Literary Criticism - General

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,...

Find the balance between tough love and tender love. In The Two Sides of Love, best-selling authors John Trent and Gary Smalley explain how to find a healthy balance between the protective, consistent, "hard side" of love and the tender, understanding, "soft side" of...

When Romantic Religion was first published thirty-five years ago, no one dreamed that Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia would one day be boxoffice hits and that their authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, would be household names. R.J. Reilly's remarkably...

Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. A call to trans men everywhere to embrace their personal journey of transition, MANNING UP brings together a wide range of voices, from young men to elders, to candidly share their journeys of transitioning to manhood. More than just the...

Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Women's Studies. Memoir. The wry and relatable narrator of GRAY IS THE NEW BLACK--a memoir of ageism, sexism and self-acceptance--came of age in the psychedelic sixties. Now in her sixties, it's time to take stock. After decades struggling to be...

For thousands of years, the Indian subcontinent has proved a fertile ground for the world's most captivating erotic love poetry, and the genius of its devotional writing harnesses great energy and mystical insight. It is in fact often hard to tell whether the poets...

Three fast-paced crime thrillers set in the streets of Mumbai. Mumbai, a city of dreams for many. But for others, a nightmare. Behind the faade of lustre and glamour churns a seething underbelly of squalor, corruption and crime. Mumbaistans three explosive crime novellas unravel...

Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: In the novel Jane Eyre, which was first published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë discusses various problems concerning marriage, which...

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, language: English, abstract: In the year 1975 the French feminist author Helene Cixous published an essay called "The Laugh of the Medusa". In it,...

PLEASE NOTE: This is a summary, analysis and review of the book and not the original book. In The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer who can Multiply Your Results authors Abramson, Dixon, Spenner, and Toman present a new method for sellers to...

Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003) emerged from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, though her tenure as an abstract painter was brief. By 1958, she had moved completely away from non-objective painting into figuration, a decision that would alter the course of her career. In addition...

Basil Bunting, one of the greatest modernist poets, had an extraordinary life. Born in the mining village of Scotswood in Tyneside in 1900, after a largely Quaker education, during which at the age of 13 he met the love of his life, he left...

Martin Buber's I and Thou argues that humans engage with the world in two ways. One is with the attitude of an 'I' towards an 'It', where the self stands apart from objects as items of experience or use. The other is with the...

In this book, Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde, Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In doing this, Sedgwick provides...

South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang used his 2003 work Kicking Away The Ladder to challenge the central orthodoxies of development economics, using his creative thinking skills to shine new light on an old topic. Creative thinkers are often distinguished by their willingness to challenge...

The modern vision of the world as one dominated by one or more superpowers begs the question of how best to understand the world-system that existed before the rise of the first modern powers. Janet Abu-Lughod's solution to this problem, in this highly influential...

American scholar Jared Diamond deploys his powers of interpretation to great effect in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which seeks to understand the meaning behind the available evidence describing societies that have survived and those that have withered and died. Why,...

Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay The Gift is an enduring classic of sociological and anthropological analysis by a thinker who is one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. The Gift exploits Mauss's high-level analytical and interpretative skills to produce a brilliant investigation of the...

David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character is one of the best-known books in the history of sociology - holding a mirror up to contemporary America and showing the nation its own character as it had never seen it...

Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements is one of the most widely read works of social psychology written in the 20th-century. It exemplifies the powers of creative thinking and critical analysis at their best, providing an insight into...

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is one of the most influential works of legal and political theory published since the Second World War. It provides a memorably well-constructed and sustained argument in favour of a new (social contract) version of the meaning of...

Leon Festinger's 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance is a key text in the history of psychology - one that made its author one of the most influential social psychologists of his time. It is also a prime example of how creative thinking and...

With his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, American psychologist Gordon Allport displays the crucial skill of reasoning, producing and organizing an argument that was persuasive enough to have a major impact not only in universities, but also on government policy. The question that...

How should rulers rule? What is the nature of power? These questions had already been asked when Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513. But what made his thinking on the topic different was his ability to interpret evidence: to look at old issues...

For 2,000 years, the standard philosophical model of knowledge was that it could be defined as a justified true belief. According to this way of thinking, we can know, for example, that we are human because [1] we believe ourselves to be human; [2]...

One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Alfred Crosby. His book...

Robert O. Keohane's After Hegemony is both a classic of international relations scholarship and an example of how creative thinking can help shed new light on the world. Since the end of World War II, the global political landscape had been dominated by two...

Clifford Geertz has been called 'the most original anthropologist of his generation' - and this reputation rests largely on the huge contributions to the methodology and approaches of anthropological interpretation that he outlined in The Interpretation of Cultures. The centrality of interpretative skills to...

Stanley Milgram is one of the most influential and widely-cited social psychologists of the twentieth century. Recognized as perhaps the most creative figure in his field, he is famous for crafting social-psychological experiments with an almost artistic sense of creative imagination - casting new...

Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is renowned for being one of the most challenging and important books in Western philosophy. Above all, it is famous for laying out a new approach to reasoning and philosophical argument, an approach that has been credited with influencing...

C. Wright Mills's 1959 book The Sociological Imagination is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of post-war sociology. At its heart, the work is a closely reasoned argument about the nature and aims of sociology, one that sets out a manifesto...

Discussion of the nature of Sumerian wisdom literature and complete editions of many Sumerian wisdom texts, including the Instructions of Shuruppak, Instructions of Ur-Ninurta, Counsels of Wisdom, Sumerian fables, Nothing Is of Value, Ballade of Early Rulers, and more. This unusual book describes the...

NOVALIS: HIS LIFE, THOUGHTS AND WORKS Translated and edited by M.J HopeEdited by Carol Appleby This book explores the life and works of Novalis; it includes a biography of Novalis by August Coelestin Just, a full version of Novalis' unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen,...

In the third volume, which is in many ways the most valuable and surprising, as modern selections tend to skimp the later Wordsworth, are the shorter poems composed between 1807 and 1820, including the Waterloo odes, the fourteen-book Prelude in the much improved text...

An authoritative survey of music and its context in the Renaissance. The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - the so-called Golden Age of Polyphony - represent a time of great change and development in European music, with the flourishing of Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina,...

On December 12th1948, Iris Murdoch wrote in her journal: One of my more fundamental assumptions is that I have the power to seduce anyone . Iris Murdoch is best known for her novels of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality and the power of...

On Good Friday, 1981, Rujen Keju and his two sons come face to face with their complicated inheritance--one that includes years of atomic testing and the continued military presence of the U.S. in the Pacific. In this highly original work of history and adventure,...

Read about the most dangerous man in the West; the poem written by a stuffed crocodile; the alchemist called the great-nephew to the Queen of Faerie; aesthetes, dandies, visionaries, antiquaries, fortune tellers and fakirs, forgotten writers and much more.Mark Valentine's third collection of essays...

If you read these essays, you will have the wisdom of the ages - the insights of Wilde, Austen, Milton, Shakespeare, Cavavfy, both Bront? and all the ancient Greeks. You will know how to dress, talk, organize, decorate and comport yourself in every possible...