Literary Criticism

"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to...

The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes...

J. B. Priestley is the first book to provide a detailed and up to date analysis of the enormous contribution made by this playwright, novelist, journalist and critic to twentieth century British theatre. Priestley was often criticised for being either...

The second volume of this accurate translation of the wonderful and enchanting tales of the Arabian nights.Book InformationISBN 9780415045407Author J.C. MardrusFormat PaperbackPage Count 602Imprint RoutledgePublisher Taylor & Francis Ltd

Nearly a hundred years after its debut in 1897, Dracula is still one of the most popular of all Gothic narratives, always in print and continually adapted for stage and screen. Paradoxically, David Glover suggests, this very success has obscured the...

First published in 1970, this work outlines the principles of English prosody in a way that will enable the reader to recognise and scan any piece of English verse. It illustrates the close relationship between English speech patterns and verse patterns,...

This volume explores the character and representation of the child in Shakespeare's drama, not as a specific life stage but as a role. As a life force, an impassioned plea for justice, a legacy, history, memory or image of love or violence, children...

New, wide-ranging essays on the controversial poet, who was both a harbinger of Modernism and a critic of modernity. Stefan George (1868-1933) is along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke one of the pre-eminent German poets of the...

This work argues that although "The Waste Land" demands close reading, the spirit of the old New Criticism works with inappropriate assumptions about unity and closed form. Many critics have tried to fix the text, to find hidden narratives and plots,...

Vagrants were everywhere in Victorian culture. They wandered through novels and newspapers, photographs, poems and periodicals, oil paintings and illustrations. They appeared in a variety of forms in a variety of places: Gypsies and hawkers tramped the...

Compelling memoir of Flora Veit-Wild and her relationship with the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist Dambudzo Marechera, one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers and a significant voice in contemporary world literature. ...

First published in 1987. This study is an attempt to distinguish the problem of political obligation as it was formulated in the ancient world from the problem as it has presented itself in the modern world, and assesses the idealist achievement in the...

This book considers one of the most controversial aspects of children's and young adult literature: its use as an instrument of power. Children in contemporary Western society are oppressed and powerless, yet they are allowed, in fiction written by...

American culture has long represented mixed-race identity in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it has been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies; however, it can also connote genetic superiority,...

A close examination of the rivalry between two printing presses at the time of the divorce crisis shows how the new learning could be employed to influence even the king himself. During the period of Henry VIII's divorce crisis, a political and...

How did early modern scholars-as exemplified by Leibniz-search for their origins in the study of language?Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking...

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court...

A thoroughly updated edition of the witty and engaging exploration of the history, application, and tenets of literary theory. The first edition of Ten Lessons served as a "literary" introduction to theoretical writing, a strong set of pedagogical...

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120...

The future of fiction is neither global nor national. Instead, Matthew Hart argues, it is trending extraterritorial. Extraterritorial spaces fall outside of national borders but enhance state power. They cut across geography and history but do not point...

This book opens up the field of literary studies to the promise of a haptic oriented analysis. This book contends that the haptic sense - combining touch, kinaesthesis and proprioception - was first fully conceptualised and explored in the modernist...

In this, the only full-length study of the visual poetry of the early twentieth century, Willard Bohn expertly illuminates the works of Apollinaire, Josep-Maria Junow, Guillermo de Torre, and others. His fascinating aesthetic insights bring to life this...

Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matterCacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement's vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century...

The Dravidian language family is the world's fourth largest with nearly 250 million speakers across South Asia from Pakistan to Nepal, from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka. This authoritative reference source provides a unique description of the languages,...

The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice. It also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson criticizes the idea of externally-directed 'development'...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814215074Author Erin JamesFormat HardbackPage Count 234Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams)...

This is the new paperback edition of the first fully annotated volume of Ben Jonson's 'The Magnetic Lady' written in 1632. It contains textual and explanatory notes and the text is modernised for student use. The introduction places the play in the...

Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of...

"Lyric Time" offers a detailed critical reading of a particularly difficult poet, an analysis of the dominance of temporal structures and concerns in the body of her poetry, and finally, an important original contribution to a theory of the lyric. ...

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women is an incendiary attack on the place of women in 18th-century society. Often considered to be the earliest widely-circulated work of feminism, the book is a powerful example of what can be...

Unbinding Medea signals the very different answers to medea to provoke debate that transcends individual and discipline-specific approaches to the reception of her myth from antiquity to the twenty-first century and to present interdisciplinary...

This volume argues that theory, far from being dead, has undergone major shifts in order to come to terms with the most urgent cultural and political questions of today. Offering an overview of theory's new directions, this groundbreaking collection...

Somatic Fictions focuses on the centrality of illness-particularly psycho-somatic illness-as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasizing how it shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and...

Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric pursues two goals. The title signals the contribution to debates about reading. Do we think 'through' - 'by means of', 'with'- poems, sympathetically elaborating their surfaces? Is this compatible...

Animals, as Levi-Strauss wrote, are good to think with. This collection addresses and reassesses the variety of ways in which animals were used and thought about in Renaissance culture, challenging contemporary as well as historic views of the boundaries...

Since the end of the Second World War-and particularly over the last decade-Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual-from Gojira...

An in-depth analysis of the work of one of the twentieth century's most innovative writersKathy Acker's body of work is one of the most significant collections of experimental writing in English. In 'Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible', Georgina Colby...

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific...

Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings.Book InformationISBN 9781474431491Author...

Communicating in the Third Space aims to clarify Homi K. Bhabha's theory of the third space of enunciation by reconstructing its philosophical, sociological, geographical, and political meaning with attention to the special advantages and ambiguities...