Literary Criticism - General

Using Key Passages to Understand Literature, Theory and Criticism is a completely fresh and innovative approach to teaching and learning literary theory: using short passages of theory to make sense of literary and cultural texts. It focuses on the key concepts that help readers...

There is a strong tradition of literary analyses of the musical artwork. Simply put, all musicology - any writing about music - is an attempt at making analogies between what happens within the world of sound and language itself. This study considers this analogy...

The Dunciad in Four Books of 1743 was the culmination of the series of Dunciads which Alexander Pope produced over the last decade and a half of his life. It comprises not only a poem, but also a mass of authorial annotation and appendices,...

Since publication over twenty years ago, The Translator's Invisibility has provoked debate and controversy within the field of translation and become a classic text. Providing a fascinating account of the history of translation from the seventeenth century to the present day, Venuti shows how...

This book is unique in offering practical advice on writing song lyrics within a critically informed framework. Part I provides the theoretical underpinning, while Part II covers the creative process, pulling together all the best songwriting advice and offering practical exercises. Fusing creative guidance...

The Language of Surrealism explores the revolutionary experiments in language and mind undertaken by the surrealists across Europe between the wars. Highly influential on the development of art, literary modernism, and current popular culture, surrealist style remains challenging, striking, resonant and thrilling - and...

The ideal accompaniment to any study of musical theatre, this lively textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the history, theory and practice of this popular theatre form. Bringing critical theory and musical theatre together, it focuses on a diverse range of key shows -...

The new edition of this highly popular guide, How to Read World Literature, addresses the unique challenges and joys faced when approaching the literature of other cultures and eras. Fully revised to address important developments in World Literature, and generously expanded with new material,...

The years 1830-1914 witnessed a revolution in the manufacture and use of books as great as that in the fifteenth century. Using new technology in printing, paper-making and binding, publishers worked with authors and illustrators to meet ever-growing and more varied demands from a...

This volume focuses on the time between the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557 and the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. Thirty-eight chapters reveal how printed texts interacted with oral and manuscript cultures during a period of religious divisions and civil...

As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home...

Whatever texts you're studying, this book will help you achieve top grades in A-level Literature. Featuring detailed analysis of a rich and eclectic mix of A-level texts, from 'King Lear' to 'Frankenstein' and 'The Great Gatsby', 'The Art of Writing English Literature Essays' covers...

If you're studying A-level or starting a degree in English Literature, our course companion will help you write better essays and achieve top grades. Including detailed analysis of a rich and eclectic mix of canonical A-level set texts - 'King Lear', 'Hamlet', 'Frankenstein', 'The...

From the author of Elegant Complexity comes a cogent analysis of David Foster Wallace's Oblivion. Nature's Nightmare is the first book of criticism devoted to Wallace's masterful story collection. Carlisle gives an in-depth narrative analysis of each story: "Mr. Squishy," "The Soul is Not...

This book seeks to explore how Barbara Pym subverts the discourse of the romance novel through her use of food, clothes, heroine and hero characterizations, and marriage customs.Author: TsagarisISBN-10: 0879727640ISBN-13: 9780879727642Publisher: University of Wisconsin PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 01/01/1998Pages: 196Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.65lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.00w x...

This collection of interviews reveals the intellectual and creative life of one of America's contemporary masters of fiction writing. In spanning his richly productive career, they convey a sense of his continuity and of his growth as a novelist. Roth has said that one...

William Apess was the first Native American's to fully, and publicly, speak out regarding the racism and unfair treatment that he and others endured. The author's writing is eloquently delivered, instilling the reader with a realistic framework of a political, historical, and personal mindset.Author:...

Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the...

Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language...

Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture.Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded...

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed...

In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of "world literature" and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern...

McCaffery interprets the works of three major writers of radically experimental fiction: Robert Coover; Donald Barthelme; and Willam H. Gass. The term \u201cmetafiction\u201d here refers to a strain in American writing where the self-concious approach to the art of fiction-making is a commentary on...

From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism...

Becoming Black is a powerful theorization of Black subjectivity throughout the African diaspora. In this unique comparative study, Michelle M. Wright discusses the commonalties and differences in how Black writers and thinkers from the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, France, Great Britain, and Germany...

This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies-in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to...

Exploring the complexities and significance of classical music todayIn Planet Beethoven, Mina Yang makes the compelling case that classical music in the twenty-first century is just as vibrant and relevant as ever--but with significant changes that give us insight into the major cultural shifts...

