Literary Criticism - General

Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama reimagines the content and continuities of theater history and exposes underlying dialogues between "home and homelessness, belonging and exile"--a century-long struggle with the meaning and power of place, which the author terms "geopathology." By reading canonical works...

First Published in 1979. This volume includes simple and systematic introduction to the more important post-war English poets. Including reviews of the poetry of Larkin, Tomlinson, Gunn, Hughes, Plath, Heaney and more. This work will appeal to A-level students, undergraduates, members of adult education...

This enduringly popular book has become a classic in the expanding and increasingly popular field of Gothic Studies. This long awaited new edition contains a new chapter on 'Contemporary Gothic', an expanded section on American Gothic and more discussion of the gothic in women's...

The term 'lyric' has evolved, been revised, redefined and contested over the centuries. In this fascinating introduction, Scott Brewster: traces the history of the term from its classical origins through the early modern, Romantic and Victorian periods and up to the twenty-first century demonstrates...

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 brilliant and bold. Dancing...

This indispensable volume provides a complete course on Latin erotic elegy, allowing students to trace a coherent narrative of the genre's rise and fall, and to understand its relationship to the changes that marked the collapse of the Roman republic, and the founding of...

This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was...

There's really no literal translation of "Qui駻eme;" it's in between "like me{ and "love me" but, unlike in English, the verb does all the work--it's all in one word: a command packed with feeling; a want; a little ball full of longing. And that's...

Literary Nonfiction. Sports Memoir. Edited by Michael Shields. THE BOUNCE AND THE ECHO is a memoir enriched by the enthralling history of the sport of basketball, from its inception unto its current state. It is the story of one person's attempt to discover himself...

Eldritch . . . cacodaemoniacal . . . lucubration . . . Have you ever wondered about the meaning of these and other esoteric words used by Lovecraft and his colleagues? In this immense dictionary, the product of years of scholarship and research, Dan...

"In ABSENCE WHERE AS, Nathanael reads the unread book, 'the book that comes' to us nevertheless, that haunts and hovers unopened and dreamt, proceeding from the Ecrits of the visionary and revolutionary artist-activist Claude Cahun, to life's library. Through this constellatory essay in the...

This guide to Victorian Literature and Culture provides students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context from 1837-1900, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background including politics and economics, popular culture, philosophy - major writers and genres including the Brontes, Dickens,...

A landmark collection of essays on the intersections of visual art, cultural studies, and environmental history in America. Issues of ecology--both as they appear in the works of nature writers and in the works of literary writers for whom place and the land are...

An 1830s African-American slave narrative written in Arabic. Dafydd Morgan, the only American immigrant novel published in Welsh. The Native American epic, Walum Olum, in the Lenape language. Theodor Adorno's dream transcripts, in German. A short story about the politics of abortion in working-class...

Sanskrit Messenger poems evoke the pain of separated sweethearts through the formula of an estranged lover pleading with a messenger to take a message to his or her beloved. The plea includes a lyrical description of the route the messenger will take and the...

Narrative theory has always been centrally concerned with fiction, yet it has tended to treat fictions as if they were merely the framed or disowned equivalents of nonfictional narratives. A rhetorical perspective upon fictionality, however, sees it as a direct way of meaning and...

In the tradition of Wendell Berry and John McPhee, Donald McCaig wites with a powerful sense of place, and of history of Virginia's Highland County, in An American Homeplace. On the fast track in the New York advertising world, McCaig gave it all up...

From his cult classic television series Twin Peaks to his most recent film Inland Empire (2006), David Lynch is best known for his unorthodox narrative style. An award-winning director, producer, and writer, Lynch distorts and disrupts traditional storylines and offers viewers a surreal, often...

Gottfried Benn (1886-1957) occupies a position in modern German literature often compared to that of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in English. This volume presents a comprehensive anthology of the author's finest work-poetry (with the German originals en face), short stories, a scene...

Jazz can be uplifting, stimulating, sensual, and spiritual. Yet when writers turn to this form of music, they almost always imagine it in terms of loneliness. In Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Sam V. H. Reese investigates literary representations of jazz and the...

Scheherazade's Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book's metamorphoses on...

This issue of Beatdom takes a look at the tricky topic of Religion, examining the role belief played in the lives and literature of the Beat Generation. From Kerouac's back-and-forth between Catholicism and Buddhism, to William S. Burroughs obsession with Scientology, Beatdom brings you...

This early volume of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It is a reference book containing definitions of phrases and figures, whether mythical or historical. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating...

A comprehensive history-and controversial reappraisal-of the world's most popular and innovative literary form. Author: Steven MooreISBN-10: 1441145478ISBN-13: 9781441145475Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLCLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/27/2011Pages: 704Format: PaperbackWeight: 2.14lbsSize: 8.81h x 5.68w x 1.86d

Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential texts in nineteenth-century German philosophy. The text provides an avenue through which to introduce and explore a rich assortment of philosophical themes and questions, and...

