Literary essay

The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story

by Blanche Gelfant

Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories...

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

by Lillian Faderman

Lesbian life in America continues to evolve. As Lillian Faderman writes, there are “no constants with regard to lesbianism,” except that lesbians prefer women.

In this book, Faderman reclaims the story of...

Moses and Multiculturalism

by Barbara Johnson

Countering impressions of Moses reinforced by Sigmund Freud in his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism, this concise, engaging work begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist...

Democracy in America

by Alexis De Tocqueville & Richard C. Heffner

Over 175 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French nobleman and an astute political scientist, came to the United States to evaluate the meaning and actual functioning of democracy. His brilliant discussion...

Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway: Stories of the Inspiration Behind Great Works of Literature

by Celia Blue Johnson

The Real Stories Behind Everyone's Favorite Novels-from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to The Great Gatsby.

Every great book begins with an idea, whether it comes to a writer's mind with lightning speed or tugs...

Stages of Evil

by Robert Lima

"The evil that men do" has been chronicled for thousands of years on the European stage, and perhaps nowhere else is human fear of our own evil more detailed than in its personifications in theater. In Stages...

Ents, Elves, and Eriador

by Jonathan Evans, Matthew T. Dickerson & Donald D. Elder

With a Foreword by John Elder and an Afterword by Tom Shippey Though not often recognized as environmental or agrarian literature, the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien demonstrate a complex and comprehensive ecological...

Salvator Rosa in French Literature

by James S. Patty

" Salvator Rosa (1615--1673) was a colorful and controversial Italian painter, talented musician, a notable comic actor, a prolific correspondent, and a successful satirist and poet. His paintings, especially...

The Irresistible Fairy Tale

by Jack Zipes

If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved,...

Critical Approaches to Comics

by Matthew J. Smith & Randy Duncan

Critical Approaches to Comics offers students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing...

Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing

by Alice McLean

This book explores the aesthetic pleasures of eating and writing in the lives of M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992), Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), and Elizabeth David (1913-1992). Growing up during a time when women's...

Crying in the Middle Ages

by Elina Gertsman

Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic, internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and linguistic performances....

Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time

by Matthew Wagner

That Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' (Love's Labour's Lost), one who can untie knots (Twelfth Night), or,...

Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature

by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg & Alexandra Schultheis Moore

What can literary theory reveal about discourses and practices of human rights, and how can human rights frameworks help to make sense of literature? How have human rights concerns shaped the literary marketplace,...

Using Critical Theory

by Lois Tyson

Explaining both why theory is important and how to use it, Lois Tyson introduces beginning students of literature to this often daunting area in a friendly and approachable style. The new edition of this textbook...

Souls with Longing: Representations of Honor and Love in Shakespeare

by Dustin Gish, Bernard Dobski & John Alvis

Souls with Longing focuses on representations of honor and love in the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare. The contributors to this collaborative volume reveal how Shakespeare’s representations of the...

Bookclub-in-a-Box Discusses The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid

by Marilyn Herbert

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is more than the usual immigrant book of adaptation, struggle, and identity. It is the gripping tale of a young man who comes to America from Pakistan just prior to 9/11. The protagonist,...

Scars to Prove It

by Craig Warren

History as fiction's muse -- "When the first cannon sounded over Charleston Harbor in 1861, it announced the beginning of an American literary phenomenon. Readers North and South hungered for imaginative writing...

Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies

by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek & Louise O. Vasvári

The studies presented in the collected volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári -- are intended as an addition to scholarship in (comparative)...

From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature

by Yi Zheng

This volume presents a historical-textual study about transformations of the aesthetics of the sublime-the literary and aesthetic quality of greatness under duress-from early English Romanticism to the New Poetry...