Literary Criticism

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life,...

In an updated edition of his hugely successful student introduction to English literature from 1100 to 1500, J. A. Burrow takes account of scholarly developments in the the field, most notably devoting a final chapter to the impact of historicism on...

Board: AQA Examination: English Language & Literature Specification: GCSE 9-1 Set Text covered: Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare Type: Essay Planner This book answers the question 'What do great answers look...

'Mary Gaitskill is willing to think about the problematic with complexity and humanity, and without taking sides or engaging in all the fashionable moral hectoring that passes for serious thought these days.' Eimear McBride Nuanced, daring and tender,...

An account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us. Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli...

This new edition celebrates the 65th anniversary of the publication of Period Piece, which has never been out of print. Period Piece is the classic memoir of a Cambridge childhood, written by Charles Darwin's granddaughter. It evokes a time when long...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781640606302Author Kenneth StevenFormat PaperbackPage Count 96Imprint Paraclete PressPublisher Paraclete PressWeight(grams) 113g

The first three books of Horace's Odes were issued together, apparently in the latter part of 23 BC. The second book, however, has a coherence of its own in terms of subject matter, tone of voice, and arrangement. In particular there is a predominance of...

In Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures, Claudia L. Johnson shows how Jane Austen became "Jane Austen," a figure intensely-sometimes even wildly-venerated, and often for markedly different reasons. Johnson begins by exploring the most important monuments and...

"Research reveals the rich and varied cultural and intellectual experiences available to an eager young Thomas Stearns Eliot during the year he spent in Paris: Wagnerian opera, the Ballets Russes, music of Stravinsky and Beethoven, Bergson's...

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and entertaining guide to the poet's craft, and an invaluable introduction to practical criticism for students. Chapters on each element of poetry, from metre to gender, offer a wide-ranging general account, and end by...

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered...

This Element attends to attention drawn away. That the Globe is a 'distracted' space is a sentiment common to both Hamlet's original audience and attendees at the reconstructed theatre on London's Bankside. But what role does distraction play in this...

Poetry, arguably, has a greater range of conceptual meaning than perhaps any other term in English. At the most basic level everyone can recognise it--it is a kind of literature that uses special linguistic devices of organization and expression for...

What s the perfect gift for your friend who loves literature? How about an adorable crocheted Moby Dick? Or a delightfully miniature Elizabeth Bennet? Or an elegant and fuzzy Jay Gatsby? Whether you need some holiday decor (Ebenezer Scrooge!) or want to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781984859624Author Maureen JohnsonFormat HardbackPage Count 128Imprint Ten Speed PressPublisher Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale

"Backgrounds and Contexts" is arranged under three headings. "Composition and Publication History" combines modern scholarship with contemporary materials to elucidate the novel's composition and publication history and present different aspects of...

The Hebrew Bible, or Christian Old Testament, contains some of the finest literature that we have. This biblical literature has a place not only in the synagogue or the church but also among the classics of world literature. The stories of Jacob and...

Aristotle Ars RhetoricaBook InformationISBN 9780198145578Author Sir David RossFormat HardbackPage Count 220Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University PressDimensions(mm) 194mm * 131mm * 19mm

Following the texts is an album of portraits of Whitman, as well as "Whitman on His Art," a collection of Whitman's statements about his role as a poet taken from his notebooks, letters, conversations, and newspaper articles. While continuing to provide...

Wales is a land with a vast wealth of ghost stories, including fantastical animals, flickering death omens and unseen things that go bump in the night. Whether these tales are based on true events, or are the creations of active imaginations, is known...

The absolute, comprehensive, from Tiffany Aching to Jack Zweiblumen guide to all things Discworld, fully illustrated by Paul Kidby.The Discworld, as everyone knows, is a flat world balanced on the back of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the shell...

From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children,...

Eliot's poetry has been charged with coldness, antisemitism, misogyny, elitism, prissiness. It is a poetry which invites or incites prejudice; how far this makes Eliot suspect is what Ricks sets out to discover.About the AuthorChristopher Ricks is...

February 1, 2002 marks the 100th birthday of Langston Hughes. To commemorate the centennial of his birth, Arnold Rampersad has contributed new Afterwords to both volumes of his highly-praised biography of this most extraordinary and prolific American...

The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence contains fourteen chapters by leading international scholars. They offer a series of alternative perspectives on one of the most important and controversial writers of the twentieth century. These...

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in...

A best-selling author and world-renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries."The author brings a fresh hopefulness to the enterprise of books and reading. Vintage Manguel-a pleasure for his...

Oscar Wilde was a major influence on the culture of his time, and remains relevant today, as a model of wit and style, a sexual icon, and a moral example. In a sequence of detailed and imaginative chapters on Wilde and his times, John Stokes shows how in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781913029562Author Thomas MoynihanFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Urbanomic Media LtdPublisher Urbanomic Media Ltd

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize 2008 and The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2008.Book InformationISBN 9781910213445Author Eca de QueirozFormat...

The enormous popular appeal of Philip Larkin's poetry has long been established; but oddly little is known to his admiring public about the personality behind the work.The Selected Letters will change this, throwing light on a more complex, and in many...

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has...

Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense...

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature--selected as the literature book of the year by the London Times "[A] fizzing, exhilarating book."-Sebastian...

Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain offers a new approach to the cultural history of contemporary Spain, examining the ways in which Spain's own self-conceptions are changing and multiplying in...

Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphosis. Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of narrative poems, ingeniously...

Other early 'stand-out' roles came in the premieres of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979) and Mike Leigh's Goose Pimples (1981). He was Malcolm Bradbury's History Man on TV (1981) before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982, where he has played...

Fired from his skiffle band, Francis Henshall becomes minder to Roscoe Crabbe, a small time East End hood, now in Brighton to collect GBP6,000 from his fiancee's dad. But Roscoe is really his sister Rachel posing as her own dead brother, who's been...

The most controversial and newsworthy plays of British theatre are a rash of rude, vicious and provocative pieces by a brat pack of twentysomethings whose debuts startled critics and audiences with their heady mix of sex, violence and street-poetry...