General

Roland Barthes's 1967 essay, "The Death of the Author," argues against the traditional practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author into textual interpretation because of the resultant limitations imposed on a text...

Learn about the greatest works of literature, and the lives of those who wrote them in The Literature Book.Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Literature...

This is a one volume, up-to-date collection of more than fifty wide-ranging essays which will inspire and guide students of the Renaissance and provide course leaders with a substantial and helpful frame of reference. Provides new perspectives on...

Competitive price and format. Compacted and up-to-date version of the earlier Revels Plays edition by the same editor, taking account of more recent critical works. A key Renaissance text.About the AuthorN.W. Bawcutt, formerly Reader in English...

For centuries people have been tormented by one question above all - 'If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?' And what of the suffering of animals, who neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it? ...

For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. 'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age', as...

Critically acclaimed as one of Shakespeare's most complex and intriguing plays, Twelfth Night is a classic romantic comedy of mistaken identities. In recent years it has returned to the centre of critical debate surrounding gender and sexuality. The...

Imaginary Maps presents three stories from noted Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi in conjunction with readings of these tales by famed cultural and literary critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Weaving history, myth and current political realities, these...

One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later...

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary...

When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine. This correspondence charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their friends and lovers,...

Shakespeare's Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured the imagination of readers and lovers; certainly no poem has come under such...

'The wind is rising!... Let us try to live!' One of the preeminent intellectuals of modern French culture, Valéry is widely considered one of the country's greatest poets of the twentieth century. Following a flurry of sonnets in his late teens, he...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9787119016627Author Shi Nai'AnFormat PaperbackPage Count 1642Imprint Foreign Languages PressPublisher Foreign Languages PressWeight(grams) 1361g

A 'wilful extremist' according to the London Times, Helene Cixous is hailed as one of the most formidable writers and thinkers of our time. Acclaimed by luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, her writing has nonetheless been misunderstood and misread, to a...

'in this life, even if you don't ask for much you still end up with bugger all!' In a run-down quarter of Paris, Gervaise Macquart struggles to earn a living and support her family. She earns a pittance washing other people's dirty clothes in the...

'What a marvellous book this is . . . de Botton dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is...

'Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful one who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know.' The Qur'an, believed by Muslims to be the word of God, was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad 1400 years ago. It is the supreme authority in Islam...

Art and Pornography presents a series of essays which investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature, and explores the distinction, if there is any, between pornography and erotic art. Is there any...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring J.R.R. Tolkien was the author of two of the most extraordinary, most original, and most popular books of the twentieth century: The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. The encounter with his works...

If you've ever wanted to know more about the power of 'P', the hypnotic rhythm of anapestic tetrameter, or how to change the mood of a verb, then look no further. If you've ever needed to catch a red herring, wield a zeugma, deepen your pathos or...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781853997174Author Stephen AndersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Bristol Classical PressPublisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLCWeight(grams)...

'If our love is a sin, then heaven must be full of such tender and selfless sinning as ours.' The Well of Loneliness is among the most famous banned books in history. A pioneering work of literature, Radclyffe Hall's novel charts the development of a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780573111020Author Richard BeanFormat PaperbackPage Count 98Imprint Samuel French LtdPublisher Samuel French Ltd

The global turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s severely tested every analyst and commentator. Few wrote with such insight as Christopher Hitchens about the large events - or with such discernment and wit about the small tell-tale signs of a...

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2014Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best BiographyNew York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the YearPenelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself...

Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. With "Gardens", Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke...

This is a story of depression a condition that reduced William Styron from a person enjoying life and success as an acclaimed writer, to a man engulfed and menaced by mental anguish. With profound insight and remarkable candor, Styron tracks the progress...

A Sherlock Holmes Escape Book: The Adventure of the Tower of London is a unique form of puzzle book, in which the reader must solve the riddles to escape the pages. The fourth title in this ingenious series of Sherlock Holmes Escape Books, The...

The third edition of the definitive collection of Chaucer's Complete Works, reissued with a new foreword by Christopher Cannon. Since F. N. Robinson's second edition of the The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer was published in 1957, there has been a dramatic...

Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907776786Author Sophie RatcliffeFormat PaperbackPage Count 48Imprint Connell GuidesPublisher CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD

Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781628370515Author Mark J BodaFormat PaperbackPage Count 238Imprint Society of Biblical LiteraturePublisher Society of Biblical LiteratureWeight(grams)...

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture...

Fairytales are one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, and forests one of our most ancient landscapes. Both evoke a similar sensation in us - we find them beautiful and magical, but also spooky, sometimes horrifying. In this fascinating...

The work of Michel Houellebecq - one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time - is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was...

The author of "The Barracks Thief" and "Hunters in the Snow" recreates his boyhood experiences, relating how he and his mother travelled throughout the United States, and tracing his experiences and changes from young boy to manhood against the...

Nevil Shute was a power and a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute's path from childhood to his career as a gifted aeronautical engineer working at...

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing...