This collection, first published in 1963, includes 29 of George Eliot's essays written between 1846 and 1868. Through these essays, Pinney has managed to convey her range of subject-matters and variety of style. This title, with an introduction and footnotes written by the editor, will be of particular interest to students of literature.

Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Zizek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Zizek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Zizek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Zizekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Beckett's Not I, and William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Zizek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek affirms Zizek's value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Zizekian criticism. Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Zizek

Edward Lobb's study, first published in 1981, is a thorough examination of Eliot's relation to Romantic criticism. This title also makes extensive use of Eliot's Clark Lectures on metaphysical poetry. Delivered in 1926, the lectures complete the picture of literary history set out in Eliot's published work, and are, the author believes, essential to a full understanding of the poet's ideas and their place in tradition. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources and earlier scholarship, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition will be of interest to students of literature.

In this fascinating and revealing book, first published in 1952, Maxwell shows the development of Eliot's poetry and poetic thought in the light of his political and religious attachments. This study traces Eliot's style from the earliest poems to the Quartets, and examines the characteristics of Eliot's earlier work adumbrate that of his maturity. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot is essential reading for students of literature.

This title, first published in 1961, explores the general background of attitudes, beliefs and ideas from which Eliot's works have originated. This study examines the influences of Eliot's work, and includes Eliot's personal views as told to the author. The book also looks at technique, structure and imagery of his poetry. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

It has long been recognised that there is an apparently paradoxical relationship between the revolutionary poetic style developed by Yeats, Eliot and Pound in the period during and after the First World War, and the reactionary politics with which they were associated in the 1920s and 1930s. Concentrating on their writings in the period up to the 1930s, this study, first published in 1982, helps to resolve the paradox and also provides a much needed reappraisal of the factors influencing their poetic and political development. The work of these poets has usually been seen as deriving from the tradition of continental symbolist poetics. Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry will be of interest to students of literature.

Containing a wealth of new scholarship and rare primary documents, The Black Jacobins Reader provides a comprehensive analysis of C. L. R. James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to considering the book's literary qualities and its role in James's emergence as a writer and thinker, the contributors discuss its production, context, and enduring importance in relation to debates about decolonization, globalization, postcolonialism, and the emergence of neocolonial modernity. The Reader also includes the reflections of activists and novelists on the book's influence and a transcript of James's 1970 interview with Studs Terkel. Contributors. Mumia Abu-Jamal, David Austin, Madison Smartt Bell, Anthony Bogues, John H. Bracey Jr., Rachel Douglas, Laurent Dubois, Claudius K. Fergus, Carolyn E. Fick, Charles Forsdick, Dan Georgakas, Robert A. Hill, Christian Hogsbjerg, Selma James, Pierre Naville, Nick Nesbitt, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Matthew Quest, David M. Rudder, Bill Schwarz, David Scott, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Matthew J. Smith, Studs Terkel

his study places Defoe's major fiction squarely in the emerging Whig culture of the early eighteenth century. It offers an alternative to the view that Defoe is essentially a writer of criminal or adventure fiction and to the Marxist judgment that he extols individualism or derives his greatest inspiration from popular print culture. This study reads the novels as reflections of mainstream Whig social and political concerns, the same concerns Defoe revealed in his verse and expository writings before and after his major period of fiction writing, 1719-24.

First published in 1991, this book is the first annotated bibliography of feminist Shakespeare criticism from 1975 to 1988 - a period that saw a remarkable amount of ground-breaking work. While the primary focus is on feminist studies of Shakespeare, it also includes wide-ranging works on language, desire, role-playing, theatre conventions, marriage, and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture - shedding light on Shakespeare's views on and representation of women, sex and gender. Accompanying the 439 entries are extensive, informative annotations that strive to maintain the original author's perspective, supplying a careful and thorough account of the main points of an article.

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets collects together writings by all the major poetic figures from Chaucer to Yeats demonstrating their vivid responses to each other, ranging from elegiac eulogy to burlesque and satire. The anthology is arranged in two sections. Part One contains poets' writings on the nature, qualities and purpose of poetry Part Two is a chronological collection of poets' writings on their peers, with an individual entry for each poet. Each extract is presented in modernized spelling and punctuation, and is carefully annotated to provide full explanations of unfamiliar phrases and references. The index has been fully revised for this paperback edition. The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets will be stimulating and enjoyable for anyone interested in the history of English poetry, but will also be an invaluable collection of primary source material for students and their teachers.

Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles. Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays. The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.

Dublin: Renaissance city of literature interrogates the notion of a literary 'renaissance' in Dublin. Through detailed case studies of print and literature in Renaissance Dublin, the volume covers innovative new ground, including quantitative analysis of print production in Ireland, unique insight into the city's literary communities and considerations of literary genres that flourished in early modern Dublin. The volume's broad focus and extended timeline offer an unprecedented and comprehensive consideration of the features of renaissance that may be traced to the city from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. With contributions from leading scholars in the area of early modern Ireland, including Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, students and academics will find the book an invaluable resource for fully appreciating those elements that contributed to the complex literary character of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature. -- .

