Literary studies: general Books

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...

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...

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 their acclaimed biographer, a final, powerful book about how Emerson, Thoreau, and William James forged resilience from devastating loss, changing the course of American thoughtIn Three Roads Back, Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial...

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...

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...

A radical reexamination of the textual and archaeological evidence about Augustus and the PalatineCaesar Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), who is usually thought of as the first Roman emperor, lived on the Palatine Hill, the place from which the word "palace"...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...