Literature Books

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...

The complete poems of the two-time finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, available in English for the first timeThis volume collects and translates-most for the first time-the nine volumes of poetry published by douard Glissant, a poet, novelist,...

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...

Discover the richness and beauty of Bali's many performing art forms.This book is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the most popular forms of traditional performing arts in Bali--among the most intricate and spectacular musical and...

Upon its premiere, The Deputy stirred up more controversy and caused greater repercussions than any other postwar work. Based on Rolf Hochhuth's research into the Vatican activities during World War II, the play's treatment of Pope Pius XII - the...

Frank O'Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry,...

This superb bilingual anthology highlights the posthumous legacy of Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, who left a vast body of unpublished work when he died in 1973. Ben Belitt, a distinguished poet in his own right, is widely...

The hilarious and poignant third play by award-winning actor, playwright, and writer Jesse Eisenberg, The Spoils continues Eisenberg's exploration of the privilege of the young straight white male. Nobody likes Ben. Ben doesn't...

The Revisionist, the second play by the award-winning actor and regular New Yorker contributor Jesse Eisenberg, is a stunning exploration of obsession, secrets, and the nature of family. The play had its world premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New...

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,...

Paul Auster provides the first extended analysis of Auster's essays, poetry, fiction, films and collaborative projects. It explores his key themes of identity; language and writing; metropolitan living and community; and storytelling and illusion. By...

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...

This book offers a comprehensive account of the work of J.G. Ballard, regarded by critics as one of the most significant fiction writers of recent times. Ballard's early science fiction writing earned him plaudits as one of the most innovative and...

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav...

Plain ugly examines depictions of physically repellent characters in a striking range of early modern literary and visual texts, offering fascinating insights into the ways in which ugliness and deformity were perceived and represented, particularly with...

Gender and warfare in the twentieth century is a collection of exciting, accessible and very readable essays that span the twentieth century, exploring the ways in which men and women have both represented warfare, and represented themselves as...

Beginning Shakespeare introduces students to the study of Shakespeare, and grounds their understanding of his work in theoretical discourses. After an introductory survey of the dominant approaches of the past, seven chapters examine the major current...

Edwin Morgan is Scotland's major living poet, and Inventions of modernity was the first book-length study of his work. Since the 1940s Morgan's poetry has been carving out an alternative to the conventional evolutions from Modernism to Postmodernism,...

Nicola McDonald's collection and the romances it investigates are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and...

This introduction to and analysis of women's writing in contemporary France includes both new writers of the 1990s and their more established counterparts. It situates these authors and their texts at the centre of the trends and issues concerning modern...

Through a study of ten modern stage and screen productions of 'King Lear', this book examines the way performance and interpretation are bound together, and shows how different performances have illuminated the contradictions in this play. The updated...

Challenging the tyranny of the Anglo-American narratives that have dominated critical histories of the Gothic so far, this work argues that the Gothic novel did not simply derive from "The Castle of Otranto", but that it has been found in the crucible of...

Energetically places modern British drama and contemporary critical and cultural theory in dialogue, demonstrating how theory allows fresh insights into familiar plays. Each chapter pairs a well-known play from the post-war period with a classic theory...

This study seeks to dissolve the barriers between literary and film studies. Grahame Smith - a Dickens scholar who has also taught, researched and published in the field of film - seeks to establish a role for Dickens in the emergence of cinema. Taking...

This study discusses Angela Carter's fiction in chronological order, and notes that although her themes are fairly consistent throughout her work, consistency of theme is not the same as repetition. The angles and emphases that develop are partly from...

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...