Literary Reference Works

The highly influential author of novels The Razor's Edge, Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and the story "The Letter" (all of which have be...

The Beat Generation was a group of writers who rejected cultural standards, experimented with drugs, and celebrated sexual liberation. Starting in ...

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early n...

As a reaction against persistent black exclusion from white American society, the novels of recent African American writers boldly celebrate the he...

What does literature reveal about a country s changing cultural identity? In History, Violence, and the Hyperreal by Kathryn Everly, this question ...

Across fiction, journalism, ethnography, and history, William T. Vollmann’s oeuvre—which includes a "prostitution trilogy," a septology (Seven Drea...

Jean Toomer's Cane was advertised as ""a book about Negroes by a Negro,"" despite his request not to promote the book along such racial lines. Nell...

Four hundred years since its publication, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal and ti...

A national hero in Cuba and a champion of independence across Latin America, José Martí produced a body of writing that has been theorized, critici...

Western European mythology and history tend to view spirituality and sexuality as opposite extremes. But sex can be more than a function of the bod...

From a position of urgent political engagement, this provocative book offers novel and compelling interpretations of several well-known Haitian-bor...

The American Adrenaline Narrative considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously prom...

Medieval America analyzes literary, legal, and historical archives that help tell a new story about the formation of American culture. Against Cold...

Women should be seen and not heard."" That was a well-known maxim in nineteenth century America. American women writers--such as Louisa May Alcott,...

Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon...

Ben Jonson was a Londoner. He lived there from infancy, left for only brief periods of travel, and used various locales in or near London as the se...

Scandalous Bodies is an impassioned scholarly study both of literature by diasporic writers and of the contexts within which it is produced. It ex...

Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping—crucial to understanding life in the southern United States—from Emancipation to the twent...

What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously? With S...

Perspectives on Barry Hannah is a collection of essays devoted to the work of the award-winning fiction writer Barry Hannah. The anthology features...

Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporar...