You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. The Great Gatsby (1925) is a classic of modern American literature and is often seen as the quintessential novel of 'the jazz age'. This is the ideal guide to the text, setting The Great Gatsby in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception and examining its afterlife in literature, film and popular culture. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading.
This Guide offers a comprehensive survey of the key criticism on Shakespeare's tragedies, from the seventeenth century through to the present day. Introducing essential concepts, themes and debates, and summarising major critical texts, Nicolas Tredell examines how the category of Shakespeare's tragedies has been constructed, contested and changed.
This Guide explores the wealth of critical material generated by these two exceptional works of modernist fiction. From the initially mixed critical responses to the novels in the early 1930s, the Guide follows the enormous growth of interest in Faulkner's work across six decades. New writings shaped by a range of critical theories are discussed, offering the reader a clear view of the place now given to one of America's most innovative and influential novelists.
Lionel Asbo has just won £139,999,999.50 on the Lottery. A horribly violent, but horribly unsuccessful criminal, Lionel’s attentions up to now have all been on his nephew, Desmond Pepperdine. He showers him with fatherly advice (‘carry a knife’) and introduces Des to the joys of internet porn. Meanwhile, Des desires nothing more than books, a girl to love and to steer clear Uncle Li’s psychotic pitbulls, Joe and Jeff. But Lionel’s winnings are not necessarily all good news. For Des has a secret, and its discovery could unleash his uncle’s implacable vengeance. ‘One of Amis's funniest novels’ New Yorker ‘A book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely’ Observer
A stimulating and comprehensive critical survey of the responses to A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as the key debates and developments, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Leading the reader through material chronologically, the Guide explores the main themes and interpretations and draws on a rich range of critical writings.
Set at a conference not of academics but of characters out of great works of literature. They convene at the San Francisco Hilton to seminar and pray - pray for their continued survival in readers' minds.
At last available in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, the columbia critical guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on a single text or pair of texts by a given writer. each volume: -- Offers a balanced and nuanced approach to criticism, drawing on a wide array of British and American sources -- Explains criticism in terms of key approaches, allowing students to grasp the central issues for each work -- Is edited by a noted scholar who specializes in the writer or work in question -- Includes notes and a comprehensive bibliography and index. The critical works in this collection analyze the complex narrative technique of heart of darkness while exploring its evocation of myth, philosophy, and politics, its attitudes to empire, its images of Africa, and its representations of women. Examining secondary sources from the 1900s to the 1990s, this guide is an indispensable resource for the study of one of Conrad's most potent works.
This guide provides a survey of the wide range of responses to Macbeth, as well as the key debates and developments from the 17th century to the present day. Chronologically structured, the guide summarizes and assesses key interpretations, sets them in context and supplies extracts from criticism which exemplify critical positions.
Tragedy is one of the oldest and most revered forms of literature in the western world. Over the centuries, tragedy has shown a tremendous capacity to reinvent itself, often emerging at crucial moments in the evolution of cultural, political and intellectual history. Not only is tragedy marked by its diversity, the critical literature surrounding the genre is equally diverse. This Reader's Guide offers a comprehensive introduction to the key criticism and debates on tragedy, from Aristotle through to the present day. Sarah Dewar-Watson presents the work of canonical theorists and lesser-known but, nonetheless, influential critics, bringing together a strong sense of the critical tradition and an awareness of current scholarly trends. Stimulating and engaging, this essential resource helps students to navigate their way around the subject of tragedy and its rich critical terrain.