Literary Criticism

"I read Peter Y. Paik's lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible." -Bruce Sterling Revolutionary narratives in recent science...

From the gothic fantasies of Walpole's Otranto to post-modern takes on the country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, Phyllis Richardson guides us on a tour through buildings real and imagined to examine how authors' personal experiences helped to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681377780Author Phillip LopateFormat PaperbackPage Count 150Imprint The New York Review of Books, IncPublisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching...

Empson has long been applauded for the dazzling intelligence and emotional passion of his poems. Praised in his lifetime by the likes of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman, his reputation contines to be high. His poems take a wide range of themes...

Ancient Athens' most successful tragedian.Sophocles (497/6-406 BC), with Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the three great tragic poets of Athens, and is considered one of the world's greatest poets. The subjects of his plays were drawn from mythology...

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here.' The 'Alice' books are two of the most translated, most quoted, and best-known books in the world, but what exactly are they?...

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation. Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today's reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not...

Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who...

Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein; but have you heard of Margaret Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier? Have you read the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term...

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week'Excellent.' New Statesman'Outstanding.' Irish Times'Enthralling.' Guardian'Shapiro at his best.' Daily Telegraph From the author of 1599, a fresh perspective on the history of the United States - and a timely reminder of...

The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women's accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What...

This Norton Critical Edition includes: Hans Walter Gabler's acclaimed text of Joyce's 1916 coming-of-age novel, accompanied by Gabler's introduction and textual notes.Preface and revised and expanded explanatory annotations by John Paul Riquelme.Other...

'The funniest book I've read in a long time: its deadpan, dry humour and its accumulation of absurdities will leave you rolling on your floor with laughter' The Times She thought she was a lover of the great classics of Russian literature - until she...

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter-writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection begins when Hughes was...

Ecology is the science of ecosystems, of habitats, of our world and its future. In the latest New Naturalist, ecologist David M. Wilkinson explains key ideas of this crucial branch of science, using Britain's ecosystems to illustrate each point. ...

Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from the much-loved writer Clive James to one of the world's most cherished poets: Philip Larkin.'This is the finest critic of his generation on the best poet of his...

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's ambiguous, bittersweet fairy tale. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of All's Well that Ends Well in...

A complete and annotated edition of Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse, including the sonnets, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece".About the AuthorWilliam Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, and was baptised on 26 April...

The Dark Mountain Project began with a manifesto published in 2009 by two English writers-Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth-who felt that literature was not responding honestly to the crises of our time. In a world in which the climate is being altered...

Original and thought-provoking study of three medieval women mystics based on writings and biographical material. `A wholly feminine voice within Catholicism-they express the inexpressible better than any amount of rational thinking about God.' THE...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781899750603Author Aubrey MaloneFormat HardbackPage Count 224Imprint Aureus PublishingPublisher Aureus Publishing

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar...

The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156027762Author Vladimir NabokovFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Houghton MifflinPublisher Houghton MifflinWeight(grams) 286gDimensions(mm) 204mm *...

Geoffrey Chaucer has some claim to being the greatest poet in the English language. Yet he has also been considered to be an invisible poet, self-depreciating and ironic, leaving only the breath of his comedy behind. In truth a great deal is known of him...

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) is now recognized as a major poet of striking originality. He is widely admired for his particularly vivid expression of feeling, from the religious ecstasy of `he Blessed Virgin' to the torments of his loneliness and...

Japanese Haiku has been a much-loved form of poetry for many centuries. Composed of 17 syllables, it can convey the essence of an emotion, a fleeting moment in nature, or a throwaway comment. This collection features 60 classic haiku by masters such as...

To gain a deeper understanding of the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism, The Pursuit of Signs is a must. In a world increasingly mediated, it offers insights into our ways of consuming texts that are both...

From a master biographer and leading scholar of eighteenth-century literature comes an award-winning new portrait of the greatest satirist in the English language Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver's Travels, the satiric...

'It isn't likely that this collection of journal entries will pass the censors. If it can't be published, I hope my friends will circulate it among themselves. I'll leave Vietnam tomorrow...' Thus Thich Nhat Hanh begins his 11 May 1966 journal entry...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781621386230Author S K HeningerFormat HardbackPage Count 470Imprint Angelico PressPublisher Angelico PressWeight(grams) 898gDimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm *...

William Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes gives a first-hand account of his feelings about the unique countryside that was the source of his inspiration. He addresses concerns that are relevant today, such as how the growing number of visitors, and the...

Before etching Jerusalem William Blake wrote about creating 'the grandest poem that this world contains.' Blake's avowed intention in constructing the work was to move readers from a solely rational way of being (called Ulro) to one that is highly...

The Holocaust changed what it means to be a Jew, for Jew and non-Jew alike. Much of the discussion about this new meaning is a storm of contradictions. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkielkraut describes with passion and acuity his own passage through...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780399532382Author Ian C. EllisFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint TarcherPerigeePublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 346gDimensions(mm) 208mm *...

The most celebrated English biography is a group portrait in which extraordinary man paints the picture of a dozen more. At the centre of a brilliant circle which included Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Fanny Burney and even George III, Boswell captures the...

This is an exciting and entirely new synthesis, combining anthropology, political and social history, and the close reading of central Greek texts, to account for two the most significant hallmarks in Homeric epic and Athenian tragedy: the representation...

The poet has said of himself and his work: "I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters--Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781950922130Author Captivating HistoryFormat PaperbackPage Count 374Imprint Ch PublicationsPublisher Ch PublicationsWeight(grams) 549gDimensions(mm) 229mm *...