Literary Criticism

Today we take it for granted that history is much more than the story of great men and the elites from which they spring. Other forms of history - the histories of gender, class, rebellion and nonconformity - add much-needed context and color to our...

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft is the acclaimed bestselling biography by Claire TomalinWinner of the Whitbread First Book PrizeWitty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She...

FINALIST: 2022 PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHYA NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021'A revelation. Such a revolutionary literary discovery seems unlikely to be on offer again. It's that good' Sunday Times 'A masterpiece of literary biography...

'A pointed, svelte but diverse work.' Irish TimesPart memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is an elegant, important and spirited work of self-investigation; the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter-and not...

In The War with Hannibal, Livy (59 BC-AD 17) chronicles the events of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, until the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. He vividly recreates the immense armies of Hannibal, complete with elephants, crossing the Alps; the...

In J. R. R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, Middle-earth endured cataclysmic wars and critical battles, causing great men, women and mystical creatures to arise, influence and shape the course of its history. Here in this...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375401855Author T. S. EliotFormat HardbackPage Count 224Imprint Modern Library IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 210gDimensions(mm) 164mm *...

The romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell was a recluse, and actively avoided marketing herself as a personality in any way, but her formula was successful. She reached a very large audience publishing 98 titles and earning, at the height of her career, about...

Easy to use in the classroom or as a tool for revision, Oxford Literature Companions provide student-friendly analysis of a range of popular A Level set texts. Each book offers a lively, engaging approach to the text, covering characterisation and role,...

When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a...

The ascending statesman.Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106-43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius...

A reader's journey along the French Riviera, from Hyeres and Saint-Tropez to the Italian border, introducing the lives and work of writers who passed this way. The sunlight and calm of the French Riviera have been a magnet for writers since the...

In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates 'decreation' - an activity described by Simone Weil as 'undoing the creature in us' - an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its...

Here is the distinctly surreal world of Henry King, who perished through his 'chief defect' of chewing little bits of string; of dishonest Matilda whose dreadful lies led her to death by burning; and of Godolphin Horne who 'held the human race in scorn'...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Grave takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide,...

Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration. She provided more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influenced the development of the...

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project...

'What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world' Seamus Heaney John Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley -...

Just as Peter Ackroyd's bestselling London is the biography of the city, Thames: Sacred River is the biography of the river, from sea to source. Exploring its history from prehistoric times to the present day, the reader is drawn into an extraordinary...

One of the central texts of the Middle Ages, The Golden Legend deeply influenced the imagery of poetry, painting and stained glass with its fascinating descriptions of saints' lives and religious festivals. By creating a single-volume sourcebook of core...

This collection illuminates the uniquely fascinating era between 1820 and 1950 in French poetry - a time in which diverse aesthetic ideas conflicted and converged as poetic forms evolved at an astonishing pace. It includes generous selections from all...

It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success, and its production history since it was first performed in 1960 has established the work as a landmark in twentieth-century drama.The obsessive caretaker, Davies, whose papers are in...

'Fierce. Game-changing. Urgently necessary. Brilliant, brilliant and did I say brilliant?' EMMA THOMPSON 'Pacy, vivid, compelling and very, VERY funny ... it will help so many' MARIAN KEYES 'A fucking classic. Required reading for all women and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780452298156Author Meredith MaranFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint PlumePublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 196g

Poetry has never been so rigorous and diverse, nor has its audience been so numerous and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are right. As Ezra Pound wrote: 'You would think anyone wanting to know about poetry would go to someone who knew something...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143132271Author William ShakespeareFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint PlumePublisher Penguin Putnam Inc

'Unremittingly glorious. I and the world demand more and we shall thump our tin mugs on the table demanding it until we are satisfied.'Stephen FryLoveable... Dreadful... Amazing... Learned... Baroque... Exquisite... Utterly wonderful... Uplifting.....

A LIFETIME'S READING OF PROUST'S MASTERPIECE "A work buzzing with appetite and curiosity."-Andrew Marr, author and broadcaster "Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is a feast."-Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize One of the...

"The Odes of Horace" are the lyric masterpieces of the golden age of Latin literature. They speak of the politics of the time, of the return to peace after the agony of civil war; they are imbued with consciousness of the brevity of life and...

A stunning collection of poems from Grace Nichols, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2021Beautyis a fat black woman walking the fields pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheekwhile the sun lights up her feetNichols gives us images that stare us...

Bringing together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends, Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant Metamorphoses describes a magical world in which men and women are transformed - often by love - into flowers, trees, animals, stones and stars...

'Fitzgerald has solved virtually every problem that has plagued translators of Homer.' Atlantic Monthly The Iliad is the story of a few days' fighting in the tenth year of the legendary war between the Greeks and the Trojans, which broke out when...

Written after he had been banished to the Black Sea city of Tomis by Emperor Augustus, the Fasti is Ovid's last major poetic work. Both a calendar of daily rituals and a witty sequence of stories recounted in a variety of styles, it weaves together tales...

Sexually transgressive, politically astute and determined to claim educational and employment rights equal to those enjoyed by men, the new woman took centre stage in the cultural landscape of late-Victorian Britain. By comparing the fictional...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262048323Author J. G. BallardFormat HardbackPage Count 424Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdWeight(grams) 638gDimensions(mm) 236mm * 162mm * 33mm

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the liberating powers of the mind. From an exploration of why...

From the elegance of the grand salons of Prideaux Place, Padstow's most stately of homes, to the wild and remote Cornish coastline, Rosamunde Pilcher captured in her novels Cornwall's unique, diverse beauty and compelling charm. WINNER of the Gorsedh...

Poetic concision in abundance.It was to celebrate the opening of the Roman Colosseum in AD 80 that Martial published his first book of poems, "On the Spectacles." Written with satiric wit and a talent for the memorable phrase, the poems in this...

This selection from the writings of C. S. Lewis gathers together forty book reviews, never before reprinted, as well as four major essays which have been unavailable for many decades. A fifth essay, 'Image and Imagination', is published for the first...

Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial...