Literary Criticism

Metafiction is one of the most distinctive features of postwar fiction, appearing in the work of novelists as varied as Eco, Borges, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. It comprises two elements: firstly cause, the increasing interpenetration of professional...

What do you call a memoir that isn't? In This Is Not a Memoir, Janette Parris incisively narrates a journey through lost high street landmarks of East and South London in a series of detailed artworks blending map, archive and anecdote with deadpan...

The biographer Winifred Gerin (1901-81), who wrote the lives of all four Bronte siblings, stumbled on her literary vocation on a visit to Haworth, after a difficult decade following the death of her first husband. On the same visit she met her second...

Techno-heaven or techno-hell? If you believe many scientists working in the emerging fields of twenty-first-century technology, the future is blissfully bright. Initially, human bodies will be perfected through genetic manipulation and the fusion of...

Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668-1723) is an intriguing poet who wrote a great deal of poetry during a period when women poets were relatively rare. Her career also began at an astonishingly early age: she was barely fourteen years old when one of her poems was...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814250112Author Thomas A. PrendergastFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University Press

The New Atheist Novel is the first study of a major new genre of contemporary fiction. It examines how Richard Dawkins's so-called 'New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie...

Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett's prose, drama and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett's texts in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9788129149114Author Anuja ChandramouliFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Rupa Publications India Pvt Ltd.Publisher Rupa Publications India Pvt Ltd.

Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement--imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. . This view has survived the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780986144578Author Raymond Smullyan SmullyanFormat PaperbackPage Count 164Imprint Sagging ShortsPublisher Sagging Meniscus PressWeight(grams) 234g

At the end of the century, much criticism has become devoted to `last things': the end of history, the end of the subject, the end of the novel, the end, even, of the end. Literature and the Contemporary, in contrast, aims to provide through twelve...

Tragedy in Transition is an innovative and exciting introduction to the theory and practice of tragedy. Looks at a broad range of topics in the field of tragedy in literature, from ancient to contemporary timesExplores the links between writers from...

Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre.Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded...

In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting,...

Increased use of mass transportation in the early twentieth century enabled men and women of different social classes to interact in ways they had not before. Using a cultural studies approach that combines historical research and literary analysis,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783825366162Author Jana DomdeyFormat PaperbackPage Count 409Imprint Universitatsverlag WinterPublisher Universitatsverlag WinterWeight(grams) 408g

In this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once...

One of the finest literary critics of her generation, Maud Ellmann synthesises her work on modernism, psychoanalysis and Irish literature in this important new book. In sinuous readings of Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, she examines the...

Focusing on the practical means and media of Shakespeare's stage, this study envisions horizons for his achievement in the theatre. Bridging the gap between today's page- and stage-centred interpretations, two renowned Shakespeareans demonstrate the...

Shoes, gloves, umbrellas, cigars that are not just objects-the topic of fetishism seems both bizarre and inevitable. In this venturesome and provocative book, Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and...

The Science Fiction Handbook offers a comprehensive and accessible survey of one of the literary world's most fascinating genres. Includes separate historical surveys of key subgenres including time-travel narratives, post-apocalyptic and post-disaster...

This book is a one-stop-shop for the busy undergraduate studying Shakespeare. Offering detailed guidance to the plays most often taught on undergraduate courses, the volume targets the topics tutors choose for essay questions and is organised to help...

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, tracing a history of Irish writing through James Clarence Mangan, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Beginning...

Takhyil is a term from Arabic poetics denoting the evocation of images. It has a broad spectrum of connotations throughout classical philosophical poetics and rhetoric, and it is closely linked to the Greek concept of phantasia. This volume is comprised...

During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645) was celebrated as one of the "seventy most famous women of all time" in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Montaigne, as well as his...

Renaissance Drama provides a comprehensive and engaging new account of one of the richest periods of theatre history: the drama of early modern England produced for the professional theatre. It brings new insights to bear by exploring the plays in their...

Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror (tain names the tinfoil,...

Pindar's victory odes, written in the fifth century B.C. to honor the heroes of the great athletic festivals, are some of the most powerful and intricate works of ancient Greek poetry-and among the most difficult to bring to modern readers. With precise...

Climate change is becoming a major theme in the contemporary novel, as authors reflect concerns in wider society. Given the urgency and enormity of the problem, can literature (and the emotional response it provokes) play a role in answering the complex...

Constellation is the first extended exploration of the relationship between Walter Benjamin, the Weimar-era revolutionary cultural critic, and the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The affinity between these noncontemporaneous thinkers serves as a...

The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings. As efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. "Ecosickness fiction" imaginatively...

From telephones and transoceanic telegraphy to typewriters and phonographs, the era of Bell and Edison brought an array of wondrous new technologies for recording and communication. At the same time, print was becoming a mass medium, as works from...

Articulates the role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors...

For many critics, Romanticism is synonymous with nature writing, for representations of the natural world appear during this period with a freshness, concreteness, depth, and intensity that have rarely been equaled. Why did nature matter so much to...

For more than fifty years, Assia Djebar, former Silver Chair of French at New York University and winner of the Neustadt Prize for Contribution to World Literature, used the tools of poetry, fiction, drama and film to vividly portray the world of Muslim...

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleOur relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical...

The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic investigates the roles played by the concept of the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud and other theorists, in the representation of lesbian and male gay sexualities and transgender in a selection of...

From wondrous fairy-lands to nightmarish hellscapes, the elements that make fantasy worlds come alive also invite their exploration. This first book-length study of critically acclaimed novelist Patricia A. McKillip's lyrical other-worlds analyzes her...

Why has memory become such an important political tool in response to the challenges of modernity? How can performance be used to probe and recuperate aspects of the past, and what are the ethical and political questions that arise when it does so? And...