The first substantial collection of essays about the trickster since 1955 Mythical Trickster Figures, is the first substantial collection of essays about the trickster to appear since Radin's 1955 The Trickster. Contributions by leading scholars treat a wide range of manifestations of this mischievous...

Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Elizabeth Cowie looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms,...

In assessing this tumultuous period in American history, Stephanie A. Slocum-Schaffer provides readers with a visceral experience of the seventies and a comprehensive survey of the important events of the entire decade. Central to the book is the belief that the 1970s were a...

The king despairs of his idle sons, so he hires a learned brahmin who promises to make their lessons in statecraft unmissable. The lessons are disguised as short stories, featuring mainly animal protagonists. Many of these narratives have traveled across the world, and are...

Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding how space works in narrative and narrative theory and how narratives work in real space. Thus far, space has...

Committed to rigorous "close reading" and engagement with the "text itself" rather than information "extrinsic" to the text, John Crowe Ransom and a group of colleagues in the American South of the 1930s established a vanguard approach to literary criticism they called the "New...

Author: James PhelanISBN-10: 0814251625ISBN-13: 9780814251621Publisher: Ohio State University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/01/2007Pages: 272Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.88lbsSize: 9.01h x 5.99w x 0.71d

Katherine Anne Porter often spoke of her story "Flowering Judas" as the tale she liked best of all her stories because it came the nearest to what she meant it to be. It is the story of Laura, an idealistic woman, who travels to...

The Idea of Spatial Form contains the classic essay that introduced the concept of "spatial form" into literary discussion in 1945, and has since been accepted as one of the foundations for a theory of modern literature. It is here reprinted along with two...

What is it the legacy that humankind has been living with since 1945? We were once convinced that time was the agent of change. But in the past decade or two, our experience of time has been transformed. Technology preserves and inundates us with...

Memos from the Besieged City argues for the institutional and cultural relevance of literary study through foundational figures, from the 1200s to today, who defied precarious circumstances to make significant contributions to literacy and civilization in the face of infelicitous human acts. Focusing on...

Institution and Interpretation investigates the forces that shape and limit interpretive practices. Whereas the prevailing use of the term institutions tends to reduce their role to that of maintaining the status quo, Weber suggests that institutions are never entirely free of the need to...

A Stanford University Press classic.Author: Andrew HewittISBN-10: 0804726973ISBN-13: 9780804726979Publisher: Stanford University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/01/1996Pages: 232Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.64lbsSize: 8.46h x 5.56w x 0.61d

A Stanford University Press classic.Author: Sanford BudickISBN-10: 0804725616ISBN-13: 9780804725613Publisher: Stanford University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 01/01/1996Pages: 364Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.10lbsSize: 9.02h x 6.03w x 0.80d

African literatures, says volume editor Oyekan Owomoyela, "testify to the great and continuing impact of the colonizing project on the African universe." African writers must struggle constantly to define for themselves and other just what "Africa" is and who they are in a continent...

Alessandro Manzoni was a giant of nineteenth-century European literature whose I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1928) is ranked with War and Peace as marking the summit of the historical novel. Manzoni wrote "Del romanzo storico" ("On the Historical Novel") during the twenty years he...

Ever since American soldiers returned home after World War II with a passion for pâté and escargots instead of pork and beans, our preferences have moved from cooked to raw, from canned to fresh, from bland to savory, from water to wine. And guiding...

The fascinating and turbulent black America of the 1960s emerges in these essays, through the lenses of dissent and its contradictions. Gerald L. Early revisits this volatile time in American history, when class, culture, and race ignited conflagrations of bitterness and hatred across the...

After a lifetime spent writing and working on his family's cattle ranch outside of Helena, Montana, Ralph Beer has gathered his best magazine essays into one collection called In These Hills. In thirty-three essays he provides a moving and elegiac tribute to lives now...

Examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time.Author: Raymond FedermanISBN-10: 0791416801ISBN-13: 9780791416808Publisher: State University...

Hammer Film's is justly famous for Gothic horror but the company also excelled in the psychological thriller. Influenced by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Alfred Hitchcock, Hammer created its own approach to this genre in some of the company's very best films. This book takes a...

This book contains the complete poems in Hungarian and in English translation of Hungary's great modern poet, Miklos Radnoti, murdered at the age of 35 during the Holocaust. His earliest poems, the six books published during his lifetime, and the poems published posthumously after...

The Gothic mode, typically preoccupied by questions of difference and otherness, consistently imagines the Other as a source of grotesque horror. The sixteen critical essays in this collection examine the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other,...