Literary reference works Books

In this exploration of the most innovative and iconoclastic modernist fiction, James J. Miracky studies the ways in which cultural forces and discourses of gender inflect the practice and theory of four British novelists: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster,...

This volume explores problems concerning the series, national development and the national canon in a range of countries and their international book-trade relationships. Studies focus on issues such as the fabrication of a national canon, and on the...

This volume focuses on the publisher's series as a cultural formation -- a material artefact and component of cultural hierarchies. Contributors engage with archival research, cultural theory, literary and bibliometric analysis (among a range of other...

A distinctive collection of more than 90 effective poetry-writing exercises combined with corresponding essays to inspire writers of all levels.

Edited by Peter Hunt, a leading figure in the field, this book introduces the study of children's literature, addressing theoretical questions as well as the most relevant critical approaches to the discipline.The fourteen chapters draw on insights from...

A twenty-first century version of Roger Fowler's 1973 Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, this latest edition of The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms is the most up-to-date guide to critical and theoretical concepts available to students of...

Trans(in)fusion is a highly original book that tries to radicalize our ways of 'critical thinking' across disciplines.

Through new readings of Shelley's verse, this book engages with the affective, phenomenological and ethical dimensions of shame, as it is made manifest by Shelley's textual strategies of reticence.

Wild Romanticism consolidates contemporary thinking about conceptions of the wild in British and European Romanticism, clarifying the emergence of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic, and ecological idea. This volume brings together the work of twelve...

First Published in 2002. This book is about the way medieval authors wrote about union with God and how they used language that refers to the senses to articulate their ideas about how a person can be one with God. Rudy argues that such explicit concepts...

Through analysis of metaphors of consciousness in the philosophy and fiction of William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this work traces the significance of representations of knowledge, gender and social class, revealing how writers conceived of...

This is Volume XII of the G.Wilson Knight collected works and includes essays and commentary on the works of Spenser, Milton's prose and poetry and Swift. It concludes with a essays looking at Byron's poetry and dramatic prose.

In this volume, G. Wilson Knight deals with the superabundance of analogies between Byron and Shakespeare through analysis and literarty criticism of poetry, sonnets and essays.

First published in 2002. This is the final Volume IV of the five G. Wilson Knight collected works series and focuses on Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism together with related essays and indexes to earlier volumes. The emphasis in this volume is the...

First published in 2002. This book is a collection of essays on the interpretation of Shakespeare's final plays and includes works on Pericles, A Winter's Tale; Cymbeline, The Tempest and Henry VIII.

This book examines the often tragic and nearly always disabling metaphor of thetheatrum mundi, world-as-stage, as it plays itself out in the characters of Mary Shelley's novels.

Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire"...

This book explores Virginia Woolf's afterlives in contemporary biographical novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fictional character or a dramatis persona. It...

First Published in 2002. Part of the G.Wilson Knight collection, the essays included in this volume V, a full length study that covers misunderstandings, Byron's role as a patron and his proteges, his poetry, and his politics.

Rulers of Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children's Literature offers multifaceted reflection on interdependences between children and adults as they engage in play in literary texts and in real life. This volume brings...

This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork...

Crime, Justice and Social Democracy is a provocative and thoughtful collection of timely reflections on the state of social democracy and its inextricable links to crime and justice. Authored by some of the world's leading thinkers from the UK, US,...

Bringing together high profile scholars in the fields of Deleuze and postcolonial studies, this book highlights the overlooked connections between two major schools of contemporary criticism and establishes a new critical discourse for postcolonial...

This materialist study of the short story's development in three diverse magazines reveals how, at the dawn of modernism, commercial pressures prompted modernist formal innovation in popular magazines, whilst anti-commercial opacity paradoxically formed...

Who's Who in Dickens is an accessible guide to the many characters in Charles Dickens' fiction. Dickens' characters are strikingly portrayed and have become a vital part of our cultural heritage - Scrooge has become a by-word for stinginess, Uriah Heep...

Originally published in 1974. The thirty-six essays of this book were written and assembled in hour of an internationally recognised scholar of medieval literature. Written by a diverse range of contributors, the chapters cover not only various studies...

Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Renaissance historians and literary critics. They are divided over a number of questions: Was there once a concerted plan to censor all material hostile to the status quo; or did authorities only...

A History of Central European Women's Writing offers a unique survey of literature from the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. It illustrates the development of women's writing in the region from the middle ages to the...

The Routledge Book of World Proverbs draws together proverbs that transcend culture, time and space to provide an enduring collection that is both useful and enjoyable.

This volume contains collection of ten essays that focus on the fiction and non-fiction of southern novelist Walker Percy (1916-1990). Delivered during the 2002 Walker Percy Undergraduate Seminar held at Southwestern College in Winfield, KS, the...

A Study Guide for Agatha Christie's "Witness for the Prosecution", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions...

This new volume in the Author Chronologies series traces the daily activities of the Nobel Prize winning author and playwright Harold Pinter [1930-2008]. It is based upon published and unpublished materials and discussion with his close...

The surge in outward foreign direct investment (FDI) by Indian firms in the past ten to fifteen years raises a host of interesting questions. This edited volume is a valuable resource for all scholars interested in India's emerging multinational...

Using three literary analyses to show what happens once we leave behind the theoretical poverty of celebratory readings of contemporary migration and hybridity literature, this book offers a way out of the theoretical deadlock of putting hybridity...

The confidence of the Victorian age was not built on consensus; the Victorians were divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such contentions were a fundamental aspect of the...