Literature: History & Criticism

This collection of social, cultural, and historical documents and popular materials, with linking explanations and commentary, will help the reader...

Have the reports of the author's death been greatly exaggerated? When Roland Barthes famously announced the death of the author, he heralded a majo...

There is growing popular and scholarly interest in autobiography, along with increasing regard for the achievements of African American writers. Th...

Without some insight into his thinking process, Salman Rushdie's complex novels must remain baffling even to the well-read. This volume puts forwar...

As a distinct area of literary study, Asian American literature now enjoys a level of critical recognition that was unimaginable when academic inte...

In a follow-up to his previous Homeric studies, noted classicist Paolo Vivante explores Homer's verse, highlighting rhythm rather than metre. Rhyth...

With the publication of Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize winning novel, ^IMidnight's Children^R in 1981, followed by the unprecedented popularity of h...

Celebrating the wealth of quality multicultural literature recently published for children and young adults, this valuable resource examines the fi...

Ruskin Bond is known internationally as one of India's most prolific writers in English for children, young adults, and adults. This literary biogr...

One of the most accomplished American writers of the early 20th century, Edith Wharton achieved both critical recognition and popular acclaim. This...

While the dramatic approach to Plato's dialogues has become popular over the last decade, little attention has been paid to the poetic quality of P...

Offering a revolutionary way of reading 19th-century slave narratives, Fishburn seeks to recover the philosophical foundations of African American ...

Perhaps more than any other single work, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has popularized the image of Brutus as a ruthless and cowardly traitor, Caesar...

Writers of imperial fiction in the period 1840-1914 created a strong image of the British Empire that was often confused with the empire as it actu...

Wagner-Martin, a respected scholar of American modernism and former president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society, offers a comprehensiv...

An overview of 19th- and 20th-century writing from the British Isles shows a constant interplay between metropolitan centers and regional peripheri...

With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded wit...

This biography traces Hughes' life and artistic development, from his early years of isolation, which fostered his fierce independence, to his prol...

Transrealist writing treats immediate perceptions in a fantastic way, according to science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker, who origin...

Shakespeare's plays were written some four hundred years ago, and while his characters are enduring, they are also alien. In grappling with the tex...

Maxine Hong Kingston's first book, Woman Warrior gained instant popularity and critical success, winning top national literary awards as well as a ...

The author of such works as The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953), Raymond Cha...

Though Doris Lessing never explicitly refers to spirituality in her works, she nonetheless explores spiritual issues throughout her texts. This boo...

Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure...

This comprehensive guide includes a discussion of the play's textual history, analyses of its various contexts and sources of influence, an examina...

Relatively little critical attention has been directed towards the explication of James Merrill's difficult poems, much less towards the understand...

Although Tolkien's literary works have, over the past few decades, attracted a considerable and varied body of criticism, much of this material is ...

Science and literature have always been strange bedfellows. Like puzzle pieces, they fit because they're different. Some of the greatest works of w...

Recent revisions of the idea of separate spheres, which governed Victorian scholarship of the past two decades, have provoked considerable interest...

Since its Golden Age, Spanish drama has evolved in considerably unintended and unexpected ways with the contemporary playwrights of any present tim...

Covering 46 poets from more than two centuries of African American literary history, this biocritical dictionary is an important contribution to an...

The 19th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was focused on the centennial of the initial publication of H. G. Wells's The War of...

The 1950s are widely regarded as the golden age of American science fiction. This book surveys a wide range of major science fiction novels and fil...

In the struggle for democratic reform, and in its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution represented a broad humanistic...

Classic 19th-century British novels that give full expression to complex ethical problems necessarily project the claims of conflicting or interfer...

Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from Hollander...

Postcolonial discourse is fast becoming an area of rich academic debate. At the heart of coloniality and postcoloniality is the contested authority...

Among the narrative traditions of the Middle Ages, the Robin Hood legend holds a unique, important, and often overlooked position. Robin Hood's uni...

Over the past fifty years, children's literature has freed itself of many traditional restrictions and become a field of exciting innovations in bo...

Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views...