Literary Criticism

The Odyssey is vividly captured and beautifully paced in this swift and lucid new translation by acclaimed scholar and translator Peter Green. Accompanied by an illuminating introduction, maps, chapter summaries, a glossary, and explanatory notes, this...

One of the primary qualities of good creative thinking is an intellectual freedom to think outside of the box. Good creative thinkers resist orthodox ideas, take new lines of enquiry, and generally come at problems from the kinds of angles almost no one...

Tales featuring anthropomorphic animals have been around as long as there have been storytellers to spin them, from Aesop's Fables to Reynard the Fox to Alice in Wonderland. The genre really took off following the explosion of furry fandom in the 21st...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!' Epic and tragic in its scope, King Lear explores a king's demise into madness and insanity when he...

This volume contains three of Strindberg's most famous plays, spanning twenty years of prodigious creativity and recurrent personal crises: The Father, which displays Strindberg's suspicion of women at its most implacable, 'powerful and profound' (Guy de...

An acclaimed biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English writersGeoffrey Chaucer is often called the father of English literature, but this acclaimed biography reveals...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781922634702Author Joan BodgerFormat PaperbackPage Count 270Imprint Living Book PressPublisher Living Book PressWeight(grams) 399gDimensions(mm) 229mm *...

This book brings together the themes of diet, consumption, the body, and human relationships with the natural world, in a highly original study of Shelley. A campaigning vegetarian and proto-ecological thinker, Shelley may seem to us curiously modern,...

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. 'Astounding' Sebastian Barry 'A masterpiece' Ayad Akhtar 'This little book is ruminative, humane, and...

"To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature." When Joe Orton (1933-1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was being hailed as the greatest comic playwright since Oscar...

This book is a study of the best-selling writer for children Enid Blyton (1897-1968) and provides a new account of her career. It draws on Blyton's business correspondence to give a fresh account of a misunderstood figure who for forty years was one of...

'I wish I had copies like this at Drama School. Essential notes on the language for those who will get up and speak it, not purely for those who will sit and study it. An incredibly useful tool with room on every page to make notes. Next time I'm in...

A selection of the writer's greatest nature poetry, selected by Tom Paulin, published in a beautiful new edition by Faber.At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overheadIn a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited;An aged thrush, frail, gaunt,...

Federico Garcia Lorca is Spain's most famous writer, and an icon of its culture. He is the author of a series of innovative works that changed the face of Spanish poetry and drama. In this new biography Stephen Roberts seeks out the roots of the man and...

______________ 'I find it impossible to imagine anyone better read than White ... Wisdom and a certain kind of tenderness are to be found on every page' - Observer 'One of the great prose stylists of our time ... There are few paragraphs that...

'Gaius Pliny sends greetings to his friend Septicius Clarus...' In these letters to his friends and relations, Pliny provides a fascinating insight into Roman life in the period 97 to 112 AD. Part autobiography, part social history, they document the...

'In ancient tales many marvels are told us ... now you may hear such marvels told!' The greatest of the heroic epics to emerge from medieval Germany, the Nibelungenlied is a revenge saga of sweeping dimensions. It tells of the dragon-slayer Sivrit,...

'Invigorating ... engaging ... thrilling' Samantha Ellis, GUARDIAN'An astonishing tour-de-force . . . Juliet has found the biographer she deserves' Marion TurnerA cultural, historical, and literary exploration of the birth, death, and legacy of the...

New Light on Tony Harrison was developed from a conference marking the 80th birthday of the prizewinning British poet Tony Harrison. Contributors include practising poets, playwrights, specialists in Classics, Theatre, Translation Studies, English and...

The classic poem, Goblin Market (1862) by Christina Rossetti, tells the story of Lizzie and Laura, who are tempted by the fruit sold by the goblin merchants. In this fully illustrated and beautiful volume, illustrator Georgie McAusland brings the words...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781599540313Author Pino AprileFormat PaperbackPage Count 332Imprint Bordighera PressPublisher Bordighera PressWeight(grams) 485gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm...

William Empson (1906-84) was one of the twentieth century's most distinctive critical voices, and left a profound mark upon Anglo-American literary culture. Published in 1993, this book was the first full study of Empson's literary criticism in its...

A new edition of the fifth book in Michael Bond's classic series about the unstoppable and much-loved guinea-pig, Olga da Polga. From the author of Paddington Bear, Michael Bond's little guinea-pig with a big imagination has been charming readers for...

A Map of Absence presents the finest poetry and prose by Palestinian writers over the last seventy years. Featuring writers in the diaspora and those living under occupation, these striking entries pay testament to one of the most pivotal events in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781611806892Author Matsuo BashoFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Shambhala Publications IncPublisher Shambhala Publications Inc

This light-hearted but deeply researched book offers interest and guidance to walkers, social historians and lovers of the Bronte family; their lives and works. Set in and around the town of Haworth it gives a dual introduction to walkers and lovers of...

Controversy raged through England during the 1570-80s as Puritans denounced all manner of games & pastimes as a danger to public morals. Writers quickly turrned their attention to their own art and the first & most influential response came with Philip...

"Alice Birch's new play is scored like a piece of music ... It is an extraordinary echoing text, full of pain and strange beauty. The three stories play out simultaneously on stage, the dialogue from one scene overlapping with the other two in a manner...

This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry. This is a book...

This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois society as a central feature of a "public sphere" in which political, ethical, and literary judgements could mingle under the benign rule of reason. The disintegration of this...

Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader is designed to give both students and lecturers a sense of the historical formation of a Marxist literary tradition. A unique compilation of principal texts in that tradition, it offers the reader new ways of reading...

Margery Kempe. Aemilia Lanyer. Aphra Behn. Lady Mary. Jane Austen. Warned not to write - and certainly not to bite - these women put pen to paper anyway and wrote themselves into history. 'Smart, funny and highly readable... a tour de force.' A.L...

Illustrated throughout, The Penguin Classics Marvel Collection presents specially curated cartoon anthologies of the world's greatest superheroesThroughout the 1960s, the Fantastic Four was both the flagship title and the creative laboratory of the...

'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.' In the last of his major writings, Samuel Johnson looked back over the previous two centuries of English...

'The people are silent' So ends Pushkin's great historical drama Boris Godunov, in which Boris's reign as Tsar witnesses civil strife and intrigue, brutality and misery. Its legacy is an uncertain future for the new Tsar whose inauguration is met with...

The selected essays of James Wood - our greatest living literary critic and author of How Fiction Works'James Wood is a close reader of genius... By turns luscious and muscular, committed and disdaining, passionate and minutely considered' John...

An entirely new portrait of Keats, rich with insights into the torments of his life and the imaginative sources of his works This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly...

This innovative study compares nineteenth-century Arabic translations of the Bible to determine how it emerged as a foundational text of Arab modernity. Bible translation gained global traction through the work of Anglophone Christian missionaries, who...

In this collection of writings produced between 2000 and 2018, the pioneering literary historian of the Czech underground, Martin Machovec, examines the multifarious nature of the underground phenomenon. After devoting considerable attention to the...

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even...