Literary Criticism

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how "Oriental" tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction "Enlightenment Orientalism", he poses a range of urgent...

This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call "dialogical poetics." This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a...

Closely examining the relationship between the political and the utopian in five major plays from different phases of Shakespeare's career, Hugh Grady shows the dialectical link between the earlier political dramas and the late plays or tragicomedies...

The essays in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, written by renowned international scholars, open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical and political: affective and physiological;...

Antiquity's satirist supreme.Lucian (ca. AD 120-190), the satirist from Samosata on the Euphrates, started as an apprentice sculptor, turned to rhetoric and visited Italy and Gaul as a successful traveling lecturer before settling in Athens and ...

Geoffrey Chaucer is the best-known and most widely read of all medieval British writers, famous for his scurrilous humour and biting satire against the vices and absurdities of his age. Yet he was also a poet of passionate love, sensitive to issues of...

The first book of its kind, Our Caribbean is an anthology of lesbian and gay writing from across the Antilles. The author and activist Thomas Glave has gathered outstanding fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry by little-known writers together with...

This book explores the specific implications of epilepsy in each of the Fyodor Dostoevsky's major post-Siberian novels. It discusses Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of polyphony to demonstrate the ways in which different historical and literary references to...

The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first...

Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids,...

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political...

A volume which examines the development of the Welsh literary canon from the time of Saunders Lewis to the present day. International debates concerning canon formation are read in relation to Welsh literature, and in particular to the critical writings...

The double, doppelganger, is mostly understood as a peculiar figure that emerged in nineteenth-century Romantic and gothic literature. Far from being a merely esoteric entity, however, this book argues that the double, although it mostly goes unnoticed,...

Living by the Pen traces the pattern of the development of women's fiction from 1696 to 1796 and offers an interpretation of its distinctive features. It focuses upon the writers rather than their works, and identifies professional novelists. Through...

Sixteenth-century Italy witnessed the rebirth of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the pastoral mode. Traditionally, we think of comedy and tragedy as remakes of ancient models, and tragicomedy alone as the invention of the moderns. Women, Rhetoric,...

"It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue." Thus spoke Hamlet, one of the great kvetchers of literature. Every day, gripers challenge our patience and compassion. Yet Pollyannas rile us up with their grotesque...

The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth century is unforgettably established in this major critical...

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It...

Defining Acts considers how the surviving English theatrical works of the fifteenth century represent competing practices of interpretation. The plays take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts-men or women,...

This book offers a rare glimpse into the creative workings of the Inklings.The creators of Narnia and Middle-earth, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends and professional colleagues. They met frequently with a community of fellow writers at...

Why has Anglo-American culture for so long regarded "theory" with intense suspicion? In this important contribution to the history of critical theory, David Simpson argues that a nationalist myth underlies contemporary attacks on theory. Theory's...

Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom explores new and pioneering strategies for transforming current teaching practices into equitable, inclusive and immersive classrooms for all students. This cutting-edge volume...

The female body, with its history as an object of social control, expectation, and manipulation, is central to understanding the gendered construction of shame. Through the study of 20th-century literary texts, The Female Face of Shame explores the nexus...

This volume of original essays employs the latest tools of historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist inquiry to reval why Joan of Arc was such an important figure.About the AuthorBonnie Wheeler directs the Medieval Studies Program at Southern...

Tim Conley's Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought...

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial...

From King Arthur and the Round Table to Alexander the Great's global conquests, the stories of romance appear in some of the most beautiful books of the Middle Ages, and still resonate today. This book provides an engaging, scholarly and richly...

Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic' introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel and Nietzsche.Book InformationISBN 9781474427456Author Patrick...

A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of China's new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with...

Our current ecological crises compel us not only to understand how contemporary media shapes our conceptions of human relationships with the environment, but also to examine the historical genealogies of such perspectives. Written during the onset of the...

The Poetry Toolkit: For Readers and Writers provides students with the essential intellectual and practical tools necessary to read, understand, and write poetry. Explains the most important elements of poetry in clear language and an easily accessible...

This, the first book to focus solely on Donne's religious writing, also places his work in a literary context and attempts to reach a more realistic assessment of its originality than has been possible hitherto. The prose works that are examined in...

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real...

The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high...

In this book, the author has three aims: (1) to elaborate an interpretation of Goethe's lyric poetry adequate to the intricacies of its subject matter; (2) to demonstrate the significance of that poetry to the development of European Romanticism; (3) to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780525561125Author John HodgmanFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Viking Press IncPublisher Penguin Putnam Inc

Beckett's Political Imagination charts unexplored territory: it investigates how Beckett's bilingual texts re-imagine political history, and documents the conflicts and controversies through which Beckett's political consciousness and affirmations were...

There is a crisis in contemporary postcolonial theory: while an enormous body of challenging research has been produced under its auspices, severely critical questions about the validity and usefulness of this theory have also been raised. This Reader is...

The festival of the Panathenaia, held in Athens every summer to celebrate the birthday of the city's goddess, Athena, was the setting for performances of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey by professional reciters or "rhapsodes." The works of Plato are our...

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...