Literary Criticism

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...

The History of Reading offers an engaging, accessible overview from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of 'book clubs'. Divided into seven sections, each with a useful introduction, this Reader:summarises the main debates and perspectives...

This book recuperates the important history that Haitian thought around Vodou possession has had in French critical theory. The author takes the period of the 1930s and '40s, as the centerfold of a more complex network of relations that places Haiti as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143128472Author The Paris ReviewFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 236gDimensions(mm) 203mm *...

Bound Fast with Letters brings together in one volume many of the significant contributions that Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse have made over the past forty years to the study of medieval manuscripts through the prism of textual transmission and...

Originally published in 1991. Essays here are arranged chronologically within sections: 'The Play as Text', 'Shylock' and 'The Play in the Theatre.' Collecting previously published important commentaries and scholarly articles, this volume in the...

Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781908980144Author Alan RiachFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Scottish Literature InternationalPublisher Association for Scottish Literary...

The Reader's Joyce engages with core issues of literary studies by rethinking accepted literary, critical, and theoretical notions of the relationships between author, reader and text. Sophie Corser describes and queries the activity of reading prompted...

This book includes essays by leading authors on Shakespeare drawing on contemporary and early continental philosophy. This collection of 15 essays by celebrated authors in Shakespeare studies and in continental philosophy develops different aspects of...

The purpose of art, according to the artist Banksy, is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. The purpose of that creative practice called "theory" is to disturb everyone-to perpetually unsettle all our staid assumptions, all our fixed...

Ranging over all George Eliot's fiction and drawing as well on her letters, essays, and translations, in this book the distinguished critic Neil Hertz documents Eliot's lifelong questioning of the nature of authorship and of what it might mean, in the...

Tells of the relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, the aftermath of the success of Sherlock Holmes and the impact of that on both author and publication as they moved into the early twentieth century.About the AuthorJonathan...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781555977948Author Maud CaseyFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Graywolf PressPublisher Graywolf PressWeight(grams) 181gDimensions(mm) 175mm * 127mm *...

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What...

At a time when psychoanalysis is attacked by biologists, psychologists and literary critics alike, this book offers a radical defence.Literature, Psychoanalysis and the New Sciences of Mind gives a clear introduction to the theories of Freud and Jung,...

"Jane Austen's Families" focuses on family dynamics in Jane Austen's six novels. After a general introduction, which places its approach in the context of ethical criticism, it divides into two sections. The first, "Family Dynamics," consists of three...

Public spectacle--from the morning rituals of the Roman noble to triumphs and the shows of the Arena--formed a crucial component of the language of power in ancient Rome. The historian Livy (c. 60 B.C.E.-17 C.E.), who provides our fullest description of...

2021 Top Ten Finalist for the Locus Awards in Nonfiction Joshua Smith's chapter "Uncle Tom's Cabin Showdown" won the 2021 Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature AssociationWeird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre-an...

Through attuned close readings, this volume brings out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley recognizes that poetic individuality is the...

Samuel Beckett's short play Play / Comedie and his only film Film were written around the same time (1962-1963). They both have self-referential titles that invite meditation on the genres they represent. Although medium-specific opportunities and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781940589008Author Warren EllisFormat PaperbackPage Count 164Imprint Sequart Research & Literacy OrganizationPublisher Sequart Research & Literacy...

The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its...

Shakespeare education is being reimagined around the world. This book delves into the important role of collaborative projects in this extraordinary transformation. Over twenty innovative Shakespeare partnerships from the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand,...

This study examines a network of writers that coalesced around the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831), which recounts Prince's experiences as an enslaved person in the West Indies and the events that brought her to seek assistance from the...

In this, the third and final volume of his critical account of American drama in the twentieth century, Christopher Bigsby turns from the text-oriented drama of Williams, Miller and Albee (volume 2) in order to trace other, parallel theatrical...

This collection examines the intersections between the personal and the political in travel writing, and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. The authors explore...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781946433404Author Simon CuttsFormat PaperbackPage Count 32Imprint Ugly Duckling PressePublisher Ugly Duckling PresseWeight(grams) 60g

This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses...

How did it feel to hear Macbeth's witches chant of "double, double toil and trouble" at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watched King...

Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre's historic themes and...

The past decade has seen the medium of comics reach unprecedented heights of critical acclaim and commercial success - and that new prominence has led to increasing interest within the academy as well. Comics & Media, a special issue of the journal...