Literary Criticism

Examines Welsh writing in English in the context of critical debates concerning the rise of cultural nationalism and the 'invention' of Great Britain as a nation in the eighteenth century. This study investigates the ways in which Anglophone literature...

The first volume of critical texts to define the field of Transatlantic Literary Studies This Reader provides 42 exemplary readings that map the theoretical and literary aspects of this growing cross-disciplinary subject area. In a substantial...

From a bitter childhood mired in poverty and hard work to a career as the most acclaimed and best-loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as tumultuous as any he created in his teeming novels of life in Victorian England...

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...

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field. Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years, making vital, theoretically informed interventions...

In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now...

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture - a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very...

The Henry VI plays are Shakespeare's earliest, most theatrically exciting plays and in their day, they were among his most popular works. In a story which stretches over thirty years, Shakespeare dramatises the fall of the House of Lancaster and creates...

Telling Stories overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel of a 'Cathy' comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781906075873Author Anthony FowlesFormat PaperbackPage Count 206Imprint Greenwich Exchange LtdPublisher Greenwich Exchange Ltd

Corneille and Racine may seem like marble monuments of an unchanging typical classicism. Mr Pocock is concerned to show that each of these great dramatists was a living writer, struggling to create developing forms and that the rules of neo-classical...

Now available in paperback, Shakespeare and the Gods examines Shakespeare's many allusions to six classical gods (Jupiter, Diana, Venus, Mars, Hercules and Ceres) that enhance his readers' and audiences' understanding and enjoyment of his work. Vaughan...

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...

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, Animal Stories argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and...

Against the background of Montrose's campaign of 1644-5, this spirited novel centres on one of Scott's most memorable creations - Sir Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket. This hard-headed Aberdonian contrasts tellingly with the weird and passionate Highland...

William Ian Miller presents a close reading of one of the best known of the Icelandic sagas, showing its moral, political, and psychological sophistication. Hrafnkel tells of a fairly simple feud in which a man rises, falls, and rises again with a...

The powerful portrait of the glorious Greek warrior Achilles presented in Homer's "Iliad" imbued a particular soldier with transcendent value, linking 'soldier' with 'hero' in Western culture. Tracing Achilles' appearances in the works of poets,...

The spectacular development of early consumer society in Britain, France and the United States had a profound impact on constructions of femininity and masculinity, and commercial and cultural values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

An introduction to the variety of medieval narrative, intended both for students and more general readers who already know some of the classics of the Middle Ages, such as Beowulf, the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales,, and who wish to venture further...

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...

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His ideas on concentrationary art proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School,...

'We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon.' So wrote Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly before he took his...

Written in the thirteenth century, the Icelandic prose sagas, chronicling the lives of kings and commoners, give a dramatic account of the first century after the settlement of Iceland-the period from about 930 to 1050. To some extent these elaborate...

For most readers and spectators, heroism takes the form of public, idealized masculinity. It calls to mind socially and morally elevated men embarking on active adventures: courageously confronting danger; valiantly rescuing the helpless; exploring and...

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is also much more. In this exploration of the shortest literary works-wise sayings, proverbs, witticisms, sardonic observations about human nature, pithy evocations of mystery, terse statements regarding ultimate...

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,...

In a society where a comic equates with knockabout amusement for children, the sudden pre-eminence of adult comics, on everything from political satire to erotic fantasy, has predictably attracted an enormous amount of attention.Adult comics are part of...

Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages-and never his its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. Whether discussing George Eliot's lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope's whorish heroines, or Charles...

Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women's Writing: Feminist Interventions and Imaginings analyzes and explores women's writing of the post-Tiger period and reflects on the social, cultural, and economic conditions of this writing's production...

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The text of Ernest Hemingway's best-known novel. Introduction and explanatory footnotes by Michael Thurston. A rich selection of background and contextual materials carefully chosen to enhance the reader's...

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...

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.About the AuthorMax Frisch, Peter Hutchinson, Lecturer in German, University of...

Enlightenment or Empire is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the culture of European colonialism. The book opens with a bold reconsideration of the relationship between the Enlightenment and colonialism, at the heart of which is an...

In Housing Problems, Susan Bernstein studies the actual houses of Goethe, Walpole, and Freud alongside textual articulations of the architectonic problems of design, containment, shelter, and fragmentation. The linking of "text" and "house" brings into...

While speculation has always been crucial to biography, it has often been neglected, denied or misunderstood. This edited collection brings together a group of international biographers to discuss how, and why, each uses speculation in their work;...

The Oxford Classical Texts, or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, are renowned for their reliability and presentation. The series consists of a text without commentary but with a brief apparatus criticus at the front of each page. There are...

Spanning the period from Elizabeth I's reign to Charles II's restoration, this study argues the garden is a primary site evincing a progressive narrative of change, a narrative that looks to the Edenic as obtainable ideal in court politics, economic...

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,...

What is a hangover? How does it feel to suffer from one? What can hangovers tell us about the way attitudes to alcohol have developed over time? In the humanities, why have we neglected the subject of the hangover in our critical discussions of...

A study of Dafydd ap Gwilym's verse in the light of the traditions of courtly and popular poetry and with consideration of the European influences on his work.About the AuthorHelen Fulton is Professor of English at the University of Wales Swansea.Book...