Literary Criticism

Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry...

In this important contribution to narrative theory, Marie-Laure Ryan applies insights from artificial intelligence and the theory of possible worlds to the study of narrative and fiction. For Ryan, the theory of possible worlds provides a more nuanced...

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader is the first book to collect together the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging...

How do the arts give us pleasure? Covering a very wide range of artistic works, from Auden to David Lynch, Rembrandt to Edward Weston, and Richard Strauss to Keith Jarrett, Pleasure and the Arts offers us an explanation of our enjoyable emotional...

First published in 2003. Brooks Landon analyses science fiction not as a set of rules for writers, but as a set of expectations for readers. He presents science fiction as a social phenomenon that moves beyond literary experience through a sense of...

A new source for Shakespeare's plays, only recently uncovered, is investigated here with a full edition and facsimile of the text. New sources for Shakespeare do not turn up every day... This is a truly significant one that has not heretofore been...

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature...

The most important period in the history of English drama is revealed in Alexander Leggatt's challenging account. The author considers English drama from the beginning of Shakespeare's career to the restoration of Charles II. Focusing on Shakespeare and...

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) has been acclaimed as one of the finest British novelists of the late twentieth century. Four of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and one of them, Offshore (1979), won; her final work of historical fiction,...

Greek tragedy parades, tests, stimulates, and upends human cognition. Characters plot deception, try to fathom elusive gods, and fail to recognise loved ones. Spectators observe the characters' cognitive limitations and contemplate their own, grapple...

This book presents a radically revised version of some of the most important and innovative articles published by Alan Cameron in the field of late antique Greek poetry and philosophy. Much new material has been added to the account of the "Wandering...

This rich volume begins with a major new essay by renowned short story critic and theorist Charles E. May, "Returning to the Source: Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty," followed by a major new essay by one of Munro's most long-standing and...

This rich volume begins with a very good-humoured memoir, "Alice Munro: Not Bad Short Story Writer"; by Munro's renowned Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, followed by powerful autobiographical pieces by fiction writer Jack Hodgins, playwright Judith...

On 10 September 2008, amid much fanfare, the Great Collider run by CERN in Geneva was turned on. The Collider was supposed to fire protons around a seventeen-mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to the speed of light...

"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence.... Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474452724Author Farah Karim-CooperFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press

This Dictionary offers points of entry into Derrida's complex and extensive works. This Dictionary offers points of entry into Derrida's complex and extensive works.From 'aporia' to 'yes', the Dictionary suggests ways into Derrida that show what is at...

This is the first book about Kafka that uses the writer's medical records. Gillman explores the relation of the body to cultural myths, and brings a unique and fascinating perspective to Kafka's life and writings.Book InformationISBN 9780415913911Author...

Recent events have focused attention on the perceived differences and tensions between the Muslim world and the modern West. As a major strand of Western public discourse has it, Islam appears resistant to internal development and remains inherently...

For almost a decade, journalists and pundits have been asking why we don't see successful examples of political satire from conservatives or of opinion talk radio from liberals. This book turns that question on its head to argue that opinion talk is the...

Noting that science fiction is characterized by an investment in the proliferation of racial difference, Isiah Lavender III argues that racial alterity is fundamental to the genre's narrative strategy. Race in American Science Fiction offers a systematic...

From David Lean's big screen Great Expectations to Alejandro Amenabar's reinvention of The Turn of the Screw as The Others, adaptations of literary classics are a constant feature of popular culture today. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781949979008Author Massimo BacigalupoFormat HardbackPage Count 366Imprint Clemson University Digital PressPublisher Clemson University Digital Press

A major history of the evolution of political journalism in the late Stuart and early Hanoverian period. The reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) saw a remarkable boom in political journalism and newspaper culture in London, in which some of the leading...

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared that philosophy "ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," and he even described the Tractatus as "philosophical and, at the same time, literary." But few books have really followed up on these claims,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781906964245Author Gary DexterFormat HardbackPage Count 292Imprint Old Street PublishingPublisher Old Street Publishing

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781910067000Author Nick WoodFormat PaperbackPage Count 44Imprint Playdead PressPublisher Playdead Press

Using both textual and iconographic sources, this richly illustrated book examines the representations of the body in Greek Old and Middle Comedy, how it was staged, perceived, and imagined, particularly in Athens, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. The study...

We tend to think of early medieval people as unsophisticated about geography because their understandings of space and place often differed from ours, yet theirs were no less complex. Anglo-Saxons conceived of themselves as living at the centre of a...

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...

The Quest of the Holy Grail adds a spiritual dimension to the adventures of Arthur's knights. Galahad replaces Lancelot as the central figure, though he appears and disappears so often that many of the knights are engaged in a quest to find him rather...

Taking as its starting point the long-standing characterization of Milton as a "Hebraic" writer, Milton and the Rabbis probes the limits of the relationship between the seventeenth-century English poet and polemicist and his Jewish antecedents...

Drawn from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the title of this book suggests the cultural and literary persistence of the Romantic in the work of many British, American, and Irish poets since 1900. Allowing for and celebrating the multiple, even fractured...

Twenty percent of Palestinians-1.57 million Israeli citizens and over seven hundred thousand exiles and immigrants around the world-live in Europe and the Americas, participating daily in languages and cultures other than Arabic. The dispersion of...

"Cultural Graphology" could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida's speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781638040774Author Phil JonesFormat HardbackPage Count 320Imprint Clemson University Digital PressPublisher Clemson University Digital Press

How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781641893831Author Usha VishnuvajjalaFormat HardbackPage Count 142Imprint Arc Humanities PressPublisher Arc Humanities Press

A master of ancient Greek prose styles.Dionysius of Halicarnassus had migrated to Rome by 30 BC, where he lived until his death some time after 8 BC, writing his Roman Antiquities and teaching the art of rhetoric and literary composition. Dionysius'...

Now back in print after a lengthy absence, one of the most enduring plays of its time. Edited by the renowned scholar, and recent advisor to the Globe Theatre, Andrew Gurr. No real competition for this singular play. Joins the now very impressive roster...