Literary Criticism - General

This comprehensive comparative approach to the folklore, fantasy, and horror literature of New England stretches from the earliest European exploration to Stephen King, John Updike, and Shirley Jackson. Along the way it examines the Puritan witch trials as examined by Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, H.P....

Dominated by Darwinism and the numerous guises it assumed, evolutionary theory was a source of opportunities and difficulties for late Victorian novelists. Texts produced by Wells, Hardy, Stoker, and Conrad are exemplary in reflecting and participating in these challenges. Not only do they contend...

Historiography can be a daunting term for those not familiar with it. This book presents the key ideas behind the term, in a clear and accessible fashion. The opening chapters introduce the reader to the practices that characterise the subject, while the final chapters...

In this study Karen Lawrence presents Joyce's Ulysses as it evolves through radical changes of style. She traces the abandonment of a narrative norm for a series of rhetorical masks, regarded as conscious aesthetic experiments, and considers the theoretical implication of this process, for...

"A clear and straightforward discussion of the ways in which literatures and their comparative study must depend upon the problematics of interpersonal and other relations. . . . This study will prove as useful as it is wide-ranging, and indeed, comparative in the good...

Post-Petrarchism offers a theoretical study of lyric poetry through one of its most long-lived and widely practiced models: the lyric sequence, originated by Francis Petrarch in his Canzoniere of the late fourteenth century. A framework in which poems are suspended according to some organizing...

In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the...

Renunciation as a creative force in the careers of writers, philosophers, and artists is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock's new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of...

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres,...

Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a...

From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this...

Children in the Holocaust and World War II is an extraordinary, unprecedented anthology of diaries written by children all across Nazi-occupied Europe and in England.Twenty-three young people, ages ten through eighteen, recount in vivid detail the horrors they lived through. As powerful as The...

In his introduction to this volume, President Jimmy Carter writes that The Best American Spiritual Writing "approaches the writing of both poetry and prose as a spiritual discipline, a way to explore the mysteries of the soul and the soul's relationship with God." As...

With backbreaking work in a ramshackle lab in Paris, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre achieve a revolutionary understanding of radiation and share a Nobel Prize. When her beloved Pierre dies in an accident, Marie is plunged into depression. Paul Langevin, fleeing an unhappy...

Cicero was one of classical antiquity's most prolific, varied and self-revealing authors. His letters, speeches, treatises and poetry chart a political career marked by personal struggle and failure and the collapse of the republican system of government to which he was intellectually and emotionally...

Book XXII recounts the climax of the Iliad: the fatal encounter between the main defender of Troy and the greatest warrior of the Greeks, which results in the death of Hector and Achilles' revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus; but at the...

Chekhov is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential literary figures of modern times. Russia's preeminent playwright, he played a significant role in revolutionizing the modern theatre. His impact on prose fiction writing is incalculable: he helped define the modern short story. Beginning...

The Dīvāni Shamsi Tabrīz is a masterpiece of Persian literature and a classic work in the history of Sūfiism. With his Masnavī it is one of the key writings of the renowned mystic poet Jalālu 'ddīn Rūmī (1207-1273). Professor Nicholson's English translation of selected...

As one of the most influential and popular genres of the last three decades, rap has cultivated a mainstream audience and become a multimillion-dollar industry by promoting highly visible and often controversial representations of blackness. Sounding Race in Rap Songs argues that rap music...

Remembering Hiroshima, the city obliterated by the world's first nuclear attack, has been a complicated and intensely politicized process, as we learn from Lisa Yoneyama's sensitive investigation of the "dialectics of memory." She explores unconventional texts and dimensions of culture involved in constituting Hiroshima...

This companion offers a wide-ranging introduction to the rapidly expanding field of translation studies, bringing together some of the best recent scholarship to present its most important current themes Features new work from well-known scholars Includes a broad range of geo-linguistic and theoretical perspectives...

Taking Picture Books Seriously: What can we learn about philosophy through children's books? This warm and charming volume casts a spell on adult readers as it unveils the surprisingly profound philosophical wisdom contained in children's picture books, from Dr Seuss's Sneetches to William Steig's...

From Instapoetry to BookTube, contemporary literary cultures and practices are increasingly intertwined with social media. In this lively and wide-ranging study, Bronwen Thomas explores how social media provides new ways of connecting with and rediscovering established literary works and authors while also facilitating the...

In 1895 the thirty-year-old W.B. Yeats, already established as one of Ireland's leading poets and folklorists, published this outstanding collection of Irish verse as part of his campaign to establish a tradition of Irish poetry fit for the dawn of a new age in...

