Literary Criticism - General

Few works of history make as well-structured a case for the importance of studying continuity, rather than change, than Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples. Hourani's work had three major aims: to refute the idea that Arab society stagnated between 1000 and...

Plato's Symposium, composed in the early fourth century BC, demonstrates how powerful the skills of reasoning and evaluation can be. Known to philosophers for its seminal discussion of the relationship of love to knowledge, it is also a classic text for demonstrating the two...

David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge. It is also a classic of the critical thinking skills of analysis and reasoning. Analysis is all about understanding how arguments work and...

The 85 essays that maker up The Federalist Papers' clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion. Written between 1787 and 1788 by three of the "Founding Fathers" of the United States, the Papers were written with the specific intention of convincing...

W.E.B Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk is a seminal work in the field of sociology, a classic of American literature - and a solid example of carefully-structured reasoning. One of the most important texts ever written on racism and black identity in...

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century's most innovative thinkers - and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published....

Thomas Hobbes is a towering figure in the history of modern thought and political philosophy. He remains best remembered for his 1651 treatise on government, Leviathan, a work that shows at the very best the reasoning skills of a deeply original and creative thinker....

S ren Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential works of Christian philosophy written in the nineteenth century. One of the cornerstones of Kierkegaard's reputation as a writer and thinker, the book is also a...

Arjun Appadurai's 1996 collection of essays Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization helped reshape how anthropologists, geographers and philosophers saw and understood the key topic of our times: globalization.Globalization has long been recognized as one of the crucial factors shaping the modern world...

Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality is a sustained feat of incisive interpretation. Well known as one of Nietzsche's greatest works, and as one of the most important books of nineteenth-century philosophy, On the Genealogy of Morality also provided the inspiration for the...

The impact of William James's 1890 The Principles of Psychology is such that he is commonly known as the father of his subject. Though psychology itself is a very different discipline in the 21st-century, James's influence continues to be felt - both within the...

Keith Thomas's classic study of all forms of popular belief has been influential for so long now that it is difficult to remember how revolutionary it seemed when it first appeared. By publishing Religion and the Decline of Magic, Thomas became the first serious...

Amartya Sen uses his 1999 work Development as Freedom to evaluate the processes and outcomes of economic development. Having come to the conclusion that development is best summed up as the expansion of freedom, Sen examines traditional definitions and understandings of the term. He...

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century's most innovative and wide-ranging thinkers. The qualities that made him one of the most-read and influential theorists of the modern age find full expression in History of Sexuality, the last project Foucault was able to...

Continuing the popular series of proverbs from around the world, each paired with an English equivalent, Don't Toss Granny in the Begonias sheds an amusing and often intriguing light on the rivalry between the French and the English: an odd couple who, from time...

Literary Nonfiction. Young Adult. Art. Film. THE MONKMAN AND SEAGULL QUIZ BOOK is bound to be a classic: a book that challenges everyone to join in and play it. In this, their first quiz book, astounding polymaths Monkman & Seagull are finally on the...

Reforging the Bible continues the programme Anthony Swindell began in his earlier book, Reworking the Bible: The Literary Reception-History of Fourteen Biblical Stories (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010). It is a study of the reception in literature of over a dozen biblical stories, giving particular...

Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe's short story about a young man named Egaeus who lives in a gloomy mansion with his cousin named Berenice. Egaeus develops an obsessive disorder which makes him fixated on certain objects while in a trance-like state....

The Sun also Rises presents the ontology, ethics, and aesthetics of Hemingway's worldview by examining the post-Narrative condition that emerged after World War I. It describes the postwar generation's response to the war's negation of the traditional meanings and values embedded in religious and...

Israel Abrahams (b. London, November 26, 1858; d. Cambridge, October 6, 1925) was one of the most distinguished Jewish scholars of his generation. He wrote a number of classics on Judaism, most notably, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (1896). He was a forceful...

America Moved: Booth Tarkington's Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869-1928 brings together for the first time all of the autobiographical writings of Booth Tarkington, one of the most successful and best-loved writers in American history. These are the memoirs of one of America's greatest...

The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies puts forth the question of the extent to which philosophers must go to school with the poets. It begins with a new interpretation of the famous Platonic quarrel with the poetic wisdom of Homer. It brings this question...

These poems offer a spiritual biography of a remarkable woman of faith, a Benedictine Oblate and spiritual adviser who lived her life according to St. Benedict's Holy Rule (""ora and labora""--pray and work). Juxtaposed with poems on her life, others reflect on Benedictine traditions...

'The nation-state is the enemy of the baroque.' This is the point of departure of this radical, even revolutionary, re-examination of the cultural history of the early-modern world. Drawing on sources in six languages, many of them hitherto unavailable to the English-speaking reader, and...

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. Ekphrasis has been traditionally regarded as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to complicate this critical paradigm and proposes a more...

Despite protests and warnings from friends and family, author Madeleine L'Engle, at the age of seventy-four, embarked on a rafting trip to Antarctica. Her journey through the startling beauty of the continent led her to write Penguins and Golden Calves, a captivating discussion of...

