Literary Criticism

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments...

This book explores the way Woolf used essay-writing techniques to develop her conception of the modern novel. The focus of this study is on Virginia Woolf's vast output of essays and their relation to her fiction. Randi Saloman shows that it was by...

There remains at work - in both Britain and America - a group of literary journalists and academics committed to the evaluative criticism of fiction, to a criticism that approaches novels as novels. The Good of the Novel is a collection of specially...

This book addresses a particular and little-known form of writing, the prose dialogue, during the Late Antique period, when Christian authors adopted and transformed the dialogue form to suit the new needs of religious debate. Connected to, but departing...

Capitalising on developments in the field over the past decade, Riddles at work provides an up-to-date microcosm of research on the early medieval riddle tradition. The book presents a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. The...

This study, first published in 1945, gives a precise description of the unfolding of a great poet's craftsmanship and suggests alignments of the technical progression with the changes of the mind.Metrical analysis is given in order to throw light on...

In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment of...

This pioneering study, described as 'a model of feminist criticism' (The Year's Work in English Studies) on first publication, revealed Gaskell as an important social analyst who deliberately challenged the Victorian disjunction between public and...

A groundbreaking re-reading of the literary response to a decade of trauma and transformation This new study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after. Instead, it focuses on the thematic preoccupations that emerged...

The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and...

An inside look at the politics of book reviewing, from the assignment and writing of reviews to why critics think we should listen to what they have to sayTaking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics' Circle...

For many artists and intellectuals in East Germany, daily life had an undeniably surreal aspect, from the numbing repetition of Communist Party jargon to the fear and paranoia engendered by the Stasi. Echoes of Surrealism surveys the ways in which a...

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a...

The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is divided into five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It...

Distinctive and innovatory, contemporary Galician poetry has a strong presence on the literary scene of Spain, continuing a centuries-old unbroken line of literary creation in the language of the region. In the thirteenth anthology in this series, we are...

From quantum physics and genetics to psychology and the social sciences, from the development of atomic weapons to the growing mass media of film and radio, the early 20th century was a period of intense scientific and technological change. Modernism,...

Information overload is a subject of vital, ubiquitous concern in our time. The Poetics of Information Overload reveals a fascinating genealogy of information saturation through the literary lens of American modernism. Although technology has typically...

This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism. The collection brings together for the...

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts which have been the subject of much contention. For a start how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in Englsih by...

The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction explores fiction written over the last thirty years in the context of the profound political, historical, and cultural changes that have distinguished the contemporary period. Focusing on both...

Modernism emerged alongside radical challenges to traditional belief systems, the reorganization of public and private spheres, new modes of visual display, and innovations in recreation and entertainment. This interdisciplinary collection focuses on the...

Original in conception and powerful in scope, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry remains one of the most important books on early Greek, Hellenistic and Roman poetry in a generation. First published in the philological climate of the early...

In contrast to the prevailing scholarly consensus that understands sentimentality to be grounded on a logic of love and sympathy, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism demonstrates that in order for sentimentality to work as an antislavery engine, it needed to be...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679779155Author Alain De BottonFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 198gDimensions(mm) 203mm *...

This book focuses on avant-garde literature and art in Europe and America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. It examines five movements that shaped our response to the demands of the modern age and contributed to the creation of a modern...

The full French text of Laine's novel is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.Book InformationISBN 9780415040013Author Pascal LaineFormat PaperbackPage...

Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification.In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780791458181Author David WeirFormat PaperbackPage Count 184Imprint State University of New York PressPublisher State University of New York...

A THE Book of the Week Did you know that Aristotle thought the best tragedies were those that ended happily? Or that the first mention of the motor car in literature may have been in 1791 in Boswell's Life of Johnson? Or that it was not unknown in the...

Many scholars have been calling for a new edition of Sir John Harington's Epigrams. Gerard Kilroy, using the three manuscripts arranged and revised by the author, offers the first complete text in print of Harington's four hundred Epigrams, uncovers...

A survey of the motif of the revenant, showing how medieval themes and motifs persist today. The proliferation of books and films about the "undead", those literally returning from the grave, in modern popular culture has been commented on as a recent...

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language...

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer's...

First volume in a new edition of Douglas's "Eneados", providing a comprehensive introduction and commentary. Although Virgil's Aeneid was one of the most widely admired works of the European Middle Ages, the first complete translation to appear in any...

"I sleep, but my heart wakes," says the Song of Songs. "The other night" names the sleepless night we spend in dreams. From The Interpretation of Dreams to Finnegans Wake, many of the great writing projects of the first half of the twentieth century...

First published in French in 1988, and in English in 1992, this companion explores the nature of the literary myth in a collection of over 100 essays, from Abraham to Zoroaster. Its coverage is international and draws on legends from prehistory to the...

Human bodies have been represented and defined in various ways across different cultures and historical periods. As an object of interpretation and site of social interaction, the body has throughout history attracted more attention than perhaps any...

This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it...

Place-names, charters, coins and manuscripts are among the forms of evidence studied in this second volume. The topics range from the course of English settlement in the south-east to the power and influence of a leading aristocratic family in the tenth...

Romeo and Juliet always use 'thou' to each other, but they are the only pair of lovers in Shakespeare to do this. Why? All the women in Richard III address Richard as 'thou', but no man ever does. Why? When characters address the dead, they use 'thou' -...