Literary Criticism

A collection of early, emerging works from some of today's most celebrated African American female writers When it was first published in 1970, The Black Woman introduced readers to an astonishing new wave of voices that demanded to be heard. In this...

The concept of obscenity is an ancient one. But as Joan DeJean suggests, its modern form, the same version that today's politicians decry and savvy artists exploit, was invented in seventeenth-century France. The Reinvention of Obscenity casts a fresh...

Dante: Contemporary Perspectives gathers recent and newly commissioned articles on Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), whose epic the Divine Comedy, is one of the landmarks of world literature. The essays in this volume probe current critical assumptions about...

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's Collaborative Book Prize 2017Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future...

This book shows that a major strand in the development of modern poetry in German and English can be seen as a protracted response to the religious crises of post-Idealist thought. It focuses on the hermeneutic dimension of Die Religion.About the...

A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE This eagerly awaited Companion features over 40 contributions from leading academics around the world, and offers critical overviews of numerous poetic genres. Covering a range of cultural...

The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. W.B. Yeats, 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' This is a book about how poetry,...

As a book on allusion, this has interest for both the traditional literary or cultural historian and for the modern student of textuality and readership positions. It focuses on allusion to folksong, and, more tangentially, to popular culture, areas...

"Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel" is the first in-depth study of Rowe's prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely...

In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, author Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema's "motion forms": structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the...

Book, Text, Medium: Cross Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today's e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience...

Thinking in Henry James identifies what is genuinely strange and radical about James's concept of consciousness-first, the idea that it may not always be situated within this or that person but rather exists outside or "between," in some transpersonal...

What is consciousness? What is it like to feel pain, or to see the color red? Do robots and computers really think? For that matter, do plants and amoebas think? If we ever meet intelligent aliens, will we be able to understand what they say to us?...

Verse translations of selected works by Ausias March, the great fifteenth-century Valencian poet. The Valencian Ausias March [1400-1459] was one of the greatest poets writing in Europe in the fifteenth century. His work is characterized by a powerful...

How does a written literature come into being within an oral culture, and how does such a literature achieve and maintain its authority? Joseph Falaky Nagy addresses those issues in his wide-ranging reading of the medieval literature of Ireland, from the...

A 2019 Prose Award Finalist What is the role of literary studies in an age of Twitter threads and viral news? If the study of literature today is not just about turning to classic texts with age-old questions, neither is it a rejection of close...

An original blending of literary and film studies which seeks to dissolve barriers between the two disciplines. Offers a new reading of Dickens from the perspective of film, technology and visuality. Proposes a new reading of the emergence of film in the...

This book is about memory-about how the past persists into the present, and about how this persistence has been understood over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, memory has been the source of an intense disquiet. Fundamental cultural...

In the fall of 1723, two London theaters staged, almost simultaneously, pantomime performances of the Faust story. Unlike traditional five-act plays, pantomime - a bawdy hybrid of dance, music, spectacle, and commedia dell'arte featuring the familiar...

Blank verse-unrhymed iambic pentameter-is familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost. Since its first use in English in the sixteenth century, it has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metrical line, enabling...

While presenting the Nobel Prize in Literature to J. M. G. Le Cl zio in 2008, the Nobel Committee called him the "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780451528032Author Henrik IbsenFormat PaperbackPage Count 416Imprint Signet ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam Inc

Published in 1995: These three 14th century medieval Greek romances, which are presented here for the first time in English translation, form part of a curious and previously neglected corner of literature.Book InformationISBN 9780367149956Author Gavin...

Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear,...

Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was one of the most popular and influential creative forces in late Georgian Britain, producing a diversity of works that defy simple categorisation. He was an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian,...

In this expansive and provocative new work, Michael Dango theorizes how aesthetic style manages crisis-and why taking crisis seriously means taking aesthetics seriously. Detoxing, filtering, bingeing, and ghosting: these are four actions that have come...

Eustache Deschamps studied under the tutelage of Guillaume de Marchault, traveled in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt-where he was said to have been made a slave-and eventually become recognized as one of the great French medieval poets. He was the first...

Despite the great literary achievements of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet, Ricardian English books were still a niche market in 1400. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton shows, however, their generation was transformational in nurturing the resurgence of...

What is going on in English studies? Bernard Bergonzi, a literary critic and teacher, who has also published poetry and fiction and has been involved in university administration, seeks to answer this frequently-raised question. With the advent of theory...

The first fully detailed and critically contextualised study of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral...

This book re-assesses the significance to Pre-Raphaelitism of the fundamental relationship of poem to painting, of the visual to the verbal, to examine those aspects of the movement that account for its enduring legacy. Beginning with the profound and...

This book offers a concise introduction to Xenophon, the Athenian historian, political thinker, moral philosopher and literary innovator who was also a pupil of Socrates, a military general on campaign in Persia, and an exile in residence in the...

During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time,...

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Howl and Other Poems, with nearly one million copies in print, City Lights presents the story of editing, publishing, and defending Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem within a broader context of obscenity issues and...

What connects the Romantic essays of Thomas De Quincey and the violent cinema of Brian De Palma? Or the "beautiful" suicides of Hedda Gabler Yukio Mishima? Or the shootings of pop star John Lennon and President Ronald Reagon? In "The Aesthetics of...

This text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the "Donahue" talk show, or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of...

From James Agee to W. G. Sebald, there has been an explosion of modern documentary narratives and fiction combining text and photography in complex and fascinating ways. However, these contemporary experiments are part of a tradition that stretches back...

During the Renaissance, the most renowned model of epic poetry was Virgil's Aeneid, a poem promoting an influential concept of heroism based on the commitment to one's nation and gods. However, Longinus' theory of the sublime - newly recovered during the...

What does the keyword "continence" in Love's Labor's Lost reveal about geopolitical boundaries and their breaching? What can we learn from the contemporary identification of the "quince" with weddings that is crucial for A Midsummer Night's Dream? How...

This book considers Mansfield's ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer by examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum.Book InformationISBN...