Literary Criticism - General

Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 2016 Essay Collection Competition. Growing up queer in Florida in the 1980s, James Allen Hall's life has taken him to places that high culture rarely treads. Losing their once-thriving family business in the pre-crash 2000s, his broke...

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. The original 2012 essay collection, redesigned and with four new essays by the author. LEGS GET LED ASTRAY is a provocative collection of essays that vividly rockets the reader through one woman's life. Caldwell's writing remarkably explores the...

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth....

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Edited by Geoffrey Babbitt and David Weiss. FIVE PLOTS is a debut essay collection by Erica Trabold, winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, selected by John D'Agata. FIVE PLOTS delves into notions of how we are shaped...

Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of writers took over the hard-boiled story (created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) and transformed it to fit the realities of their world-a universe infected by violence, greed, racism, sexism, war, and commercialism. Their protagonists, too,...

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...

"When Laurence Thompson's original Vietnamese Grammar first appeared in 1965, it went almost instantly to the top of the list of required reading for serious students of the Vietnamese language. It has stayed there ever since but, in recent years, the title has become...

Our most modern monster and perhaps our most American, the zombie that is so prevalent in popular culture today has its roots in African soul capture mythologies. The Transatlantic Zombie provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining...

Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superseding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the...

Neil Gaiman is the imaginative wizard behind the best-selling novels American Gods (soon to be an HBO series) and The Anansi Boys, the graphic series The Sandman, and popular children's books like Coraline and The Graveyard Book. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy looks at Gaiman's...

The vampire is one of the nineteenth century's most powerful surviving archetypes, owing largely to Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula, the Bram Stoker creation. Yet the figure of the vampire has undergone many transformations in recent years, thanks to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and...

Since 1977, The Wolfe Pack has published The Gazette, chockful of articles and tales of America's greatest sleuth, Nero Wolfe, who prefers beer and orchids to working at his West 35th Street brownstone. But thanks to Wolfe's wisecracking associate Archie Goodwin and his agent...

Short Fiction on Faith Luminous fiction on themes of faith and meaning from favorite writers, including Sandra Cisneros, Andre Dubus, Louise Erdrich, Stephen King, Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, E. M. Forster and others.Author: J. P. ManeyISBN-10: 0807083356ISBN-13: 9780807083352Publisher: Beacon PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/01/1998Pages: 338Format: PaperbackWeight:...

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, repeatedly expels literature from the...

This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature--namely, the postal system--determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding....

The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media--everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games--is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society....

The Family of Love charts a successful love intrigue between the cash-strapped Gerardine, and Maria, the sequestered niece of the mercenary Doctor Glister. Their romance unfolds against the dissection of two citizen marriages, the Glisters' and the Purges'. Mistress Purge attends Familist meetings independently,...

"Now and then," writes Lionel Trilling, "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's...

This fully annotated bilingual edition of Calligrammes makes available a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but also in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire--Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice--died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless,...

In attempting to answer the question posed by this book's title, Giorgio Agamben does not address the idea of philosophy itself. Rather, he turns to the apparently most insignificant of its components: the phonemes, letters, syllables, and words that come together to make up...

Anabasis is a classic Greek drama by the Greek writer, Xenophon. Anabasis is the most famous work, in seven books, of the Greek professional soldier and writer Xenophon. The journey it narrates is his best known accomplishment and "one of the great adventures in...

Reflections on Biography is intended for all readers of biography--lifelong or occasional, critical or casual--and is written by an award-winning biographer, Paula R. Backscheider. The author examines biography from many angles and gives a tour of the decisions biographers make and some of the...

This antiquarian volume contains Tryon Edwards's 1877 work; "The New Dictionary of Thoughts". It is a carefully compiled, intellectually edited, and properly arranged collection of quotes, maxims, and aphorisms. The book is designed as a tool for readers who are looking to broaden their...

There is a tradition of one-volume narrative histories of the United States in which the political, military, diplomatic, social, and economic strands are skillfully interwoven. Rather than add to these volumes, The Epic of America paints a sweeping picture of the diverse past that...

CONTENTS The Origin of the Sagas The Written Saga Historical Sagas relating to Iceland and Greenland Historical Sagas relating to Norway and other Northern Lands Mythical and Romantic Sagas Sagas from Latin Sources English Translations and other AidsAuthor: W. A. CraigieISBN-10: 141020748XISBN-13: 9781410207487Publisher: University...

Close reading is the most essential skill that literature students continue to develop across the full length of their studies. This book is the ideal guide to the practice, providing a methodology that can be used for poetry, novels, drama, and beyond. Using classic...

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Music. With a foreword by Devin Johnston and studio photographs by Moira Tarmy. Through the drawings and paintings included in DUET (WITH CHORUS), Brian Calvin explores arrangements of figures at once boldly simplified and subtly expressive. In doing so, he works...

