Literary Reference Works

Terry Pratchett's writing celebrates the possibilities opened up by inventiveness and imagination. It constructs an ethical stance that values i...

During her lifetime, Lydia Sigourney was acclaimed as nineteenth-century America's most popular woman poet and published widely as a historian, tra...

The Instructions are Saint Louis''s second set of recommendations, which he addressed to his daughter Isabelle, who later became Queen of Navarre. ...

By mid-career, many successful writers have found a groove and their readers come to expect a familiar consistency and fidelity. Not so with Hen...

**Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year**The Penguin Classics Book is a reader's companion to the largest library of classic literature in t...

George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the most influential authors in the English language. His landmark novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Ei...

From wondrous fairy-lands to nightmarish hellscapes, the elements that make fantasy worlds come alive also invite their exploration. This first ...

La Chancun de Willame is an Old French epic poem written before 1150 concerning Vivien''s resistance to an invading Moslem army and the efforts of ...

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work, the Historical and Critical Dictionary. This brief bo...

This book is a reevaluation and a reinterpretation of Pierre Charron (1541-1603) - in particular La Sagesse - and of the impact of his writings. Je...

Dystopian fiction captivates us by depicting future worlds at once eerily similar and shockingly foreign to our own. This collection of new essa...

Marxist theories have had a profound influence on crime fiction, beginning with the works of the American writers of the 1930s. This study explo...

The cultural fantasy of twins imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical. Media portrayals consistently offer the spectacle of twins...

This is a critical edition of an adaptation of the Discipline Clericalis, the first western collection of eastern apologues, written between 1105 a...

Focusing on crime fiction and films that artfully combine comedy and misdeed, this book explores the reasons writers and filmmakers inject humor...

A highly regarded scholar in the fields of American cultural history and print culture, Joan Shelley Rubin is best known for her writings on the va...

A highly regarded scholar in the fields of American cultural history and print culture, Joan Shelley Rubin is best known for her writings on the va...

In today's world, our television screens are filled with scenes from countless conflicts across the globe - commanding our attention and asking u...

Mary Shelley is best known for her classic novel Frankenstein, a literary masterpiece that remains one of the most frequently taught books in high ...

Alice Walker is one of the few living writers whose work regularly appears in the high school curriculum. While she is known primarily for her best...

Bon mots from one of the twentieth century''s most beloved writers These impeccably chosen passages are a trenchant reminder that Margaret Ra...

This general chronology of Voltaire''s letters by an eminent Voltairiste contains a chronological appendix, followed by a bibliography and an i...

In 1253, this collection of fictional tales was translated from Arabic into the language of thirteenth-century Spain. It is one of the purest survi...