Literary Criticism - General

Offering a fresh perspective on the gothic novel in America, this vigorous study engages the underlying currents that define American culture as one of consumption. It rereads texts that range from Hawthorne, Poe, James, and Faulkner to the contemporary gothic novels of Toni Morrison,...

Elements of popular culture, such as literature and films, are major industries. If scholars are to fully understand how popular culture evolves and functions, techniques for dealing with the impact of business need to be factored into the analysis. Using the history of the...

Conversations with Robertson Davies is a long overdue anthology of interviews with Canada's most respected literary figure. Journalist, essayist, reviewer, playwright, and novelist, Robertson Davies has not only been a leading figure in Canadian literature since World War II, but, since the publication of...

The first white South African novelist to win international recognition, Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was also known for her political and social treatises, which promoted feminism, socialism, pacifism, and free thought and which criticized racism and British imperialism.Author: Joyce Avrech BerkmanISBN-10: 0870238361ISBN-13: 9780870238369Publisher: University of...

This book reflects many of the concerns found in Decolonising the Mind and Moving the Centre. Ngugi has put together a new collection under an old title, rewriting most of the pieces that appeared in the original 1981 edition, and adding completely new essays,...

Analysis of the writings of Chinua Achebe aimed at students of literature. Simon Gikandi has set out to reveal '...the very nature of [Achebe's] creativity, its prodigious complexity and richness...its paradoxes and ambiguities. This is scholarship of real stature and supersedes all other studies...

Examines the war in Sierra Leone as a crisis of modernity. Do small wars in Africa manifest a 'new barbarism'? What appears as random, anarchic violence is no such thing. The terrifying military methods of of Sierra Leone's soldiers may not fir conventional western...

Ordinary Enchantments investigates magical realism as the most important trend in contemporary international fiction, defines its characteristics and narrative techniques, and proposes a new theory to explain its significance. In the most comprehensive critical treatment of this literary mode to date, Wendy B. Faris...

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the finest and most accomplished contemporary writers of his generation. The short story author, television writer and novelist, included twice in Grantas list of Best Young British Writers, has over the past twenty-five years produced a body of work...

Tom Stoppard is widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary British playwrights, a writer who has earned an intriguing mix of both critical and commercial success. Arcadia is considered by many critics to be Stoppard's masterpiece, a work that weds his love for...

Blasted has been labelled as one of the landmark plays of post-war British theatre, achieving its iconic status and, indeed, its notoriety, very quickly. Sarah Kane's suicide in 1999 consolidated a process of singling-out that had begun four years earlier with the 'national outrage'...

John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman has become a modern classic but it is a complex novel and can be daunting to study. This accessible guide offers detailed readings of the text as well as accounts of Fowles's influences and the context...

The guide to Renaissance Literature and Culture provides students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context from 1533-1642, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background including religion, politics, exploration and visual culture - major writers and genres including Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe,...

This series covers texts of women writers whose work is being increasingly discussed in the study of the development of the 20th century and the Modernist movements of the 19th century, placing the works in their context.Author: Sally Ledger, George EgertonISBN-10: 082648185XISBN-13: 9780826481856Publisher: Continnuum-3PLLanguage:...

Plenty of people want to write poetry yet while it is not necessarily difficult to write poetry badly, it is harder to write it well. In this guide Fred Sedgwick explains - this numerous examples from successful poets - how the creative process works,...

Gathers selections from letters, essays, criticism, and autobiographies by Telemann, Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schuman, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, and Mahler.Author: James Steakley, Jost HermandISBN-10: 0826402933ISBN-13: 9780826402936Publisher: Continnuum-3PLLanguage: EnglishPublished: 01/01/1981Pages: 304Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.81lbsSize: 8.24h x 5.54w x 0.84d

It is said that words are like people: One can encounter them daily yet never come to know their true selves. This volume examines what words are--how they exist--in religious phenomena. Going beyond the common idea that language merely describes states of mind, beliefs,...

"Pagan life seduces me a little more with each passing day. If it were possible today, I would change my religion and would joyfully embrace poetic paganism," wrote the Armenian poet Daniel Varuzhan in 1908. During the seven years that remained in his life,...

The first edition of this extremely popular two volume Greek text has been successfully adopted in many high schools and colleges; the organization and approach used by the authors, make it an equally effective tool for those who would enjoy learning the language on...

In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects...

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel...

Developing a model of narrative based on game theory, Thomas Leitch offers a compelling new explanation for the distinctiveness and power of Hitchcock's films. Games such as the director's famous cameo appearances, the author says, allow the audience simultaneously to immerse itself in the...

From Edouard Manet to T. S. Eliot to Jim Morrison, the reach of Charles Baudelaire's influence is beyond estimation. In this prize-winning translation of his no-longer-neglected masterpiece, Baudelaire offers a singular view of 1850s Paris. Evoking a m lange of reactions, these fifty "fables...

First study of disaster movies through reception theory and queer theory.Dying for a Laugh looks at the evolution of the contemporary disaster film from the 1970s to the present. Ken Feil argues that contemporary camp culture has influenced and reformed the conventions of the...

At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping-from falling asleep and waking up, to drowsiness and insomnia, to states in which sleeping and waking mix. Delving into philosophy as well...

Diversity can be a rich source of possibility and opportunity in early childhood education. Appreciating that learning and development are shaped by culture and context, history and values, the diversity of cases found in this volume provide a useful tension in considering one's own...

