Literary Criticism

This collection of modern essays by leading figures in the field of Shakespeare scholarship reveals the rich interplay between contemporary theoretical approaches - psychoanalytic, new historicist, feminist and cultural materialist - and the study of the...

Nizami Ganjavi is one of the foremost figures in Persian poetry, living in Azerbaijan in the second half of the twelfth century. One of the oldest Western poets in Persian literature, he is acclaimed for his five masnavis which are assembled to form the...

Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British...

In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as...

The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields...

The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies and an invaluable record of the experience and history of slavery in the United States. This Companion examines the slave narrative's relation to British and American...

Originally published between 1932 and 1945, the eleven-volume Works of Edmund Spenser collects The Faerie Queene along with Spenser's minor poems, prose works, and Alexander C. Judson's The Life of Edmund Spenser.About the AuthorEdmund Spenser...

This book brings together textual commentaries in English and Portuguese on thirty representative works of literature in Portuguese - either complete poems or extracts from longer works.About the AuthorClaudia Pazos AlonsoBook InformationISBN...

In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write of the phenomenon of men who evoke sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim Winckelmann could place admiration of male beauty at the center of his art...

Organized into two parts, "Literary Theory" and "Social and Political Theory," this Reader explores issues of community, identity, justice, and the marginalization of African American and Caribbean women in literature, society, and political movements...

The critic has long been a reviled figure, at best the mere handmaiden of the 'creative' arts, at worst a parasite upon them. For playwright Brendan Behan, critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They know how it is done. They have seen it done every day...

In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the elan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and...

In the midst of native people's discontent following Spanish conquest, a native Andean born after the fall of the Incas took up the pen to protest Spanish rule. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote his Nueva coronica y buen gobierno to inform Philip III of...

Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works-Primitivism and Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense-of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together...

A Cycle of the West rewards its readers with a sweeping saga of the American West and John G. Neihardt's exhilarating vision of frontier history. It is infused with wonder, nostalgia, and a keen appreciation of epic history. Unquestionably the...

Using a reader-oriented approach, Shadi Bartsch reconsiders the role of detailed descriptive accounts in the ancient Greek novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius and in so doing offers a new view of the genre itself. Bartsch demonstrates that these...

Originally published in 1996. A detailed analysis of the art of children's literature covering world literature for children, children's literature as a canonical art form, the history of children's literature from a semiotic perspective, and epic,...

"A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English Middle Ages, Piers Plowman is the one that most deserves and needs annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and...

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to this emerging field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative readings on key topics...

Literature and Complaint in England 1272-1553 gives an entirely new and original perspective on the relations between early judicial process and the development of literature in England. Wendy Scase argues that texts ranging from political libels and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780863584329Author Patricia DunckerFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Rivers Oram Press/Pandora ListPublisher Rivers Oram Press

Through a series of insightful and sophisticated readings, this book reveals the worldliness of premodern Persian poetry. It traces the political role of poetry in shaping the prison poem genre (habsiyyat) across 12th-century Central, South and West Asia...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474443357Author Aidan TynanFormat HardbackPage Count 216Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press

This essential guide provides a deeply informed survey of the criticism of all the plays and major stories authored by Brian Friel. Scott Boltwood introduces readers to the key themes that have been used to characterise Friel's entire career, moving...

This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals...

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series (general editor: Elleke Boehmer) offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies...

The cult of the female breast in contemporary American and European society is as pervasive as it is notorious. Our current fascination merely updates a long-standing obsession with the breast, which over the past twenty years has also become a subject...

" With New Line Cinema's production of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the popularity of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is unparalleled. Tolkien's books continue to be bestsellers decades after their original publication. An epic in league with those of...

This study returns to the origins of Robert Lepage's directorial work and his first cross-cultural interaction with a Shakespearean text to provide some background for his later work. This early work is situated within the political and social context of...

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH SHAKESPEARE HOW TO DO THINGS WITH SHAKESPEARE "This is a companion to Shakespeare with a difference. Vive la differance!" DAVID BEVINGTON, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO "Doing things with literature: scholarly articles are not the only way...

In the company of wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children and werewolves as portrayed in...

The work of J.R.R. Tolkien has had a profound effect on contemporary fiction and film making, yet criticism often places him at the margins of twentieth- and twenty-first century thought and experience. He actually sits near the centre of the last...

This book is a study of the complex relationship between matter and idea that shaped the nineteenth-century culture of art, and that in turn determined the course of still-current accounts of art's nature and value. Fundamental questions about the...

In this study of two creative minds, Lucy Newlyn offers a new version of the Coleridge-Wordsworth interaction during its most crucial years: 1797-1807. Rejecting all those accounts (including the poets' own) which have sought to construe difference as...

Using dance anthropology to illuminate the values and attitudes embodied in rumba, Yvonne Daniel explores the surprising relationship between dance and the profound, complex changes in contemporary Cuba.From the barrio and streets to the theatre and...

The early years of the twenty-first century saw several losses for the American theatre but also marked the emergence of a new generation of exciting playwrights. In this book, Christopher Bigsby explores the work of nine of these developing talents, and...

Making Officers out of Gentlemen aims to study the emergence and evolution of the military training and feeder institutions, beginning in the early twentieth century, which were central to the project of Indianization-a key political and nationalist...

This mid fourteenth-century poem, a discussion of the 'contempt of the world' and the 'Four Last Things', was one of the most popular Middle English texts in its time, as indicated by the large number of extant copies, and illustrations of it in the...

The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how...

This book shows that the sounds of the early modern stage do not only signify but are also significant. Sounds are weighted with meaning, offering a complex system of allusions. Playwrights such as Jonson and Shakespeare developed increasingly...