Literary studies: general Books

Barry Forshaw is acknowledged as a leading expert on European crime fiction, but his principal area of expertise is in the crime arena of the British Isles. Continuing the earlier success of the series with Nordic Noir and Euro Noir, he has now delivered...

Forker's critical edition fills the need for a fully annotated, historically contextualised and modernised text of the most important Elizabethan chronicle play apart from Shakespeare and Marlowe's Edward II.Now attributed definitely to George Peele,...

Selected as one of The Times Books of the Year 2017From the gothic fantasies of Walpole's Otranto to post-modern takes on the country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, Phyllis Richardson guides us on a tour through buildings real and imagined to...

This beautiful collection brings together passages from the renowned stories, poems, dramas and myths of South Asian literature, including the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Drawing on the translations published by the Clay Sanskrit Library, the book...

This lively retelling of the myth of the voyage of St Brendan from Ireland to America is illustrated with original linocuts by American artist Kathleen Neeley. Jackson's third poetry collection is an engaging and spirited interpretation of the tale,...

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it.Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to...

Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of this career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned Paris books -...

"One of the Year's Best," Times Literary SupplementWhen a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he's famous...

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...

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...

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 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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called 'green' terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world,...

A Clockwork Counterpoint is the first book to examine the musical side of Anthony Burgess, an astonishingly prolific, underrated and talented composer, revealing how his lifelong involvement in music is an essential key toward understanding his life and...

Expanded footnotes designed to help readers from all levels of familiarity with Elizabethan drama. Emphasis on the play as a theatre text - informative stage-directions. Stimulating introduction, which makes something of a break from the orthodox style ...

A critical examination of the long established tradition of adapting classic novels to film or TV screen. It is historically wide-ranging, encompassing novelists from Jane Austen to Michael Ondaatje. The early cinema ransacked literature for stories...

Ben Jonson's "Volpone" (1605) is one of the most famous comedies of early modern Europe, translated into many languages and frequently revived on stage. This student edition has a carefully modernized text, aimed at undergraduates, theatrical producers...

Of all of Jonson's plays, Bartholomew Fair with its focus on the conflict between a carnivalesque enjoyment of the flesh and society's desire for order and control, speaks most directly to the modern audience. This edition is the first to use the...

Competitive price and format. Compacted and up-to-date version of the earlier Revels Plays edition by the same editor, taking account of more recent critical works. A key Renaissance text. -- .

An introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, this text focuses on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the collective past shape Morrison's work. It approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned...

For many years Middleton's "A Game at Chess" was more notorious than read, considered rather a phenomenon of theatrical history than a pre-eminent piece of dramatic writing. "A Game at Chess" was a nine days' wonder, an exceptional play of King James'...

The sixteen short stories in this anthology demonstrate the scope of the modern Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960. To this end, the collection contains writings by both established writers, such as moravia, Vittorini, Pavese and Pasolini, as well...

How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuriesBefore Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the...

Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome's first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known...

On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land's creation, explosive impact, and enduring influence.When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a...

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine's ConfessionsIn this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions-what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read,...

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers - from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie...

Aristotle's Poetics is the most important book ever written for writers and readers of stories-whether novels, short fiction, plays, screenplays, or nonfiction. Aristotle was the first to identify the keys to plot, character, audience perception, tragic...

How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only...

A reexamination of Austen's unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novels-and that challenges distinctions between her "early" and "late" workJane Austen's six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent...

Winner of the NAVSA Best Book of the Year, North American Victorian Studies AssociationFrom the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and...

The remarkable transformation of Orwell from journeyman writer to towering icon Is George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived? Yes, according to John Rodden's provocative book about the transformation of a man into a myth. Rodden does not...

Presented in one volume for the very first time, and updated with new archival discoveries, Early Auden, Later Auden reintroduces Edward Mendelson's acclaimed, two-part biography of W. H. Auden (1907-73), one of the greatest literary figures of the...

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn't absent from-but rather was at the heart of-Roman religionBelief and Cult argues that belief isn't uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion...