Literature: history and criticism Books

Age range 14+Shakespeare everyone can understand - now in this new EXPANDED edition of HAMLET! 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...

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and...

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and...

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and...

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and...

Have you ever tried to read The Scarlet Letter but realized midway through the second sentence that you were already lost? No Fear: The Scarlet Letter will change all that. No need to worry about losing the thread...

Why be frightened of the most wonderful collection of tales ever written? No Fear: The Canterbury Tales makes it simple for students to love Chaucer's masterpiece in all its humor, bawdiness, and poignancy. It features the original text on the left-hand...

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Henry IV Part One and Two on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The complete text of the original play A line-by-line...

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

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

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Much Ado About Nothing 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 The Taming of the Shrew on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The complete...

Tolkien expert Christopher Snyder presents the most in-depth exploration yet of Tolkien's source materials for Middle-earth—from the languages, poetry, and mythology of medieval Europe and ancient Greece to the halls of Oxford and the...

Read this sequence through from page one, or start at any point and let its circles widen, or perhaps go to the lovely, light-syllabled final lyric and discover interesting ways back. The poems themselves breach back and forth to form a questing...

The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, often looked upon as the third Rosicrucian manifesto, has an entirely different tone from the other Rosicrucian documents. Unlike the Rosicrucian manifestoes, which address the transformation of society, The...

Mary Meigs is one of the eight women who portray themselves in the film The Company of Strangers, a "semi-documentary" National Film Board production, released in 1990 to overwhelming critical and popular acclaim. Meigs spent two years writing this...

A monumental event in American poetry, Get the Money!brings together the essential prose writings of iconic New York School poet Ted Berrigan."Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself...

For distinguished philosopher HansBlumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. Lions, translated by Kri Driscoll, collects thirty-two of Blumenberg's philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great...

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy and political theory,...

The legendary Georges Simenon was the most successful and influential writer of crime fiction in a language other than English; Andr Gide called him 'the greatest French novelist of our times'.Celebrated crime fiction expert Barry...

It's one of the most successful and surprising of phenomena in the entire crime fiction genre: detectives (and protodetectives) solving crimes in earlier eras. There is now an army of historical sleuths operating from the mean streets of Ancient Rome to...

The Age of Lovecraft is the first sustained analysis of HowardPhillips Lovecraft in relation to twenty-first-century critical theory andculture. This volume offers the most thorough examination of Lovecraft's placein contemporary philosophy  to...

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely...

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with...

From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead's work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature...

Philosophers look beyond the sea of red dresses to reveal insights about gender inequality, religious oppression, power, and violence.In The Handmaid's Tale and Philosophy, philosophers give their insights into the blockbuster best-selling novel and...

By the time of his death in 1989 at the age of 48, Bruce Chatwin had become one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Though his career spanned merely twelve years, his impact and influence was profoundly felt; Chatwin's first book In...

Newly available in paperback, this is a detailed description of the intensive work process involved in the making of Toy Symphony, a play by Michael Gow, directed by Neil Armfield and brought to the stage for the first time in December 2007 by Company B...

Newly available in paperback, Historical literatures recovers a rich, vibrant and complex tradition of Restoration and early eighteenth century English historical writing. Highlighting the wide variety of historical works being printed and read in...

Now available in paperback, Julian Barnes is a comprehensive introductory overview of the novels that situates his work in terms of fabulation and memory, irony and comedy. It pursues a broadly chronological line through Barnes's literary career, but...

This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing's relationship with feminism and the impact of her...

This book offers the complete text of three novellas, along with vocabulary and explanatory notes to make them fully accessible to learners of Spanish from post-GCSE level and upwards. The introduction provides background on the author and her position...

Philip Massinger's tragedy The Roman Actor, was first performed in 1626, as King James I's reign came to an end and his son Charles I acceded to the throne. Three years later, when the play was published, relations between the king and many in parliament...

This study examines the full range of Carlos Fuentes' art, from the critical realism of his early novels to his highly experimental novels of the late sixties, and to his novels from the eighties where national identities are playfully evoked and largely...

This volume explores the characteristics of the art and literature of the Second Empire in France; it examines the attitudes and positioning of artists and writers of the period in relation to a regime of dubious legitimacy, and the ways in which that...

This collection of essays is part of a new phase in Shakespeare studies. The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a man of the theatre who showed no interest in the printing of his plays, producing works that are only fully realised in...

Lunney explores Marlowe's engagement with the traditions of the popular stage in the 1580s and early 1590s and offers a new approach to his major plays in terms of staging and audience response, as well as providing a new account of English drama in...

The Republic of Letters emerged during the seventeenth century as a concept to describe the interaction between scholars across Europe and beyond. While the concept was an imaginary one, it was firmly grounded in a reality of close circles of interaction...

This volume celebrates the life and work of Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet and dramatist. The contributors are a stimulating blend of academics, poets and theatre professionals, all responding in a variety of ways to the creative...

The Henry VI plays are Shakespeare's earliest, most theatrically exciting plays and in their day, they were among his most popular works. In a story which stretches over thirty years, Shakespeare dramatises the fall of the House of Lancaster and creates...

In Renaissance Drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child.Drawing on a wide rage of play texts, Alison Findlay shows...

New D.H. Lawrence uses current and emergent approaches in literary studies to explore one of Britain's major modernist writers. The collection features new work by the present generation of Lawrence scholars, who are brought together here for the first...

Carmen Conde is a major figure in twentieth-century Spanish poetry. Though neglected up to now, Mientras los hombres mueren is the most important collection of war poetry to emerge from the Spanish Civil War. It was first published, in a limited edition,...