Literary Criticism

A body of Bedouin oral poetry which was collected in the second or third Islamic century, the pre-Islamic qasidah, or ode, stands with the Qur'an as a twin foundation of Arabo-Islamic literary culture. Throughout the rich fifteen-hundred-year history of...

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narratives...

For many decades, R.S. Thomas has been portrayed according to terms that he himself helped to define. Drawing on the poet's status as a passionate defender of the Welsh nation, scholars have followed his lead in emphasising the Welsh credentials and...

Illustrations have been an important element of many of the most extensively read editions of Shakespeare's plays, from the frontispieces to Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition to the multiple images placed within the text of Victorian editions. Through symbols...

Book connoisseur Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers' lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments and achievements. Each handsome page in A Reader's Book of Days is devoted to a day of the...

Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John...

"[An important] detailing of the development and evolution of a major institution of the African Diaspora [and] of Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian identity." -Sheila S. WalkerThe Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble has long been recognized as an extraordinary...

In This Thing Called the World Debjani Ganguly theorizes the contemporary global novel and the social and historical conditions that shaped it. Ganguly contends that global literature coalesced into its current form in 1989, an event marked by the...

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...

Rhetorical theory, the core of Roman education, taught rules of public speaking that are still influential today. But Roman rhetoric has long been regarded as having little important to say about political ideas. The State of Speech presents a forceful...

In this book, the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the emerging study of law as literature, Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg show that law is not only a scheme of social order, but also a process of creating meaning, and a crucial dimension...

This book provides a comprehensive account of the cutlural history of English drama. Drawing upon new empirical research and the latest theoretical models, Shepherd and Womack show how the character of a given theatrical 'age', as traditionally...

This text traces the changing theatrical and cultural identity of the History plays in the context of postwar social and political conflict, crisis and change. Since the company's inception in the early 1960s, the RSC's commitment to relevance has...

The first volume to expound African American literary theory from the 1920s to present African American Literary Theory: A Reader is the first volume to document the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781569757734Author Christopher HodappFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Ulysses PressPublisher Ulysses PressWeight(grams) 258g

The author of more than twenty books and a revered contributor to numerous national publications, Charles Bowden (1945-2014) used his keen storyteller's eye to reveal both the dark underbelly and the glorious determination of humanity, particularly in...

Reading Paradise Lost "This lucid and entirely jargon-free guide to Paradise Lost will help any reader of the poem to find their feet, and to understand what makes it the best poem in the English language. Hopkins has one, and only one, resemblance to...

How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century BritainWhile eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied-from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and...

'Rethinking Therapeutic Reading' uses a combination of literary criticism and experimental psychology to examine the ways in which literature can create therapeutic spaces for personal thinking. It reconsiders the role that serious literary reading might...

This book contains the English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each. Besides CommentC'est How It Is, O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est that was published later inanother volume.About the...

Positing a dynamic relationship between print culture and social experience, Bronwen Wilson's The World in Venice focuses on the printed image during a century of profound transformation. City views, costume illustrations, events, and portraits of locals...

All of the essays in this volume capture the body in a particular attitude: in distress, vulnerability, pain, pleasure, labor, health, reproduction, or preparation for death. They attend to how the body's transformations affect the social and political...

This book helps the reader make sense of the most commonly studied writer in the world. It starts with a brief explanation of how Shakespeare's writings have come down to us as a series of scripts for actors in the early modern theatre industry of...

The tradition of the German novel, before the emergence of its 'classic' writers in the first half of the twentieth century (Thomas Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Musil), does not have an assured place in the canon of European literature. Not that it has wanted for...

This title, first published in 1961, explores the general background of attitudes, beliefs and ideas from which Eliot's works have originated. This study examines the influences of Eliot's work, and includes Eliot's personal views as told to the author...

The shared aim of these important new critical interventions into the early modern period is to make fresh feminist attempts to uncover the writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean women. Subject to silence, censorship and manipulation in the terms of...

Domestic interiors and housing environments have historically been portrayed as a framing device for the representation of individuals and social groups. Drawing together a wide and eclectic collection of well known, and less familiar, works by writers...

This essential guide to the Walking Dead comics presents the best features, interviews and guides to the award-winning comic as featured in the Official Walking Dead Magazine. As The Walking Dead shuffles back onto TV screens for its highly anticipated...

This book traces the sources and development of Ruskin's aesthetic and critical theories. In his attempt to skirt the danger of excessive emotion and association in art, Ruskin's struggle with the sublime but not the picturesque, is, along with the...

In Shakespeare's Tempest, Caliban says to Miranda and Prospero: "...you taught me language, and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. "With this statement, he gives voice to an issue that lies at the centre of post-colonial studies. Can Caliban own...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781606994078Author Hal FosterFormat HardbackPage Count 112Imprint FantagraphicsPublisher FantagraphicsWeight(grams) 1051g

A visionary work of science fiction that introduced the word "robot"Written in 1920, premiered in Prague in 1921, and first performed in New York in 1922-garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word robot. Mass-produced as efficient...

The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917-1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781683965589Author Gilbert SheltonFormat HardbackPage Count 144Imprint FantagraphicsPublisher FantagraphicsWeight(grams) 312gDimensions(mm) 26mm * 20mm * 2mm

Hailed as 'the father of black literature in the twentieth century', Richard Wright was an iconoclast, an intellectual of towering stature, whose multidisciplinary erudition rivals only that of W. E. B. Du Bois. This collection captures Wright's immense...

Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), includes two masterpieces - 'May Day' and 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' - as well as other stories from his earlier career. Tales of the Jazz Age reproduces the original...

The first complete, versified English-language translation of the epistles of Renaissance poet Clement Marot. Clement Marot (1496-1544), a royal poet in Renaissance France who ushered in new verse forms and renewed existing ones, stands as one of the...

The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre's status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and...

This comparative study crosses multiple cultures, traditions, genres, and languages in order to explore the particular importance of Homer in the emergence, development, and promotion of modernist writing. It shows how and why the Homeric epics served...

In this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected. The Fugitive's Properties uncovers a poetics of...