In his beloved story The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien takes readers into a world unlike any other, yet so much seems familiar. As Bilbo journeys there and back again, glimpses of the spiritual are seen. The Christian World of The Hobbit does what no book...

Composed by Alfred Tennyson as a requiem for his college friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1833, "In Memoriam A. H. H." is a poem written over a seventeen year period and completed in 1849. Widely considered as...

"Were it not for the Buddhadharma, says Charles Johnson in his preface to Turning the Wheel, "I'm convinced that, as a black American and an artist, I would not have been able to successfully negotiate my last half century of life in this country....

Combine elements of Bob Marley, Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba you get a sense of the power of the world's wildest rockstar. Fela created Afrobeat, an infectious mix of American funk and jazz with traditional Yoruba and highlife music, and used it to rail...

A pioneering ethnobotanist, Gary Paul Nabhan credits the arts with sparking unlikely scientific breakthroughs and believes that such "cross-pollination" engenders new forms of expression that are essential to discovery. In this highly readable book, he tells four stories to illustrate this idea. In the...

Florida served as one of the great meeting grounds of the planet, a place where peoples from Indian America, Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and Europe converged. This book features essays in both Spanish and English on the influence of the Spanish in Florida...

The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller "Sacred Games" about the surprising overlap between writing and computer codingVikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first...

Lilith is considered among the darkest of MacDonald's works, and among the most profound. It is a story concerning the nature of life, death, and salvation. In the story, MacDonald mentions a cosmic sleep that heals tortured souls, preceding the salvation of all. MacDonald...

The Discourses of EpictetusWith the Encheiridion - A SelectionTranslated by George LongThe Discourses of Epictetus are a series of extracts of the teachings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus written down by Arrian c. 108 AD. There were originally eight books, but only four now...

The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible is a volume of poems divided into three parts. The three parts are bound together by a brace of persistent and developing themes, as well as by the repetition (and the development) of language, metaphor, and imagery. Part 1 presents...

Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg is a collection of classic rural American poetry. "I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan. Here the water...

Thinking is much broader than what our science-obsessed, utilitarian culture often takes it to be. More than mere problem solving or the methodical comprehension of our personal and natural circumstances, thinking may take the form of a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a museum...

Four thousand years ago, Egyptian society struggled with the downfall of the Old Kingdom, which brought an end to material success and introduced anarchy and chaos. Out of this period of crisis came such literature as A Dialogue between a Man and His Ba,...

In Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies, authors Shelley Ingram, Willow G. Mullins, and Todd Richardson talk about things folklorists don't usually talk about. They ponder the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever they...

Masks in Horror Cinema explores the endurance of the mask in this genre. As a transformative device, masks are approached historically and cross-culturally to examine how masked rituals intersect with power, ideology and identity. The power of the mask evolves in horror movies, reflecting...

Historical memory emerges through dialogue between one generation and the next. But what happens to this dialogue if the children speak a different language to their parents? Literary autobiography offers a space to explore the potential forms of memory in the aftermath of inter-generational...

Why did W.B. Yeats want a hair from the head of Aleister Crowley, and how did the artist Althea Gyles get it for him? What was the terrible lesson learned by scholar and demonologist the Reverend Montague Summers? Why was Sherlock Holmes reticent about...

In Haunted by Books Mark Valentine explores the more curious byways of literature. He presents the author who was always being told he had nearly written a masterpiece, and the genius of the short story who brewed his own cider and lived in a...

Desert environment leaves its stark impress upon plants, animals, and men. And Ross Calvin tells the beautifully strange story of New Mexico-its ancient culture, the coming of the Spanish friars, the Spanish occupation, pueblo life, the Apaches and their long warfare with the whites,...

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you'd do best to hone your chops and avoid clich s (like the one that begins this sentence) by learning from the prime movers. How to Write About Music offers a selection of the best...

Mongolian proverbs reveal important values, while at the same time concealing them. They show the honorable destiny that comes with a good name and the shameful future connected with a bad reputation, assuring a promising future for those who keep Mongolian traditions and customs...

Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of...

Despite being born into slavery, Greco-Roman philosopher Epictetus became one of the most influential thinkers of his time. The Discourses of Epictetus are a series of extracts of the teachings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. No writings of Epictetus himself are known. His discourses...

In this first of her plays for religious broadcasting, a nativity play, Dorothy L. Sayers wanted to convince listeners of the truth that Christ was born into our deeply problematic world, in his case, in territory overrun by an army of occupation. Although framed...

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Yearning for acceptance from her Italian-speaking mother-in-law, Bea Tusiani's stories offer a glimpse into the struggle of generations. From Bushwick, Brooklyn in the 1950's to her mother-in-law's kitchen in the Bronx, Tusiani shows how two women who loved the same man,...