Cognitive Poetics is a new way of thinking about literature, involving the application of cognitive linguistics and psychology to literary texts. This student-friendly book provides a set of case studies to help students understand the theory and master the practice of cognitive poetics in...

This study argues against vague interpretations of fantasy as mere escapism and seeks to define it as a distinct kind of narrative. A general theoretical section introduces recent work on fantasy, notably Tzventan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973)....

This book illuminates Jane Austen's exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists....

First published in 1980. Paradise Lost was once a favourite text for family reading; today it is confined to the educational system, which treats it as an object to be investigated rather than a subject that demands response. Professor Hunter writes inevitably for an...

In this thought-provoking book Lambert Wiesing asks simply: What is luxury? Drawing on a fascinating range of examples, he argues that luxury is an aesthetic experience. Unlike experience gained via the senses, such as seeing, hearing or tasting, he argues that luxury is achieved...

"The experiences provided in these 37 lessons parallel the readings and tasks recommended by the Common Core State Standards. The main difference is that our lessons put student curiosity and engagement first." --Harvey "Smokey" Daniels and Nancy Steineke In this highly anticipated follow-up to...

Divided into three parts, this brief, chronologically-organized, fully-integrated drama anthology offers a global emphasis and extensive critical and historical material of 23 indispensable plays. KEY TOPICS: No other anthology offers such a richly varied selection from the traditional Western canon, Asia, Africa, Latin America,...

In this brilliant new book, a preeminent literary thinker muses over the central question of how we can feel at home in the world, given that the world is independent of and indifferent to our wishes. Drawing on books and films, cultural history and...

Conspiracy theory as a theoretical framework has emerged only in the last twenty years; commentators are finding it a productive way to explain the actions and thoughts of individuals and societies. In this compelling exploration of Latin literature, Pag疣 uses conspiracy theory to illuminate...

Since the publication of his haunting, elegiac Goodbye to a River in 1960, John Graves has become one of Texas' most beloved writers, whose circle of loyal readers extends far beyond the borders of his home state. A "regional" writer only by virtue of...

In A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke argues that the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. He proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language. The book also offers readings of...

Narrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. We experience narrative in words, pictures, and film, yet regardless of how the tale is told, story...

Twenty-five years after her death, we are still coming to terms with the controversial figure of Hannah Arendt. Interlacing the life and work of this seminal twentieth-century philosopher, Julia Kristeva provides us with an elegant, sophisticated biography brimming with historical and philosophical insight. Centering...

Is there a "female Bildungsroman"? Can the story of Elizabeth Bennet's development be yoked to a genre conceived in terms of Wilhelm Meister and David Copperfield? Unbecoming Women unpacks the ideological baggage of the Bildungsroman, and turns to novels of development and conduct books...

Chow situates contemporary Chinese film within the broad context of Chinese history and culture, giving readers a glimpse of the unique shared identity that characterizes the current crop of outstanding filmmakers, such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.Author: Rey ChowISBN-10: 0231076835ISBN-13: 9780231076838Publisher: Columbia University...

The contributors to this volume explore the impact of D.W. Winnicott's psychoanalytical theories, focusing on the relevance of his independent version of object relations theory to psychoanalytical literary criticism.Author: Peter L. RudnytskyISBN-10: 0231075731ISBN-13: 9780231075732Publisher: Columbia University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/27/1994Pages: 315Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.00lbsSize: 9.00h x...

When first published in France in 1984, Le surrealisme was widely acclaimed as the definitive survey of the surrealist movement. Clearly and elegantly translated, Surrealism is now the premiere English-language study of the literary and artistic movement whose revolutionary goals and accomplishments continue to...

One type of analysis cannot fit every play, nor does one method of interpretation suit every theatre artist or collaborative team. This is the first text to combine traditional and non-traditional models, giving students a range of tools with which to approach different kinds...

Art of Darkness is an ambitious attempt to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama, and verse--including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Freud's...

Almost thirty years ago, W. J. T. Mitchell's Iconology helped launch the interdisciplinary study of visual media, now a central feature of the humanities. Along with his subsequent Picture Theory and What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell's now-classic work introduced such ideas as the pictorial...

We often think of sleep as mere stasis, a pause button we press at the end of each day. Yet sleep is full of untold mysteries--eluding us when we seek it too fervently, throwing us into surreal dream worlds when we don't, sometimes even...

The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? Lydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the political history of digital writing and...

The term "network" is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word's ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with...

Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cross-species communication...

First published in 1959, Surrealism remains the most readable introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to...

"Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon," wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by...