Literary Reference Works

What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. Herman Melville wrote these wo...

Central to every vampire story is the undead's need for human blood, but equally compelling is the human ingestion of vampire blood, which often...

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle''s (1657-1757) Dialogues were written when he was only twenty-five and published in full in 1683. Donald Schier pro...

Lauded by critics yet largely unappreciated by fans of horror and weird fiction, T.E.D. Klein is considered one of the great horror writers, des...

We live in an information economy, a vast archive of data ever at our fingertips. In the pages of science fiction, powerful entitiesgovernments and...

This Companion offers a compelling survey of American literature in the 1930s. These thirteen new essays by accomplished scholars in the field prov...

For the first time since the sixteenth century, a new edition is here made available of the first book of Laurent de Premierfait''s French version ...

James I. Wimsatt edits Guillaume de Machaut''s important Dit de la fleur de lis et de la Marguerite; he identifies an acrostic connecting the earli...

In her study of Marie de France''s twelfth century poem, The Lay of Guingamor, Sara Strum examines the work as a hero-quest tale in the vein of Chr...

This collection of fifty-seven essays, manifestos, and other prose writings on literature, painting, music, and cinema is drawn from various litt...

Nineteenth-century Britain gave birth to the fantasy novel and the science fiction novel--two of today's most popular genres. During the same pe...

It has been 400 years since William Shakespeare, the man heralded as the greatest writer in the English language and Englands national poet, died. ...

Since their inception, detective novels have been a wildly successful genre of American fiction, featuring a uniquely American belief in rugged ...

The Storied South features the voices--by turn searching and honest, coy and scathing--of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thinkers in t...

The storm has become a universal trope in the literature of crisis, revelation and transformation. It can function as a trope of place, of apocalyp...

In this long-awaited book from one of the most recognized and respected scholars in Native Studies today, Emma LaRocque presents a powerful interdi...

What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters greatest voices, pondered these per...

A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of technologies and rhetorical practice. Rhetorical Machines addresses new approaches to...

The J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature--long held at the University of California, Riverside--have been a majo...

Adventure fiction is one of the easiest narrative forms to recognize but one of the hardest to define because of its overlap with many other gen...

George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has sparked a renewed interest in things medieval. The pseudo-historical world of Westeros delights...

Under the threat of climate change, corruption, inequality and injustice, Americans may feel they are living in a dystopian novel come to life. ...

D. J. Conlon examines Guy of Warwick, a popular thirteenth century Saxon legend adapted into Anglo-French prose in the fourteenth century.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials stands as a landmark in fantasy literature. Comprised of the novels The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, an...

Bailey points out in this book that Hardy found a reasoned basis for his meliorism in Von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. Hardy's philoso...

This volume contains an introduction and translation into English of six poems by Geffroi de Paris, the fourteenth-century French writer and author...

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...