Literary Criticism

"Professor Jones' book uniquely fills a huge hole in gender studies in the Renaissance. Its easy clarity of argument, its scrupulous care for detail, its just plain good story telling, and its theoretical sophistication make it an obvious candidate for...

Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of...

This revelatory exploration of Book One of the Argonautica rescues Jason from his status as the ineffectual hero of Apollonius' epic poem. James J. Clauss argues that by posing the question, "Who is the best of the Argonauts?" Apollonius redefines the...

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential theorists of philosophy as well as literary studies. His work on dialogue and discourse has changed the way in which we read texts - both literary and cultural - and his practice of philosophy in literary...

In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past...

Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires, and Virgins is a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary work that traces the construct of female monsters as an embodiment of socio-cultural fears of female sexuality and reproductive powers. This book...

In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How...

Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written...

Republic to restoration cuts across artificial divides between periods and disciplines,often imposed for reasons of convenience rather than reality. Challenging the traditional period divide of 1660, essays in this volume explore continuities with the...

A lively and comprehensive account of the whole tradition of European fiction for students and teachers of comparative literature, this volume covers twenty-five of the most significant and influential novelists in Europe from Cervantes to Kundera. Each...

Kim Thuy is a literary phenomenon, rising in her first decade of writing to a level of international recognition that few Quebecois writers ever attain. The Vietnamese-born author's novels have garnered literary prize recognition and have been translated...

This book analyses the ways in which divorce informed the development of French fiction until the First World War, arguing that in France the divorce question was intimately related to the rhythm of revolution.Book InformationISBN 9781907975479Author...

In this major undertaking David Keenan translates and contextualizes over 100 tales from the Notes from the Hut for Examining the Subtle, a collection of 1,200 tales and observations by Chi Yun, one of eighteenth century China's leading intellectuals. By...

This sourcebook includes the full text of Song of Myself. Since 1855, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has been enjoyed, debated, parodied and imitated by readers, critics and artists crossing national and linguistic boundaries. Many argue that it is the...

In this major new book, Vincent Sherry reveals a fresh continuity in literary history. He traces the idea of decadence back to key events from the failures of the French Revolution to the cataclysm of the Great War. This powerful work of literary...

This volume offers a wealth of critical analysis, supported with ample historical and bibliographical information about one of Shakespeare's most enduringly popular and globally influential plays. Its eighteen new chapters represent a broad spectrum of...

One of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot is generally regarded as a leading exponent of the literary movement which came to be known as Modernism. In this volume, Harriet Davidson collects key recent essays by such...

A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine...

During the nineteenth century, women authors for the first time achieved professional status, secure income, and public fame. How did these women enter the literary profession; meet the demands of editors, publishers, booksellers, and reviewers; and...

Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently...

The cult phenomenon Battle Royale has been lauded as a masterpiece and decried as exploitative gore, but it's always remained in the public consciousness. This collection of essays by some of the best science fiction, horror, and thriller writers working...

In the past few years, discussion of fiction in all sorts of media has intensified. The prominence of literary critics has increased, the awarding of lucrative book prizes has become more publicized, and reports of the formation of reading groups have...

No doubt, the feminist movement has come a long way, even though many of its aims have not been realized or, in fact, are still debated by its supporters and critics. It is sobering andinstructive to look back and examine the aspirations, achievements...

This volume presents a revision of gay criticism and focuses on E.M. Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies. Many previous critics of Forster downplayed his homosexuality or read Forster in terms of gay liberation. This collection...

In the last two decades, China has become a dramatically more urban society and hundreds of millions of people have changed residence in the process. Family and communal bonds have been broken in a country once known as "a society of kith and kin." There...

Can reading social protest novels actually produce a more just world? Literature and Social Justice offers a scientifically informed, evidence-based affirmative answer to that crucial question, arguing that literature has the potential-albeit largely...

Marshall Walker's lively and readable account of the highs and lows of Scottish literature from this important date to the present addresses the important themes of democracy, power and nationhood. Disposing of stereotypical ideas about Scotland and the...

"The most thorough, systematic and convincing semiotics of the theater we have. . . . [L]ike those of Eco, it is an important conceptual synthesis, and a bibliographical gold mine." -Modern Language Notes" . . . impresses with its thoroughness and the...

First published in 1937, Of Mice and Men has been a staple of American literature ever since. Divided by decade, The Essential Criticism of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men provides an overview of criticism over the 70 years the book has been in print...

This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a...

In Grimm Legacies, esteemed literary scholar Jack Zipes explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. Zipes reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781908980274Author Gerard CarruthersFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Scottish Literature InternationalPublisher Association for Scottish Literary...

David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as 'public...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780948877735Author Christopher MacLachlanFormat PaperbackPage Count 72Imprint Association for Scottish Literary StudiesPublisher Association for Scottish...

What shall we make of medieval English lyrics? They have no fixed line or meter, no consistent point of view, and their content may seem misaligned with the other texts in manuscripts in which they are found. Yet in Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues...

In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians, and members of the medical...

This book is divided into five parts and covers: representation; subjectivity; form, structure and system; history and society; morality, class and ideology. Each part contains several thematic sections in which extracts from different writers and...

Strange Likeness provides the first full account of how Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was rediscovered by twentieth-century poets, and the uses to which they put that discovery in their own writing. Chapters deal with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin...

This volume brings together Lee Patterson's essays published in various venues over the past twenty-seven years. As he observes in his preface, "The one persistent recognition that emerged from writing these otherwise quite disparate essays is that...

Originally published in 2003. The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into...