Literature: History & Criticism

J. K. Rowling achieved astounding commercial success with her series of novels about Harry Potter, the boy-wizard who finds out about his magical p...

With a career spanning 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most prolific and popular American writers of the 20th century. Though his works have ...

African-American author Langston Hughes was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and interest in his works increases daily. Though remembere...

Like Arthur Conan Doyle before him, best-selling novelist Robin Cook has turned from the practice of medicine to that of writing popular suspense f...

This volume is the most comprehensive of the existing studies of McMurtry's writings, covering all of his works up to the most recent. A biographic...

More than one hundred years after being written, Great Expectations is still one of the most widely studied works of fiction. This casebook of hist...

Imaginary beasts have figured prominently in literary works ever since the ancient world, when these myths were first formulated. But the nineteent...

Unique in its scope of coverage, this reference work provides students and scholars interested in researching modern American leftist and working-c...

Working from the premise that the stage performer's primary functions derive from celebrative rituals, this book describes the figure of the actor ...

Fences is the story of a responsible yet otherwise flawed black garbage collector in pre-Civil Rights America who, in August Wilson's hands, rises ...

Corti focuses on the meaning and importance of the act of child murder in literary treatments of the ancient myth. A projection of commonly experie...

The majority of Shakespeare's plays have at least one clown figure making an appearance. These characters range from rogues who say only a line or ...

The tremendous universal appeal of Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale took the book world by storm. With her third novel finally earning her the re...

The works of Louisiana authors differ from the works of other Southern writers in significant ways. Strong French, Spanish, Native American, and Af...

Gertrude Stein's works encompass a variety of genres. She explicitly called many of her works plays, operas, or novels intending her works to be re...

African American writers have created a rich literature that reflects their experiences and achievements. In many instances, whites figure prominen...

One of Shakespeare's four major tragedies, Othello has captivated audiences for centuries. In its treatment of jealousy and racial tension, it offe...

The analysis of the mythopoetics of a literary work involves the search for mythological archetypes, parallels, paradigms, and motives in a literar...

Shakespeare was a master of language, his sayings have become part of everyday speech, and his plays endure, in part, because of the beauty of his ...

As the author of The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey's Cafe, Gloria Naylor is widely respected as one of the most impor...

This study presents an exciting new approach to novels that combine the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of con...

The fully-lived, yet tragically ended life of Ernest Hemingway has attracted nearly as much attention as his extensive canon of writings. This crit...

The Tempest was first published in 1623 and is probably the last play Shakespeare wrote by himself. The product of his artistic maturity, it has in...

Lafcadio Hearn was a prolific 19th-century writer with diverse experiences. He was born in Greece; educated in Ireland, France, and England; and th...

Often misleadingly called the Dark Ages, the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance was a time of great creativity. The Middle Ages ga...

Though J. M. Synge is considered a major figure of Irish drama and an important canonical playwright, he is the subject of fewer and fewer books an...

Metaphors allow us to describe something new in terms of the familiar. They are culturally and ideologically grounded and help structure language, ...

Often regarded as Shakespeare's most complex and difficult play Hamlet is also one of his most popular. It has been performed countless times on th...

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is arguably the most widely read 19th-century author in America. Even through the 1990s, her books continued to appea...

Mark Twain's legacy is an extensive canon of writings that includes some of the most widely read, staged, debated, reinterpreted, and filmed works ...