Less is More is a collection of eight ten-minute plays. These tiny dramas speak to the necessity to say what is essential in a small number of words. As Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit." The first play, "The Dissolution Mask," is...

Alfred Perkins was an ordinary young man who grew up in the small English village of Carlisle. When he was a boy his godfather, old Oliver Cyning, used to tell him stories about Elfland, the place where all the fairies, elves, gnomes, goblins, and...

The human experience is an intimate, tough, and, at times, hilarious conversation with what is familiar and what is mystery. Poetry at its best turns this conversation into art and teaches by example how to employ language creatively and courageously--even coyly--in exploring the full...

There was a time in my youth when I would buy and read any and every book I discovered by C.S. Lewis. What I had found was that he wrote in a way that engaged my mind like no other writer. He was respected...

Luci Shaw's poetry is already widely known and celebrated. Scape, her 2013 collection of new poetry, explores metaphors of spiritual significance, paying attention to the small and seemingly irrelevant events of living and listening to nature. Wise, thoughtful, and probing, her sensuous lyrics find...

These poems--selected from the past three decades--are firmly rooted in what Richard Wilbur called the "hunks and colors of the world." They faithfully try to take into account a world we did not make and, at the same time, record the terrifying and painful...

In 1987, when Bryan Parys was four years old, his father Alfred pressed record on a tape player next to his hospital bed. He began leaving messages for his wife, three children, and anyone who wanted to know why his terminal cancer at age...

Using the structure of the liturgical calendar and the lives of the saints for inspiration, Kevin Brown explores not only faith, but subjects ranging from love to childhood and from grammar to grace. The saints' backgrounds serve as metaphors for our lives today, as...

""Elijah, Yahweh, and Baal is a masterpiece presented with authority by a twentieth-century accomplished and unsurpassed exegete. It is now translated by a disciple, whose elegant rendition sounds as if Hermann Gunkel had originally written himself the book in English."" --Andre LaCocque, The Chicago...

A good quotation states an insight so shrewdly that not only do you get it, but you can't seem to forget it. It loves to make you slow down and savor truth. These neat little extended metaphors deserve to be heard, examined, and challenged....

Across fiction, journalism, ethnography, and history, William T. Vollmann's oeuvre--which includes a "prostitution trilogy," a septology (Seven Dreams) about encounters between first North Americans and European colonists, and a more than three-thousand-page philosophical treatise on violence--is ambitious as it is dazzling. Conversations with William...

"Unspoken Sermons" by George MacDonald is a Christian classic spoken of highly by C.S. Lewis. In "Unspoken Sermons," "to understand the words of our Lord is the business of life. For it is the main road to the understanding of The Word himself. And...

Yoga is divided into several branches, ranging from that which teaches the control of the body, to that which teaches the attainment of the highest spiritual development. In the work we will not go into the higher phases of the subject, except when the...

Don Quixote Explained the Reference Guide analyzes the Life and Times of the Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote De La Mancha. Specially, it scrutinizes the novel's: 110 characters; 46 relationships; 19 themes; 12 groups of people; 30 obscure words; 23 Latin phrases; 4 major jokes;...

Don Quixote Explained the Reference Guide analyzes the Life and Times of the Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote De La Mancha. Specially, it scrutinizes the novel's: 110 characters; 46 relationships; 19 themes; 12 groups of people; 30 obscure words; 23 Latin phrases; 4 major jokes;...

Understanding Bob Dylan, by acclaimed author Tony Beck, reveals a dramatically new perspective on the lyrics of legendary poet singer Bob Dylan. Understanding Bob Dylan is a comprehensive analysis of Dylan's songs, based on access to Dylan's archives, including his hand-written notebook for Blood...

The American Nightmare: Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Cormac McCarthy's The Road presents an extensive analysis of two novels by the two most prominent contemporary American writers.The book searches into the stylistic and linguistic complexities of those two post-9/11 novels and explores the ways...

Malice Aforethought is the story of murder-one-the premeditated, cold-blooded killing and obliteration of the name and life-story of the world's greatest writing genius, William Shakespeare. This shameful tale has finally been unraveled, slowly but inexorably, piece by dramatic piece, during the last century. Whom...

In J. R. R. Tolkien's desire to create a mythology for his homeland, he actually made one for every person, every land, and every age. The Lordof the Rings is a catechism of spiritual warfare cleverly disguised as a fantasy. The struggle against evil...

This early work by Ford Madox Ford was originally published in 1929 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.Author: Dante AlighieriISBN-10: 1444697013ISBN-13: 9781444697018Publisher: Stubbe...

The great poets of the past, we find in this book, deliver more wisdom about love and marriage than anyone writing today: Christian love without any Puritan undertow, love closer to the Romans than to the Victorians, love still represented by Eros - what...

Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( 30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936)was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his tales and poems ofBritish soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He...

Thomas Hooker, graduate and fellow of Cambridge, England, and practically founder of Connecticut, was born in 1586. He was dedicated to the ministry, and began his activities in 1620 by taking a small parish in Surrey. He did not, however, attract much notice for...