Despite apparent interest in defining fran ais r gional since as early at the nineteenth century, we have been left wondering about the precise origins and changing nature of contemporary regional varieties of French, particularly in the south of France. Through an examination of...

Religious and secular communities ritualize some books in one, two, or three dimensions. They ritualize the dimension of semantic interpretation through teaching, preaching, and scholarly commentary. This dimension receives almost all the attention of academic scholars. Communities also ritualize a text's expressive dimension through...

In Memoriam, by world-renown poet Alfred Tennyson, is a requiem written for Tennyson's friend, Arthur, who died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage. While inspired by a tragic event, the work features some of Tennyson's most popular verse. The poem not only explores themes of...

In the course of nearly thirty years of work with patients in psychiatric hospitals and private practice, Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere have uncovered the ways in which transference and countertransference are affected by the experience of social catastrophe. Handed down from one generation...

"A vigorous case for the virtues of old-fashioned literary criticism."--New York Times Book Review In his first book, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, which was heralded by such diverse critics as Jacques Barzun and Morris Dickstein, Arthur Krystal demonstrated that the literary essay...

In this short, brilliant book, Viktor Shklovsky enunciates the function of the arts: what they are and, just as importantly, what they are not. In the course of defining what art is, by implication he also quietly lays to waste the theories and people...

Literary Nonfiction. Politics. Anarchism. An accessible discussion of the revolutionary mode of thought that rejects all forms of domination and seeks, in the words of Louise Michel, order through harmony. Francis Dupuis-D ri, a professor of political science and an anarchist, reveals through dialogue...

The early 1970s marked the beginning of Newfoundland's cultural renaissance. And in 1974, amidst the music, literature, and burgeoning patriotic pride, a young, upstart Reach for the Top team from Canada's newest province had eliminated competitors from across the country, setting the stage for...

The poems in Phases are as interested in the creeping penumbral edge of language as they are in the shadowy fact of faith. Playful experiments with form swing to the conceptual ring's apogee, while a colloquy across history and place center the proverbial orbit.Author:...

Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves is a classic fortune-telling guide by Cicely Kent. At no time in the history of the world has there been such earnest searching for light and knowledge in all matters relating to Psychic Phenomena as in the present day....

This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate...

Dennis Callaci's 100 Cassettes started life as an installation of 100 hand drawn/painted cassette covers for an installation at the dA Center for The Arts in Pomona, California. Six months after that installation, the book 100 Cassettes started being written in earnest. The book's...

The importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics In an age where our experiences are processed and filtered through a wide variety of mediums, both digital and physical, how do we tell our own story? How do we "get a life," make...

This book spotlights the Old Testament's "supporting cast," the vast array of nameless characters wedged in the margins of biblical stories. Often categorized as literary props or aspects of scenery, these anonymous figures ("laborers," "a creditor," "the crowd," "servants," "elders," "a midwife," etc.) frequently...

The Religion of the Ancient Celts is one of the best scholarly treatments of the ancient Celtic religion. Written early in the 20th Century, Religion of the Ancient Celts includes extensive treatment of that perennially fascinating subject, the Druids.Author: J. a. MacCullochISBN-10: 1849022712ISBN-13: 9781849022712Publisher:...

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Fearless, haunting, and transcendently honest, Amy Long's CODEPENDENCE is a memoir of pain and its paradoxes. Long documents her coming of age as an ambitious young writer plagued by chronic headache and entangled with a boyfriend's opioid addiction. The essays...

A flagbearer for the increasingly fashionable genre of "transnational history," Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is, first and foremost, a stunning example of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. Snyder's linguistic precocity allows him to cite evidence in 10 languages, putting fresh twists on the familiar...

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's 1974 paper 'Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases' is a landmark in the history of psychology. Though a mere seven pages long, it has helped reshape the study of human rationality, and had a particular impact on economics -...

Edmund Burke's 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments. Often cited as the foundational work of modern conservative political thought, Burke's Reflections is...

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be seen, without exaggeration, as a landmark text in intellectual history. In his analysis of shifts in scientific thinking, Kuhn questioned the prevailing view that science was an unbroken progression towards the truth. Progress was actually...

In 1935, 230 writers from 38 countries converged on Paris to consider ways of countering the fascist threat to culture. Held against a background of a rapidly changing political climate, the five-day congress attended by some of Europe's foremost writers -- Andr Gide, Andr...

Speaking of Wagner compiles in a new and highly accessible format celebrated author, lecturer, and Metropolitan Opera commentator William Berger's collection of talks and presentations about Richard Wagner, the most controversial, and perhaps the most widely influential, artist in history. These talks have been...

Love's Victory by Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651) is the first romantic comedy written in English by a woman. The Revels Plays publishes for the first time a fully-authorised, modern spelling edition of the Penshurst manuscript, the only copy of the play containing all five...