Literary Criticism

Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn't travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explored...

This is a "biography of the imagination, " an inner narrative of Sylvia Plath's life and work. Combining psychoanalytical, feminist, and intertextual methods, Steven Gould Axelrod traces what Roland Barthes has called "the body's journey through language...

Talk on the Wilde Side focuses on the formation of a new `type' of sexual category in the newpaper reports of the trials of Oscar Wilde, relating this to middle-class discussions of masculinity throughout the nineteenth century.Book InformationISBN...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780312398989Author William ShakespeareFormat PaperbackImprint Bedford/Saint Martin'sPublisher Macmillan Learning

The powerful exchanges between stage, stake, and scaffold - the theatre, the bear garden and the spectacle of public execution - crucially informed Shakespeare's explorations into the construction and workings of 'the human'. The theatre's family...

Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007 is the authoritative guide to some of the most inventive and challenging fiction to emerge from Ireland in the last 25 years. Meticulously researched, it presents detailed interpretations of novels by some...

In recent years the canon of eighteenth-century poetry has greatly expanded to include women poets, labouring-class and provincial poets, and many previously unheard voices. Fairer's book takes up the challenge this ought to pose to our traditional...

War Poetry is a major new anthology of poetry combined with substantial introductory material. Demonstrating the full range and diversity of the writing which came out of both world wars, War Poetry includes selections from established and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781434402882Author Michael HemmingsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 156Imprint Borgo PressPublisher Wildside PressWeight(grams) 239gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm...

The most important literary dispute of the Renaissance pitted those writers of Neo-Latin who favored imitation of Cicero alone, as the single best exemplar of Latin prose, against those who preferred to follow an eclectic array of literary models. This...

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and...

During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device. During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden -...

This book situates the film-maker Patrick Keiller alongside the writers W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair as the three leading voices in 'English psychogeography', offering new insights to key works including London, The Rings of Saturn, and Lights Out for...

England's Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the extemporized Latin she spoke on formal visits to Cambridge and...

From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015) comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and...

From antiquity to the Renaissance the pursuit of patronage was central to the literary career, yet relationships between poets and patrons were commonly conflicted, if not antagonistic, necessitating compromise even as they proffered stability and status...

The years between 1880 and 1940 were a time of unprecedented literary production and political upheaval in Ireland. It is the era of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Revival, and a time when many major Irish writers - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Lady Gregory...

Based on close readings of texts, Zeina Halabi counters the prevalent reading of late 20th-century Arabic literature as a neoliberal, apolitical, fragmented discourse.Book InformationISBN 9781474429009Author Zeina HalabiFormat PaperbackImprint Edinburgh...

Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collections in Texas and South Africa, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and...

Romance Writing explores the changing nature of both the romance genre and the discourse of romantic love from the seventeenth century to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the first studies to approach romantic love as both genre and discourse in...

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction to the key thinkers and theories integral to the study of literature. Organized thematically, the book provides historical introductions and uses a...

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of...

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781912224937Author Mariaconcetta CostantiniFormat PaperbackImprint Edward Everett RootPublisher Edward Everett Root

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474474566Author Jeffrey BellFormat PaperbackPage Count 184Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press

Concentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780921689485Author George WoodcockFormat PaperbackPage Count 280Imprint Black Rose BooksPublisher Black Rose Books

The book of Isaiah is one of the longest and strangest books of the Hebrew Bible, composed over several centuries and traversing the catastrophe that befell the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Francis Landy's book tells...

Victoria Moul's groundbreaking study uncovers one of the most important features of early modern English poetry: its bilingualism. The first guide to a forgotten literary landscape, this book considers the vast quantities of poetry that were written and...

In this one-of-a-kind book, novelist and academic Nicholas Royle brings together two remarkably different creative figures: Enid Blyton and David Bowie. His exploration of their lives and work delves deeply into questions about the value of art, music...

First full-length study of the notion and concept of old age in early medieval England. How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested? This first full survey of the...

Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the...

At the beach, bodies converge with the elements and strange treasures come to light. Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780954054274Author Esther KreitmanFormat HardbackPage Count 384Imprint David PaulPublisher David Paul

Although literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe it owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that characterize technological development. However this...

Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end...

A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition, Borrowed Light makes the case that the 20th century is the "anticolonial century." The sparks of concerted resistance to colonial oppression were ignited in the gathering of intellectual malcontents from...

Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping...

As a teenager during China's Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel "Waiting", completing a trajectory...

The first academic work dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. Applies practices of reading texts from literary and cultural studies to consider the computer game as an emerging mode of...