Literature: history and criticism Books

From the inadvertent marriage of a brother and sister in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders to the sexually charged intrafamilial relationships in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, a remarkable number of English novels written between 1684 and 1814 predicate their...

Arguably the single most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and...

Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel, to our understanding of literature's place in cultural debate, and to women's studies. The essays...

Eros in Mourning begins with a reading of the Iliad that shows how Homer, not yet influenced by the ideology of transcendence, analyzes the structure of unassuageable mourning in a way that is as up-to-date as the latest poststructuralism. Then, in...

Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent...

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication,...

''Unheard melodies may be sweeter, as Keats writes, but in the essays of another masterful poet and thinker about poetry, Anthony Hecht, we find it delicious to be listening as if for the first time. No reader of Hecht's dazzling essays on rhyme, on the...

Originally published in 1766, the Laocoon has been called the first extended attempt in modern times to define the distinctive spheres of art and poetry.

In Structure and Society in Literary History Robert Weimann, one of Germany's leading literary theoreticians, raises important questions about the social function of literature and sketches the outlines of a new historical criticism.Weinmann's Marxist...

''Blonsky has grouped numerous original and newly translated works by those who have been highly visible forces in semiotic circles . . . His book functions as a unified voice proclaiming the power of semiotics to reveal the hidden practices and secrets...

''This is major scholarship, both as it contributes to American history of ideas and as it offers a brilliant new interpretation of major nineteenth-century American writers.''--J. Hillis Miller

''An unprecedented encounter between feminist criticism, reading-research and reader-response criticism...I found 'Gender and Reading' a valuable book to read as a feminist critic. Valuable because it asserts our rights, as women, to read; to read as...

''It remains the best work on literature and psychoanalysis, essential reading for anyone interested in pursuing the relations between the two or wanting to know about the possible effects of the French re-reading of Freud for a reading of literature...

''Tropics of Discourse'' develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also...

''When it is done well, deconstructive criticism can be a pleasure to read, as it is in the case of Barbara Johnson. Her discussions of the reading process . . . are patient, ingenious, and persuasive.''--Robert Scholes, Yale Review

Saving the Text cuts through Jacques Derrida's complex blend of philosophy, commentary, and elaborate wordplay to ascertain his place in the history of criticism and the significance of Glas as a literary event. Distinguished critic and scholar Geoffrey...

With contributions by David Bleich, Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Walker Gibson, Norman N. Holland, Wolfgang Iser, Walter Benn Michaels, Georges Poulet, Gerald Prince, and Michael Riffaterre.

'Since the earliest days,' writes Richard Chase in this classic study, 'the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance.' In his detailed study of...

Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction...

''A scholarly and original contribution to the autobiographical impulse at the heart of (Woolf's) ...writings''.--Harold Bloom, Yale University.

In an earlier book Professor Krieger discussed the tragic vision as the confrontation with extremity -- the writer's commitment to a master metaphor even as he acknowledges the incompleteness of that metaphor. The term 'classic' is used here to indicate...

''Avrom Fleishman's ''The English Historical Novel'' provides the first comprehensive study not only of this subject but also of the theoretical relationship between history and the historical novel''.--Harriet Gilliam, ''Clio''.

Ten Centuries of Spanish Poetry introduces readers to the dazzling array of poetry Spain has produced since the eleventh century. Editor Eleanor L. Turnbull has selected the best translations of each work or, if none were available, translated them...

In these three predecessors of existentialism, all of whom were profoundly influenced by Stendhal, author Ralph Harper finds evidence of that spiritual isolation which leads ultimately to personal solitude and philosophical nihilism. To these negative...

Owen Wister is known to most Americans as the creator of the heroic cowboy in The Virginian (1902). Despite his success as a Western novelist, Wister's failure to write about his native city of Philadelphia has been lamented by many for the loss of a...

Owen Wister is known to most Americans as the creator of the heroic cowboy in The Virginian (1902). Despite his success as a Western novelist, Wister's failure to write about his native city of Philadelphia has been lamented by many for the loss of a...

An English translation of the writings of French constitutional theorist Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94) on the United States. Subjects include the American Revolution, federal Constitution, and the emerging political culture in the United States.

An English translation of the writings of French constitutional theorist Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94) on the United States. Subjects include the American Revolution, federal Constitution, and the emerging political culture in the United States.

An English translation of the writings of French constitutional theorist Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94) on the United States. Subjects include the American Revolution, federal Constitution, and the emerging political culture in the United States.

The business world is often shown as a world where everyone knows the price of everything, yet appreciates the value of nothing. It is the moral imagination that allows people to be aware of the dimensions of a situation. This text shows how society...

Brian W. Aldiss wrote classic science fiction novels like Report on Probability A and Hothouse. Billion Year Spree, his groundbreaking study of the field, defined the very meaning of SF and delineated its history. Yet Aldiss's discomfort with being a...

Kelli D. Zaytoun draws on Gloria Anzaldua's thought to present a radically inclusive and expansive approach to selfhood, creativity, scholarship, healing, coalition-building, and activism. Zaytoun focuses on Anzaldua's naguala/ shapeshifter, a concept of...

Durante mas de cincuenta anos, Julia de Burgos ha evocado sentimientos de identidad y union entre puertorriquenos y latinos en Estados Unidos. Vanessa Perez-Rosario va mas alla del enfoque tragico de otras biografias de Burgos para examinar la vida de la...

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into...

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into...

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into...

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into...

Challenging convention with the SF nonconformist Roger Zelazny combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and...

Because gothic fiction was the one semi-respectable genre that regularly explored sexual and social transgressions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, George Haggerty's Queer Gothic argues that it makes sense to consider the ways in which...

Because gothic fiction was the one semi-respectable genre that regularly explored sexual and social transgressions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, George Haggerty's Queer Gothic argues that it makes sense to consider the ways in which...

In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure. Tara A. Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed...

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias...

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias...

Challenging convention with the SF nonconformist Roger Zelazny combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and...

Challenging convention with the SF nonconformist Roger Zelazny combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and...