Literary Criticism

The love song is timeless. From its beginnings, it has been shaped by bohemians and renegades, slaves and oppressed minorities, prostitutes, immigrants and other excluded groups. But what do we really know about the origins of these intimate expressions...

Described by Philip Pullman as 'the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkein', Alan Garner has been enrapturing readers with works like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet for more than half...

Wordsworth (1770-1850) is one of the most important and enduringly popular of all the English poets. Wordsworth's verse declares a belief in the power of poetry to teach by appealing to the imagination and to the `grand elementary principle of...

An illustrated guide to one of the most enduring masterworks of world literatureWritten in the eleventh century by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of prose and poetry that is widely considered the world's...

Despite having no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs deftly explores the strengths and weaknesses of policy arguments put forward by American urban planners in the era after World War II. They believed that the efficient movement of cars was...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. So runs one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Setting the scene in Pride and Prejudice, it deftly introduces the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907776243Author Graham BradshawFormat PaperbackPage Count 136Imprint CONNELL PUBLISHING LTDPublisher CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD

This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the work and thought of the highly influential twentieth-century critic and theorist Walter Benjamin. The volume provides examinations of the different aspects of Benjamin's work that have had a...

The title, The Government of the Tongue, carries suggestions of both monastic discipline and untrammelled romanticism, and is meant to raise an old question about the rights and status of poetic utterance itself. Should it be governed? Should it be the...

How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural...

This is the first comprehensive critical anthology of modern poetry in Irish with English translations. It forms a sequel to Sean O Tuama and Thomas Kinsella's pioneering anthology, An Duanaire 1600-1900 / Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), but features...

"At last, at last, at last, Pessoa again! More Pessoa! One of the very great poets of the twentieth century, again and more! And one of the fascinating figures of all literature, with his manifold identities, his amazing audacities, his brilliance and...

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'A rich, strange book. Very truthful and moving' Tessa Hadley 'A terrific, engrossing novel' Roddy Doyle 'A masterpiece' Sebastian Barry The new novel about the transformative power of art,...

This is a concise, readable and comprehensive introduction to Bram Stoker's classic "Dracula" (1897) for undergraduates. "Dracula" (1897) is one of the most commonly studied gothic novels and has been hugely influential through...

Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city...

'Adrian Noble vigorously highlights the extraordinary rhythmic, linguistic patterns Shakespeare gives the speaker. Any actor will find this book invaluable. For any student of Shakespeare it should be essential.' (From the Foreword by Ralph Fiennes)'How...

War and Peace and Anna Karenina are widely recognised as two of the greatest novels ever written. Their author, Leo Tolstoy, has been honoured as the father of the modern war story; as an innovator in psychological prose and forerunner of stream of...

This third and final volume of A. David Moody's critical life of Ezra Pound presents Pound's personal tragedy in a tragic time. The first volumes of Moody's biography have been acclaimed as 'masterly' (Daily Telegraph), 'exceptional' (Literary Review),...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781914927201Author William ShakespeareFormat PaperbackPage Count 212Imprint Redbrick BooksPublisher Redbrick BooksWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm) 216mm *...

Brand new deluxe edition of this definitive companion to The Hobbit, quarter-bound, stamped in gold foil with a unique design inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's own artwork, featuring a ribbon marker and housed in a matching custom-built slipcase...

This edition of eighty poems of Catullus is designed for both university and school use. An introduction deals with the life of Catullus, with his indebtedness to Alexandrian poetry, and with the later history of the poems. The Latin text comes from the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780804171632Author Peter MendelsundFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 510gDimensions(mm) 198mm *...

Storylistening makes the case for the urgent need to take stories seriously in order to improve public reasoning. Dillon and Craig provide a theory and practice for gathering narrative evidence that will complement and strengthen, not distort, other...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375701122Author Kennedy FraserFormat PaperbackPage Count 268Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 328gDimensions(mm) 216mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780993077876Author Neil BowenFormat PaperbackPage Count 122Imprint Peripeteia PressPublisher Peripeteia PressWeight(grams) 181gDimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm...

With its rich golden hue, art deco-inspired bottle, and timeless, musky scent, Chanel Number 5 is the world's bestselling perfume. Reverently known among industry insiders as "le monstre" - the monster - it is arguably the most coveted consumer luxury...

Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the "Queens of Crime." Alongside writers like Agatha Christie, she perfected the whodunnit, but also used the genre to explore social, ethical, and emotional matters. Her characters, particularly Lord Peter Wimsey and his...

In Elf Queens and Holy Friars Richard Firth Green investigates an important aspect of medieval culture that has been largely ignored by modern literary scholarship: the omnipresent belief in fairyland. Taking as his starting point the assumption that...

A beautifully illustrated history of the Queen of Flowers and her enduring power in our gardens, art, religion and imagination. 'Fascinating... I'll never look at a rose in quite the same way again.' Adrian Tinniswood The rose is bursting with...

For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently...

This critical introduction to Warner's writings aims to rehabilitate them from neglect by discussing the development of his ideas and their problematic relationship with the fictional forms through which he articulated them - a relationship which deepens...

The paramount historian of the early Roman empire.Tacitus (Cornelius), famous Roman historian, was born in AD 55, 56 or 57 and lived to about 120. He became an orator, married in 77 a daughter of Julius Agricola before Agricola went to Britain, was...

Widely adopted for classroom use, this book offers translations of four major works of ancient Greek literature which treat the life and thought of Socrates, focusing particularly on his trial and defense (three dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Apology of...

Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio This is the biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first...

The four dramas in this volume are some of George Bernard Shaw's most interesting plays. They stretch from 1929 to 1935 and coincide with the Great Depression, the intensification of the crisis of democracy that began after the war, and the rise of...

Humanity has always used symbols-material objects used to denote difficult, abstract concepts-to describe thoughts and feelings, or to protect secret truths from common knowledge. This concise A-Z guide is a fascinating work of reference that brings to...

'Lovely... delivers the warmest of glows' - Telegraph 'Who wouldn't love this chocolate-box delight of insights and snapshots of The Queen...A treasure chest' - Good Housekeeping In 2022 Queen Elizabeth II celebrated seventy years as Queen and Head of...

BLWith new text and full apparatus criticus The Eudemian Ethics was one of two ethical treatises which Aristotle wrote on the subject of ethica or `matters to do with character'. Although the two works cover much the same ground, the Nicomachean...

'What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages -- oh, here is Jacob's room.' Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows...