Literature: history and criticism Books

A collection of four stories of the supernatural by early twentieth-century medievalist and antiquarian M. R. James, exemplifying how James redefined the ghost story and how his connection to academia, antiquities, and medievalism inspired and informed...

In March 1917, Book 4 the willing and unwilling participants of the Russian Revolution try to make sense of their next steps amidst unraveling chaos. One of the masterpieces of world literature, The Red Wheel is Nobel prize-winner Aleksandr...

J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is not only a seemingly inexhaustible source of wonder and excitement, it is also a profound tale, relevant to our times and to the vital question: what is it to be a human being? Why have these books proved so...

Originally published in 1925 with two purposes in mind: to provide a collection of material to prepare students to read ordinary medieval Latin texts and, to meet the need of advanced students by furnishing an anthology of medieval Latin prose and...

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has...

The superheroes from DC and Marvel comics are some of the most iconic characters in popular culture today. But how do these figures idealize certain gender roles, body types, sexualities, and racial identities at the expense of others? Hot Pants and...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In this poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious green warrior. In...

W. H. Davies (1871 - 1940) was popularly though reductively known as the 'tramp-poet' due to his remarkable journey from vagrancy, in Britain and the United States, to considerable literary success. 'Discovered' in part by Edward Thomas, who admired his...

The autobiography Nancy Mitford intended to write herself

The Contemporary Leonard Cohen is an exciting new study that offers an original explanation of Leonard Cohen's staying power and his various positions in music, literature, and art. The death of Leonard Cohen received media attention across the globe,...

The most up-to-date and unified study of critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver In Understanding Barbara Kingsolver, Ian Tan situates Kingsolver's oeuvre in an ecocritical and ecofeminist context and argues that her work puts...

Explores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare...

A timely, accessible introduction to Margaret Atwood's most recent novels and enduring themes.In 2017, the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale introduced the acclaimed and bestselling Canadian author to a new generation and reminded...

Understanding Jennifer Egan is the first book-length study of the novelist, short-story writer, and journalist best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Alexander Moran examines each of Egan's varied published works,...

Best known for her Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which were adapted into the BBC television series Case Histories, Kate Atkinson is the author of eleven novels, two plays, and a collection of short stories. Her literary awards include the...

Some of the greatest writers in the history of the art-Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jerzy Kosinski, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf-all chose to silence themselves by suicide, leaving their families and friends with heartbreak and the...

Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling...

In 1943, Charlotte Delbo and 229 other women were deported to a station with no name, which they later learned was Auschwitz. Arrested for resisting the Nazi occupation of Paris, Delbo was sent to the camps, enduring both Auschwitz and RavensbrUEck for...

What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot."" Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write ""the other...

The publishing phenomenon of summer reading, often focused on novels set in vacation destinations, started in the nineteenth century, as both print culture and tourist culture expanded in the United States. As an emerging middle class increasingly...

During the Cold War, determined translators and publishers based in the Soviet Union worked together to increase the number of foreign literary texts available in Russian, despite fluctuating government restrictions. Based on extensive interviews with...

From 1890 to 1960, some of Anglo-America's most heated cultural contests over books, sex, and censorship were staged not at home, but abroad in the City of Light. Paris, with its extraordinary liberties of expression, became a special place for...

By late 1916, Rudolf Steiner had become an important interpreter of Goethe and frequently discussed Faust--probably Goethe's greatest work--from the perspective of anthroposophic Spiritual Science. Although Steiner's readings are unconventional and...

At Home Abroad brings attention to a little known period in the career of America's most notable humorist. It follows the writer-performer Down Under on a journey through thirty lectures in colonial Australia and New Zealand. This appealing book is a...

Thanks to the success of franchises such as The Hunger Games and Twilight, young adult literature has reached a new level of prominence and popularity. Teens and adults alike are drawn to the genre's coming-of-age themes, fast pacing, and vivid emotional...

A darkly alluring plant family and the arrival of modernity Victorian Nightshades tells the story of how one plant family-notorious for centuries in England because of its frequently psychoactive and poisonous properties-rose to social and economic...

I Am Alive (Je suis vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars's latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and...

I Am Alive (Je suis vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars's latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and...

Best known by her stage name, La Goulue (the Glutton), Louise Weber was one of the biggest stars of fin de siecle Paris, renowned as a cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge. The subject of numerous paintings and photographs, she became an iconic figure of...

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package,...

How do we understand memory in the early novel? Departing from traditional empiricist conceptualizations of remembering, Mind over Matter uncovers a social model of memory in Enlightenment fiction that is fluid and evolving - one that has the capacity to...

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Frances best foreign book of the year. In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the...

The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation's most acclaimed writers. From the city's founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice...

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the Western world and most certainly its greatest playwright. His actual relationship to Western civilization has not, however, been thoroughly investigated. At a time when that...

Known as a distinctly English author, D.H. Lawrence is reevaluated as a creator and critic of American literature in this imaginative study. From 1922 to 1925, during his "savage pilgrimage" in Mexico and New Mexico, D.H. Lawrence completed the core of...

One of the twentieth century's most intriguing and complicated literary friendships was that between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In death, their reputations have reversed, but in the early 1940s Rawlings had already achieved wild...

Driven by a dual analysis, Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain looks at French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) in Spain--his more or less direct influence on Spanish letters--and also at Bergsonism in Spain--the more indirect resonance with his...

Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. Gordon Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern...

From the authors of the popular blog and resource for teachers, The Classroom Bookshelf, this book offers a framework and teaching ideas for using recently released children's and young adult literature to build a culture of inquiry and engagement from a...

Prudentius (b. 348 c.e.), one of the greatest Latin poets of late antiquity, was also a devoted Christian. His allegorical masterpiece, Psychomachia, combines epic language and theological speculation to offer a powerful vision of Roman and Christian...

Preaching Magazine Book of the Year (2022) Hearts & Minds Best Books List (2022) Christianity Today Award of Merit in Church & Pastoral Leadership (2023) It's time to give pastors permission to read books besides the Bible. Six months into his first...

How do the arts in worship form individuals and communities? Every choice of art in worship opens up and closes down possibilities for the formation of our humanity. Every practice of music, every decision about language, every use of our bodies, every...

No single figure has been featured with greater frequency in Western art than Jesus Christ. Sculptures, particularly - though they have received less notice than paintings - provide some of the most moving representations in their capacity to show Christ...

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century.Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser...

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism has become the indispensable resource for scholars and students of literary theory and discourse. The long-awaited second edition includes 48 new entries and subentries and has been revised...

Can computer games be great literature? Do the rapidly evolving and culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the narrative mode of discourse--novels, films, television series--is losing its dominant position in our culture? Is it...

When it was first published, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge proved to be a seminal work in the psychoanalytic study of Faulkner's fiction, especially of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This softcover reissue of John Irwin's...

Because traumatic events are unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognizable as truth. Such experiences are best understood not only through the straightforward acquisition of facts but through...