Literary Criticism

"I read Peter Y. Paik's lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible." -Bruce Sterling Revolutionary narratives in recent science...

Likened to a second Tsar in Russia and attaining prophet-like status around the globe, Tolstoy made an impact on literature and the arts, religion, philosophy, and politics. His novels and stories both responded to and helped to reshape the European and...

This collection of studies, which spans the past decade, was first published in hardback in 1985. As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of ahistorical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, it develops a...

This is the first critical introduction to the theories of discourse advanced by Foucault, Althusser, PUcheux and Hindess and Hirst. Discourse theory proposes that in our daily activities the way we speak and write is shaped by the structures of power in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781940589220Author Lou TamboneFormat PaperbackPage Count 364Imprint Sequart Research & Literacy OrganizationPublisher Sequart Research & Literacy...

Inside "Paradise Lost" opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint's comprehensive...

This book defines, analyses, and theorises a late modern 'etymological poetry' that is alive to the past lives of its words, and probes the possible significance of them both explicitly and implicitly. Close readings of poetry and criticism by Auden,...

Black Women Writing and Identity is an exciting work by one of the most imaginative and acute writers around. The book explores a complex and fascinating set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as: *...

What has been the appeal of Anne Hathaway, both globally and temporally, over the past four hundred years? Why does she continue to be reinterpreted and reshaped? Imagining Shakespeare's Wife examines representations of Hathaway, from the earliest...

This text contains a comprehensive A-Z list of all Shakespeare's plays, all of the characters in those plays, as well as persons and places mentioned in the plays; the principal actors, acting companies, and theatres of the time; other playwrights,...

Focusing on the importance of Martineau's contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, this book highlights the degree to which the public quarrel between her and Dickens in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within...

This book surveys the impact of the British Empire on nineteenth-century British literature from a postcolonial perspective. It explains both pro-imperialist themes and attitudes in works by major Victorian authors, and also points of resistance to and...

'In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people' (The Times, 1873). The Art of Eloquence considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson,...

In this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amid spectacularly negative future projections of environmental collapse. The vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...

As You Like It: Language and Writing explores one of Shakespeare's best-known comedies. It considers the literary and theatrical contexts in which Shakespeare was writing; examines, in detail, the different forms of language used in the play and...

This edition presents in English, for the first time, Jeanne d'Albret's Letters to the king, his mother, his brother, her own brother-in-law, and the queen of England, together with her Ample Declaration (1568) defending her decampment to the Protestant...

Professor Wheeler's widely-acclaimed survey of the nineteenth-century fiction covers both the major writers and their works and encompasses the genres and "minor" fiction of the period. This excellent introduction and reference source has been revised...

A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children's and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences. In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the...

In this second edition of the remarkable, and now classic, cultural history of black women's beauty, Venus in the Dark, Janell Hobson explores the enduring figure of the "Hottentot Venus" and the history of critical and artistic responses to her by black...

How does Dickens make his readers laugh? What is the distinctive character of Dickensian humour? These are the questions explored in this book on a topic that has been strangely neglected in critical studies over the last half century. Dickens's friend...

The impact of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), one of the most important groups of experimental writers of the late twentieth century, is still being felt in contemporary literature, criticism, and theory, both in Europe and the US...

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy...

John Rogers here addresses the literary and ideological consequences of the remarkable, if improbable, alliance between science and politics in seventeenth-century England. He looks at the cultural intersection between the English and Scientific...

This is a unique text deploying simultaneous modes of writing in a highly synchronous way. Kunin is an esteemed scholar of poetry yet offers a conversational guide any casual readers can follow with interest. For its bulk and precisely focused subject,...

A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these...

Climate change is an enormous and increasingly urgent issue. This important book highlights how humanities disciplines can mobilize the creative and critical power of students, teachers, and communities to confront climate change. The book is divided...

In The Mourning Voice, Nicole Loraux presents a radical challenge to what has become the dominant view of tragedy in recent years: that tragedy is primarily a civic phenomenon, infused with Athenian political ideology, which envisions its spectators...

Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la...

Taking as her focus a body of writings in poetic, didactic, and legal modes that circulated in England's capital between the 1380s-just a generation after the Black Death-and the first decade of the English reformation in the 1530s, Amy Appleford offers...

Constellating four central topics-ghosts, colors, animals, and bees-in highly attuned prose, Dorothea Lasky explores the powers and complexities of the lyric, "metaphysical I," which she exposes as one of the central expressions of human wildness. In...

Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meta archival meditation, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. Our subject is Sir...

Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement,...

This interpretation of Aristotle's "Poetics" seeks to demonstrate that it is a coherent statement of a challenging theory of poetic art and that it hints towards a theory of mimetic art in general. Assessing this theory against the background of earlier...

The Sun Also Rises (1926) was Hemingway's first novel and is widely considered to be the most important of his longer works of fiction. Written in an accessible style by prominent scholars, this collection of essays provides helpful and valuable insight...

During the colonial period in Guyana, the country's coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as...

Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled...

The Letters and the Law explores the fraught relationship between writers and lawyers in the four decades following Alexander II's judicial reforms. Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. Literary...

The work of Walter Scott, one of the most globally influential authors of the nineteenth century, provides us with a unique narrative of the changing ecologies of Scotland over several centuries and writes this narrative into the history of environmental...

This book provides a unique account of Walcott's development as a writer in addition to being the fullest study of his poetry and plays to date.Discusses all his major works and includes information on his out-of-print and unpublished plays along with ...

A Companion to Virginia Woolf is a thorough examination of her life, work, and multiple contexts in 33 essays written by leading scholars in the field. Contains insightful and provocative new scholarship and sketches out new directions for future...