A deeply reflective work, written by a number of eminent scholars both Jewish and Christian who represent a variety of disciplines and perspectives, this book explores basic issues in Wiesel's work -the nature of God, madness, silence, horror, and hope. With essays by such...

The skies darken for the exiles, who have taken refuge in forest hermitages. First one demon, then another, attempts to harm or corrupt them. When these efforts fail, an army of demons is sent, and then a bigger one, but each time Rama again...

One of literature's greatest gifts is its portrayal of realistically drawn characters--human beings in whom we can recognize motivations and emotions. In Imagined Human Beings, Bernard J. Paris explores the inner conflicts of some of literature's most famous characters, using Karen Horney's psychoanalytic theories...

Most Americans think of Betsy Ross as she was depicted in Charles Weisberger's popular painting The Birth of Our Nation's Flag--a motherly figure, sewing at the hearth. In fact, as Jo Ann Menezes's analysis in Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism points out, Ross was a...

"A sensitive, intelligent book."--Sander L. Gilman, Professor of Humane Studies, Cornell University How is AIDS treated in the contemporary plays of Larry Kramer and William Hoffman? How important is the Black Death to a reader of Boccaccio's Decameron? How have the historical and current...

Examines director Jacques Demy's use of the fairy tale as a means to explore issues of gender, sexuality, and class. To the uninitiated, the films of French New Wave director Jacques Demy can seem strange and even laughable, with their gaudy color schemes and...

A graceful, deeply meditative debut from Kawita Kandpal. Folding a River, a collection of elegies, shows a pleasing range of free-verse forms that develop themes sustained throughout: loss, exile, myth, landscape. Kawita Kandpal's poems are explorations of East-West cultures, taking her into an emo-mythic...

Somewhere near the beginning of this incisive critical study of perhaps the most elusive and, to some minds, structurally disordered of living writers, Molly Hite notes that the idea of order has always fascinated novelists. She attributes this to the genre's being a hybrid,...

Narrative Causalities offers both an argument and a methodology. The argument is that interpretations of the consequences and causes of events are contextual and that narratives, by determining the context in which events are perceived, shape interpretations. The methodology, on which the argument is...

In this volume, an international group of contributors presents new perspectives on narrative. Using David Herman's 1999 definition of "postclassical narratology" from Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (OSUP) as their launching point, these eleven essayists explore the various ways in which new approaches...

Matters of Fact examines what happens when writers and readers encounter texts presented as nonfiction: texts that make some truth claim on outside experience, texts whose characters and events have at least some tangible dimension outside the written word. The current critical climate blurs...

At some point in their career, nearly all the dancers who worked with George Balanchine were told "don't act, dear; just dance." The dancers understood this as a warning against melodramatic over-interpretation and an assurance that they had all the tools they needed to...

Though she died penniless and forgotten, Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized as a major figure in African American literature. Best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she also published numerous short stories and essays, three other novels, and two...

The humble ballad, defined in 1728 as "a song commonly sung up and down the streets," was widely used in elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond. Authors ranging from John Gay to William Blake to Felicia Hemans incorporated the seemingly incongruous genre...

As the study of literature has extended to cultural contexts, critics have developed a language all their own. Yet, argues Mark Bauerlein, scholars of literature today are so unskilled in pertinent sociohistorical methods that they compensate by adopting cliches and catchphrases that serve as...

Being and God argues that defensible philosophical theorization concerning the topic "God" is both possible and necessary within the framework of an adequate systematic philosophy--which must include a theory of Being--but is not possible in the absence of such a framework. The book provides...

A study of the decadent literary movements in England and France, focusing upon such poets and authors as Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.Author: Brian StablefordISBN-10: 0809509083ISBN-13: 9780809509089Publisher: Wildside PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/30/2008Pages: 160Format: HardcoverWeight: 0.78lbsSize: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.50d

While Howard Phillips Lovecraft was closing the final chapter of his writing career, Fritz Reuter Leiber was only beginning to open his own. The year was 1936 and Jonquil Leiber, Fritz's first wife, sent a letter on her own initiative to Lovecraft, knowing that...

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The Mediterranean is the meeting point of three continents--Asia, Africa, and Europe--as well as three major monotheistic religions--Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Focusing on global networks and cultural exchanges, Mediterranean Passages collects writings from across 3,000 years to provide a pan-Mediterranean perspective of the cultural,...

Few spaces remain as central to American consciousness as the western frontier. The vast territory, which for generations fueled the desires and conquests of artists, philosophers, and politicians alike, now offers new discoveries in Richard Lehan's Quest West. Through an intellectual and cultural history...

Regionalism often evokes provinciality and an affiliation with minor literary genres, but Robert Jackson shows that region is an integral part of American identity, providing grounding for major independent voices. Jackson offers a new critical model of region that contributes to literary and cultural...

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1993 An unconventional spiritual autobiography, told in a remarkable, outspoken voice and rooted in the messy realities and questions--the 'ordinary time'--of one woman's life, from infidelity to living with multiple sclerosis, to death, to renewing...

"Secrets of the Universe" ranges from an autobiographical tour-de-force that describes a childhood spent with an alcoholic father to 'Looking at Women, ' a reflection on male yearning and confusion, to a look at the place-or absence-of nature in recent American fiction.Author: Scott Russell...