Literary Criticism

What is poststructuralist theory, and what difference does it make to literary criticism? Where do we find the meaning of the text: in the author's head? in the reader's? Or do we, instead, make meaning in the practice of reading itself? If so, what part...

Plato's Symposium is an exceptionally multi-layered dialogue. At once a historical document, a philosophical drama that enacts abstract ideas in an often light-hearted way, and a literary masterpiece, it has exerted an influence that goes well beyond the...

Tomas Transtroemer (1931-2015) was Sweden's most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he published, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead...

Life of the Russian poet who withstood Stalinism and became an inspiration to millionsAnna Akhmatova is recognised as one of the greatest poets of Russian literature, an iconic figure who gave voice to the suffering of the Russian people during the...

Eclectic and illuminating, these essays are the last that Maugham published. Ranging from an appreciation of Goethe's novels, to an encounter with an Indian holy man, with a considered analysis of the form at which Maugham himself excelled - the short...

The third in the hilarious series from Roald Dahl Funny Prize winning author Philip Ardagh and illustrator of The Gruffalo, Axel Scheffler.Oh no! The Grunts are on the loose. And this time they're in a VERY sticky situation. When Mrs Grunt's mother, the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907776014Author John SutherlandFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint CONNELL PUBLISHING LTDPublisher CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD

This biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written with reference to Browning correspondence only recently available, argues that the poet was a strong and determined woman largely responsible for her own incarceration in Wimpole Street. The author...

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western...

The Value of Ecocriticism offers a brief, incisive overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in a bewildering age of global environmental threat. The intellectual, moral and political complexity of environmental issues,...

Thoroughly updated editions to meet the needs of the Key Stage 3 and GCSE classrooms. Enhanced accessibility for all students with clear navigation through the texts, spacious page design and new activities. Brand-new support and activities to match...

After the Titanic sank on 15 April 1912, the story hit the headlines worldwide. Details of the tragedy were displayed on the front pages of every newspaper and magazine, and were talked about in every home. The events that happened on that fateful night...

A sociological history of literary study-both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of literary study are especially profound. No scholar has...

The first comprehensive biography of this undervalued writer, who was considered 'far and away the best living woman poet' in her day.Andrew Motion's Spectator Book of the Year.'One of the many achievements of This Rare Spirit is its rejection of that...

A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become "real" at all' writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello,...

An extraordinary book, which enables us to consider the nature of God in the 21st Century through the lens of Dostoevsky's novels. The current rash of books hostile to religious faith will one day be an interesting subject for some sociological analysis...

Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781555404277Author Sarah Iles JohnstonFormat PaperbackPage Count 200Imprint Scholars PressPublisher Scholars PressWeight(grams) 341gDimensions(mm) 228mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780807070611Author Doris GrumbachFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint Beacon PressPublisher Beacon PressWeight(grams) 170gDimensions(mm) 218mm * 140mm * 8mm

Within the English-speaking world, no work of the German High Middle Ages is better known than the Nibelungenlied, which has stirred the imagination of artists and readers far beyond its land of origin. Its international influence extends from literature...

'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.' Stefan Zweig was already an emigre-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne...

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a...

'Delightful . . . an original look at the literature inspired by Britain's birdlife' the Guardian, Best Nature Books of 2017'[The] pages light up with feathered magic' Evening StandardWhen Alex Preston was 15, he stopped being a birdwatcher. Adolescence...

'Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.' Waugh begins his story with heredity, writing of the energetic, literary and sometimes eccentric men and women who, unknown to themselves,...

That Mad Ache , set in high-society Paris in the mid-1960's, recounts the emotional battle unleashed in the heart of Lucile, a sensitive but rootless young woman who finds herself caught between her carefree, tranquil love for 50-year-old Charles, a...

The Decameron (c.1351) was written in the wake of the Black Death, a shattering epidemic which had shaken Florence's confident entrepreneurial society to its core. In a country villa outside the city, ten young noble men and women who have escaped the...

A groundbreaking biography of Milton’s formative years that provides a new account of the poet’s political radicalizationJohn Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest...

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words,...

"Magnificent! The best how-to manual ever published." - Kevin Kelly, Cool Tools Scott McCloud tore down the wall between high and low culture in 1993 with Understanding Comics, a massive comic book about comics, linking the medium to such...

A new edition of the classic companion to Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels, updated to include the final novel in the series. This indispensable guide to navigating the well-loved Aubrey-Maturin novels has been updated, with new chapters devoted to the...

First published in July 1850, shortly after Wordsworth's death, The Prelude was the culmination of over fifty years of creative work. The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, it takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind': leading the reader...

'(Conrad) thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths' - Bertrand Russell This selection of four tales by...

Perhaps nowhere else has literature been as conscious a collective endeavor as in China, and China's survival over three thousand years may owe more to its literary traditions than to its political history. This Very Short Introduction tells the story of...

In Market a la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which...

Winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award in Poetry A Literary Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2020” A meticulously detailed catalogue of ordinary people performing acts of extraordinary violence, The Century charts an awakening to structures of dominance...

Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on...

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original...

The constant call to admit guilt amounts almost to a tyranny of confession today. We demand tell-all tales in the public dramas of the courtroom, the talk shows and in print, as well as in the more private spaces of the confessional and the...

This is an expansion of the first dictionary of symbols to be based on literature, rather than on 'universal' psychological archetypes or myths. It explains and illustrates the literary symbols that we frequently encounter (such as swan, rose, moon,...

An innovative and best-selling addition to contemporary peninsular literature, crime fiction by Spanish women re-writes the norms for this particular genre as established by male authors inside Spain, and revises and re-fashions paradigms for the...