Literary studies: general Books

Timeless techniques of effective public speaking from ancient Rome's greatest oratorAll of us are faced countless times with the challenge of persuading others, whether we're trying to win a trivial argument with a friend or convince our coworkers about...

A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of...

In this book, novelist Colm Toibin offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences--the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Toibin creates a...

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine Comedy. For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work...

Upon publication, "Don't Panic" quickly established itself as the definitive companion to "Adams" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". This edition comes up-to-date, covering the movie, "And Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer and the build up to the...

Celebrated for its own clarity and sublime style, this classic work of literary theory draws on the writings of Demosthenes, Plato, Sappho, Thucydides, Euripides, and Aeschylus, among others, to examine and delineate the essentials of a noble style. The...

Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating...

Successfully integrating elegance and a close fidelity to the Greek, these new translations aim to provide Greekless students with as close a sense as possible of how the Greeks themselves thought and wrote about the world. Miller's skillful introduction...

Turn the pages of The Literature Book to discover over 100 of the world's most enthralling reads, and the literary geniuses behind them.   Storytelling is as old as humanity itself. Part of the Big Ideas Simply Explained series, The Literature...

The fierce, irreverent novel of aspiration and rebellion that is both a cornerstone of Australian literature and a feminist classic  Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant Career when she was only sixteen, intending it to...