Charting a homeward-bound voyage from Bombay to London aboard a sailing ship, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897) captured the late-Victorian era's maritime obsession and identified the strikingly original talent of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) as a sea writer in what has proved to be a landmark of sea literature. The Introduction situates the novel in Conrad's career and traces its origins and reception. Explanatory notes illuminate literary and historical references, identify real-life places and indicate Conrad's sources and influences. The essay on the text and the apparatus lay out the history of the work's composition and publication, and detail interventions by Conrad's typists, compositors and editors. Also included are notes explaining literary and historical references, a glossary of nautical terms, illustrations, including maps and pictures of early drafts, and appendixes. This edition of The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' presents the novel and its preface in forms more authoritative than any so far printed, and restores a text that has circulated in defective forms since its original publication.

Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired. The term picaresque describes a specific set of early modern Spanish narratives relating the life story of a lowborn adventurer in a realist, ironic, and often humorous manner. The protagonist, the picaro or picara (rascal), seeks upward mobility in a resolutely hierarchical society determined to prevent his - or her - ascent, and both are rich targets of satire. Spanish picaros inspired Anglo-French rogues including Gil Blas and Tom Jones and paved the way for the modern novel. Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque novel from its origins to the present day, along with a treatment of the debates that the picaresque has inspired. After introductory chapters on the picaresque genre and the origin of the phenomenon, the book analyses canonical texts and their role in the picaresque spectrum. Further chapters then turn to critical approaches to the genre and manifestations of the picaresque in Hispanic America, France, England, and modern Spain. Overall, the book affords readers a broad sense of the range of this rich tradition and an in-depth view of the field and its major texts.

Every Sunday, readers of The New York Times Book Review turn with anticipation to see which novelist, historian, short story writer, or artist will be the subject of the popular By the Book feature. These wide-ranging interviews are conducted by Pamela Paul, the editor of the Book Review, and here she brings together sixty-five of the most intriguing and fascinating exchanges, featuring personalities as varied as David Sedaris, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, and James Patterson. The questions and answers admit us into the private worlds of these authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, pet peeves, and recommendations. By the Book contains the full uncut interviews, offering a range of experiences and observations that deepens readers' understanding of the literary sensibility and the writing process. It also features dozens of sidebars that reveal the commonalities and conflicts among the participants, underscoring those influences that are truly universal and those that remain matters of individual taste. For the devoted reader, By the Book is a way to invite sixty-five of the most interesting guests into your world. It's a book party not to be missed.

This book addresses the place of women writers in anthologies and other literary collections in eighteenth-century England. It explores and contextualizes the ways in which two different kinds of printed material-poetic miscellanies and biographical collections-complemented one another in defining expectations about the woman writer. Far more than the single-authored text, it was the collection in one form or another that invested poems and their authors with authority. By attending to this fascinating cultural context, Chantel Lavoie explores how women poets were placed posthumously in the world of eighteenth-century English letters. Investigating the lives and works of four well-known poets-Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Elizabeth Rowe-Lavoie illuminates the ways in which celebrated women were collected alongside their poetry, the effect of collocation on individual reputations, and the intersection between bibliography and biography as female poets themselves became curiosities. In so doing, Collecting Women contributes to the understanding of the intersection of cultural history, canon formation, and literary collecting in eighteenth-century England.

Gothic Terrors brings together two discursive fields that have had very little contact hitherto: gothic studies and Hispanism. Though widely accepted in English studies, Hispanists seldom invoke the concept of a Gothic mode existing beyond its first appearance in the eighteenth century. Highlighting Gothic elements in mainstream Spanish fiction from the nineteenth century until the present day, Lee Six challenges the view that Spanish writers rejected what the Gothic had to offer. Through close study of texts by Benito Perez Galdos, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Miguel de Unamuno, Camilo Jose Cela, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Espido Freire, and Javier Garcia Sanchez, Abigail Lee Six traces the evolution of three staples of the Gothic: the heroine imprisoned on grounds of madness, the doubled or split character, and the use of violent, gory description. Persuasively argued and well researched, Gothic Terrors reflects on the Gothic presence in Spanish mainstream literature and identifies two important ways in which it crosses cultural divides: the traditional gulf between high and low culture within Spain, and the engagement of Spanish creative writers with transnational literary trends. Gothic Terrors will thus appeal to Gothic scholars who are interested in the Spanish dimension of their field, as well as to Hispanists who may have been unaware of how relevant and useful Gothic studies could be for them.

With their intimate settings, subdued action and likeable characters, cozy mysteries are rarely seen as anything more than light entertainment. The cozy, a subgenre of crime fiction, has been historically misunderstood and often overlooked as the subject of serious study. This anthology brings together a groundbreaking collection of essays that examine the cozy mystery from a range of critical viewpoints. The authors engage with the standard classification of a cozy, the characters who appear in its pages, the environment where the crime occurs and how these elements reveal the cozy story's complexity in surprising ways. Essays analyze cozy mysteries to argue that Agatha Christie is actually not a cozy writer; that Columbo fits the mold of the cozy detective; and that the stories' portrayals of settings like the quaint English village reveal a more complicated society than meets the eye.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The purpose of this collection, which was first published in 1996, is to provide both an overview of the major critical approaches to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and a selection of the best essays dealing with them. The essays examine the origins of the Mabinogion, comparative analyses, and structural and thematic interpretations. This book is ideal for students of literature and Medieval studies.

New Aphorisms & Reflections: Third Series, the sixth volume in a sequence which began with 222: Aphorisms & Reflections, features more than 450 entries, some of which are autobiographical. Like its predecessors, New Aphorisms & Reflections includes a sampling of "meetings of the minds"-dialogues between the author and aphorists and thinkers of the past. Cover image: Allison O'Donnell, Mostly Underground, 2008. Acrylic and graphite on board.