Criticism category: 58377 books

“Fearless, illuminating” criticism from a New York Times–bestselling author and legendary teacher, “proving . . . that true art is moral and not trivial” (Los Angeles Times). Novelist John Gardner’s thesis in On Moral Fiction is simple: “True art is by its nature moral.” It...

When Gene Logsdon realized that he experienced the same creative joy from farming as he did from writing, he suspected that agriculture itself was a form of art. Thus began his search for the origins of the artistic impulse in the agrarian lifestyle. The Mother of All Arts is the culmination of Logsdon"s...

Literary theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create...

In this book, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff explores short stories by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, written between 1943 and 1968, with a post-Jungian approach. Drawing upon archetypal theories of myth from Joseph Campbell, James Hillman and their forbearer C. G. Jung, Ellerhoff demonstrates how short...

Drawing upon a wide range of biographies of literary subjects, from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to William Golding and V.S. Naipaul, this book develops a poetics of literary biography based on the triangular relationships of lives, works and times and how narrative operates in holding them together....

Essays on Melville and the culture of the Pacific“Like the young Melville, those who imagine Polynesia from the perspective of Europe or North America tend to envision a tropical garden set in a shining sea. But the Pacific experienced by a runaway American sailor in an earlier century presents a different...

From his perch as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, author, editor, and literary critic William Dean Howells discussed his theories of realism in literature in his column, “The Editor’s Study.” Highly influential, this collection of Howells’s essays and ideas is an invaluable resource for any reader or student with a passion for literature.  

As a prominent novelist, critic and editor, William Dean Howells played an essential role in shaping the American literary sensibility of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the shift toward naturalism and realism. In this, his most widely read series of essays on literature, Howells lays out his view of the superiority of realistic fiction.

William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1871, but his literary reputation really took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which describes the decay of a marriage. His 1885...

"There are no photographs which can be denied. All photographs have the status of fact. What is to be examined is in what way photography can and cannot give meaning to facts." With these words, two of our most thoughtful and eloquent interrogators of the visual offer a singular meditation...

In this Companion, an international team of leading T. S. Eliot scholars contribute studies of different facets of the writer's work to build up a carefully co-ordinated and fully rounded introduction. Five chapters give a complete account of Eliot's poems and plays from several distinct points of...

For the first time in digital publishing, this comprehensive eBook presents the complete works of Henrik Ibsen, the 'Father of Modernism', with numerous illustrations, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to...

In this volume A. E. Harvey asks, Is the notion of "Holy Scripture" still credible? In particular, in the light of modern critical study and postmodern literary theory, does the New Testament still qualify as a "holy" book? Arguing that the New Testament must continually...

Plutarch's essay 'How to Study Poetry' offers a set of reading practices intended to remove the potential damage that poetry can do to the moral health of young readers. It opens a window on to a world of ancient education and scholarship which can seem rather alien to those brought up in the highly...