Literature: history and criticism Books

‘Enlightening, moving’ SIR IAN MCKELLENFrom the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives. ‘The web of our...

A charming collection of quotes about cats from our favourite authors, accompanied by artwork in the trademark style of Paul Magrs (author of The Panda, the Cat and the Dreadful Teddy). ‘I love them, they are so nice and selfish’ – L.M. MontgomeryThis...

A look at 100 inspiring novels that have left a significant mark on the world of literature and popular culture. Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had...

Build your brain and blitz through the canon with Literature in 30 Seconds of Less!, a collection of illuminating synopses of the great works.Bursting with illuminating synopses of humanity’s great works, you no longer have to lower your gaze when...

From Voltaire to Verlaine and from Hugo to Hemingway, these are the Paris locations that have influenced modern literature. The book is an elegant photographic stroll around the bookshops, famous literary restaurants and storied streets of Europe’s...

A celebration of all the weird and wonderful books to be found at an antiquarian bookshop. Books have the power to enrich the soul, to enliven the senses, to expand our horizons… and others are simply mad. This wonderful celebration of the oddest books...

C. S. Lewis offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry of one of the most consequential periods in world history, providing deep insight into some of the greatest writers of the age, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William...

A charming, clever, and original collection of more than 100 spine poems–a popular form of found poetry composed by arranging book spines—illustrated with 110 full-color photographs.Easy to create and share online, spine poems—also known as collage...

The New York Times bestselling author of the beloved classic How to Read Literature Like a Professor teaches you how to write everything from a report for your community association to a meaningful memoir in this masterful and...

‘An absolute belter of a biography’ MARINA HYDEA Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. An...

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.‘Highly engaging … Go now, read this book’ THE TIMES ‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or...

‘One of the greatest writers of our time.’ Toni Morrison‘You Don’t Know Us Negroes adds immeasurably to our understanding of Hurston … her words make it impossible for readers to consider her anything but one of the intellectual giants of the 20th...

The enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s fiction is captured in this pocket-sized collection of quotations taken from her celebrated works. The novels of Jane Austen are famed for their ability to perfectly convey the nuances of social interactions in the...

A unique, moving and dazzlingly researched exploration of the places, people, musicians, writers and filmmakers that inspired David Jones to become David Bowie, what we can learn from his life’s work and journey, and why he will always matter. When...

As featured on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 5 Live Selected as one of the Independent’s 10 best pregnancy books for expectant parents Birth is a feminist issue. It’s the feminist issue nobody’s talking about. For too long women have been told, ‘a healthy...

'If Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic I'd nominate her for sainthood.' Frank McCourt The international bestseller, reissued and with a new introduction. A witty, entertaining, impassioned guide to perfect punctuation, for everyone who cares about precise...

Take a stroll through some of the most influential pieces of literature of all time with Read the Classics. From Aristotle and Plato to Kerouac and Tolstoy, don’t just read the classics, learn why they hold such a time-honored place in the...

An amazing guide to some of the most beloved, original, inspiring, hysterical, heart-warming, compelling, rude and downright scary books that have enchanted children the world over. In 100 Children's Books That Inspired Our World, author Colin Salter...

Give yourself a head start!Collins School Dictionary is the perfect companion for all students aged 11-14. With a clear design throughout, it is easy to use and full of useful features to help build language confidence and help with work and study. This...

One of the most popular and beloved introductions to the concept of faith ever written, Mere Christianity has sold millions of copies worldwide. The book brings together C.S. Lewis’s legendary radio broadcasts during the war years, in which he set out...

Australians hear the call of Country, but without knowledge of the history and the lives of its animals and plants, that call is confused and loses itself in opal fields and vainglorious stockman's museums. Follow Crisp: not for her the umbrella on the...

*Shortlisted for the SPN Book of the Year Award 2020*Nganajungu Yagu is dedicated to Papertalk Green's mother, and is built around selected correspondence between Yagu and Daughter. It gently reminds us of the sacrifices made by our matriarchs over time...

Ages 4 to 8 years. Yelling and shouting, the children chased each other in and out of the water...They didn't realise that they were sharing the water with a tired old Wunambi. Find out what happens when his rest is disturbed. Wunambi the water snake...

'I was confined, locked into my library, tracing my heartbeats from way, way back.'In Telltale, Carmel Bird seizes on an enforced isolation to re-read a rich dispensary of books from her past. A rule she sets herself is that she can consult only...

After Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, it rapidly achieved the status of a classic. The novel is widely read and studied in Australia, and overseas, and valued for its imaginative power,...

The Portuguese traders who brought Europe to Japan in the sixteenth century were known as 'southern barbarians'. In his new collection John Mateer offers a contemporary re-charting of the Portuguese Empire. This empire is a fugitive one, notable for its...

Storm and Honey is the new collection by prize-winning poet Judith Beveridge. It concentrates in a dramatic way both the raw emotional power and the sweetness which are the essential qualities of Beveridge's verse. Its centrepiece, 'Driftgrounds' is a...

In the late 1930s an apprentice potter made a solemn pledge with some of his young work mates to meet up on New Year's Day, in the year 2000, in the famous Long Bar of the Hotel Australia. But the reunion never took place because, while sixty years later...

The Supplement to the Bibliography of Australian Literature (BAL) completes the most comprehensive reference to Australian creative writing ever published. The four volumes of BAL recorded details of all separately published creative literature by...

The essays in this volume address one of the central issues in literary translation, namely the relationship between the creative freedom enjoyed by the translator and the multiplicity of constraints to which translation is necessarily subject. The links...

Benefiting from recently catalogued archival materials, The Flip Side: Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 19351985 evaluates the influence of an ensemble of well-known Americans born and bred in China Pearl S. Buck, Henry R. Luce, Owen...

Time, Tide and History: Essays on the Writing of Eleanor Dark is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark's fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark's writing...

This is the first collection in print of the letters of Australian colonial poet Charles Harpur (181368) and his circle. Supported by extensive annotation newly prepared for this edition, the 200 letters and life-documents open up successive phases of...

War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story.In Australia, although women have written...

Republics of letters: literary communities in Australia is the first book to explore the notion of literary community or literary sociability in relation to Australian literature. It brings together twenty-four scholars from a range of...

The Enchantment of English is a study of the teaching of English in Australian universities, from its beginnings in the second half of the 19th century through to the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which universities proliferated and diversified. Written...

Gail Jones is one of Australia's foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high...

Since its publication in 1903, Joseph Furphy's Such is Life has become established as an Australian classic. But which version of the novel is the authoritative text, and what does its history reveal about Australian cultural life?From Furphy's...

One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting.In Patrick White's Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new...

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) arrived in Sydney in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem The Aboriginal Mother, written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her...

RichardFlanagan: Critical Essays is the first book to be published about thelife and work of this major world author. Written by twelve leading criticsfrom Australia, Europe and North America, these richly varied essays offer newways of understanding...

Macbeth is often read in a singular fashion: either as a cautionarymorality tale warning against ambition, or as a psychological studyof evil. In Ambivalent Macbeth, renowned Shakespeare scholar R.S.White argues that these differing readings result from...

The Romantic period is the most appealing but also the most confusing period of English literature for the student. Crucially, this book distinguishes between 'the Romantic' as modern critics use the term and 'the romantic' as it was used during the...

Over the course of the 19th century a remarkable array of types appeared in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the "currency lass", the squatter, and more. Some had a powerful influence on the...

Christina Stead set five of her novels in the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place and nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label 'expatriate' and her books defy...

A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan's My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first...