Literature: history and criticism Books

This is Marjorie's sixth book with Coffee House. We're honored that a poet of her stature and influence is loyal to our press. She is truly an icon of experimental and modernist poetry. This collection engages deeply with the challenging legacy of Ezra...

For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent...

This groundbreaking work of scholarship explores convergences between performance and science through an investigation of new technologies that drive computer-mediated, interactive art. Wide-ranging and richly illustrated essays uncover shifts that have...

A reconsideration of Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking A Room of One's Own through a very modern lens, revisiting Woolf's now archaic politics and mining the text for lessons on how to be a writer. The central message of A Room of One's Own is that, to...

This is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990's in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction...

This book is a study of the literature and visual arts concerned with the many and diverse forms of slaveries produced by globalisation in Britain since the early 1990s. Starting from the sociological and political analyses of the issue, it...

This book is the first edited collection to focus on the work of contemporary author Hari Kunzru. It contains major new essays on each of his novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill as well as...

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett's work across the world following the author's death in 1989, Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts...

The heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of...

Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy's literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental...

This book investigates the troubled relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. Acknowledging that the medieval and medievalism are mutually constitutive, and that their texts can be read using similar strategies, it argues that medieval...

Winner of the Elma Dangerfield 2018Byron in Italy - Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet's 'last attachment' - forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet...

Shakespeare's London 1613 offers for the first time a comprehensive 'biography' of this crucial year in English history. The book examines political and cultural life in London, including the Jacobean court and the city, which together witnessed an...

This unique and exciting collection, inspired by the scholarship of literary critic Stephanie Trigg, offers cutting-edge responses to the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer for the current critical moment. The chapters are linked by the organic and naturally...

This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the five most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War period: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. It presents...

This man and music asks two central questions: what can literature contribute to the art of composition, and how can music influence the writer? Anthony Burgess, famed novelist, journalist, and composer, answers these questions and many more. As a person...

This book explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw, who from the Middle Ages to the present day has stood up for the values of natural law and true justice. Analysing the whole sequence of Robin Hood adventures, it begins with the medieval...

This edition presents a thoroughly reconsidered text based on collation of all known copies of the 1608 quarto (including material unnoticed by earlier editors). Textual analysis draws on detailed internal investigation and the printer's wider practice...

This book deals with Shakespeare's role in contemporary culture. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare's plays inform modern ideas of cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. It is unique in using social...

She-wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a...

This ground-breaking book provides an abundance of fresh insights into Shakespeare's life in relation to his lost family home, New Place. The findings of a major archaeological excavation encourage us to think again about what New Place meant to...

Some of the most compelling and enduring creative work of the late Victorian and Edwardian Era came from committed imperialists and conservatives. Their continuing popularity owes a great deal to the way their guiding ideas resonated with modernism in...

Before the idea of the Anthropocene, there was the angry planet How might we understand an earthquake as a complaint, or erosion as a form of protest-in short, the Earth as an angry planet? Many novels from the end of the millennium did just that,...

An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological eraWhat can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a...

Bringing the word sustainability back from the brink of clich-to a substantive, truly sustainable future Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose aside from a feel-good appeal to the consumer? In The Three Sustainabilities, Allan...

A collection of scholarship on monsters and their meaning-across genres, disciplines, methodologies, and time-from foundational texts to the most recent contributions.From the mythical monstrous races of the ancient world to the murderous cyborgs of our...

A classic Russian tale retold for our time by an eminent folklorist."Many years ago in the great empire of Russia where wicked winds and cruel storms tormented the lives of poor peasants . . .\u201d So begins the magical story of a simple peasant boy who...

How do early modern media underlie today's digital creativity?In Cut/Copy/Paste, Whitney Trettien journeys to the fringes of the London print trade to uncover makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical,...

Packed with fascinating facts,Literary Miscellanyis sure to please both professor and pleasure reader alike.Wouldn't it be great to be a fly on the wall as the great writers took pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)? While reading this work, you'll be...

The ways in which women have historically authorized themselves to write on war has blurred conventionally gendered lines, intertwining the personal with the political. Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century explores, through feminist lenses,...

From the moment of her spectacular death on the scaffold, the story of Mary Queen of Scots became nothing short of a sensation across Europe. She was executed on 8 February 1587, and her death was the climax of a captivity that lasted over eighteen years...

This is the first graphic novel adaptation of Lazarillo de Tormes, an anonymous sixteenth-century work that is credited with founding the literary genre of the picaresque novel. This genre includes not only works by Spanish authors like Miguel de...

The Logic of Love in the Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer's magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an "insoluble." Philosophers of the fourteenth century expended great...

Marking the bicentenary of Dostoevsky's birth, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity takes the writer's art specifically the tension between experience and formal representation as its central theme. While many critical approaches to Dostoevsky's...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of this good book must be in want of a drink. In six enduring novels, Jane Austen captured the fancies and foibles of Regency England, and every delightful page of this book...

A fascinating analysis of the psychology behind Westworld.   In both the film and the TV show Westworld, people playing out fantasies find their lives in danger when robots built to entertain start to kill, creating an opportunity for us to...

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Two Gentlemen of Verona on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The...

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Measure for Measure on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The complete...

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Antony and Cleopatra on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The complete...

Let's face it. Hearing people talk about Shakespeare can be pretty annoying. Particularly if you feel like you don't understand him. When people talk about which of Shakespeare's plays they like best, or what they thought of a particular performance,...

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes give you just what you need to succeed in school: Complete Plot Summary and Analysis  Key Facts About the Work  Analysis of Major Characters  Themes,...

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in new DELUXE editions! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, these popular guides make Shakespeare accessible...

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in new DELUXE editions! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, these popular guides make Shakespeare accessible...

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in this new EXPANDED edition of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, this popular guide makes...

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in new DELUXE editions!Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, these popular guides make Shakespeare accessible to everyone...

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in this new EXPANDED edition of MACBETH! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, this popular guide makes Shakespeare...

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in new DELUXE editions! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, these popular guides make Shakespeare accessible...

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in this new EXPANDED edition of JULIUS CAESAR! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, this popular guide makes Shakespeare...