Criticism category: 58377 books

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James...

What Matters Now? (What Can't You Hear?) is an anthology of sixteen newly-commissioned texts, ranging from music criticism to short fiction, from visual poetry to art writing, responding to the prompts expressed in the title. Texts by Cheryl Tipp, Chiara Guidi, David Toop, Francesco Tenaglia, Helena...

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett's knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after....

In Seven Essays: Studies in Literature, Drama, and Film, Abdulla Al-Dabbagh’s unique approach to literary and cultural issues succeeds in casting new light on these subjects, revealing innovative fields of research and investigation. Expressed in his usual lucid and eloquent style, this collection...

This book offers a wide-ranging analysis of the entire corpus of Medbh McGuckian’s published work. Its objective is to provide both a readable synthesis of existing criticism, in a fashion which will be generally useful to academics and students, and also to offer an original contribution to the...

Hailed by critics during the 1980s as the decade's 'Great American Playwright', Sam Shepard continued to produce work in a wide array of media including short prose, films, plays, performances and screenplays until his death in 2017. Like Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams in their autumnal years,...

British Literature and Classical Music explores literary representations of classical music in early 20th century British writing. Covering authors ranging from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, the book examines literature produced during a period of widely...

Simon Gilson's new volume provides the first in-depth account of the critical and editorial reception in Renaissance Italy, particularly Florence, Venice and Padua, of the work of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Gilson investigates a range of textual frameworks and related contexts that influenced...

This book reads the work of Salinas, Guillén, Larrea, Diego, Alberti, Méndez, and Lorca in analogical relation with Cubism and with the revolutionary discoveries of modern physics. Gala advances traditional criticism by considering these artists in the broader cultural context of Spain, Europe, and European Modernism.

This collection of essays explores the main concepts and methods of reading launched by French philosopher Jacques Derrida who died in 2004. Derrida exerted a huge influence on literary critics in the 1980s, but later there was a backlash against his theories. Today, one witnesses a general return...

How does literature work? And what does it mean? How does it relate to the world: to politics, to history, to the environment? How do we analyse and interpret a literary text, paying attention to its specific poetic and fictitious qualities? This wide-ranging introduction helps students to explore...

What exactly is "modernism†?? And how and why has its definition changed over time? Modernism: Evolution of an Idea is the first book to trace the development of the term "modernism†? from cultural debates in the early twentieth century to the dynamic contemporary field of modernist...

The aim of this book is to expose readers to architecture’s pretexts that include literary narratives, film, theatre, painting, music, and ritual, as a bridge between diverse intellectual territories and architecture. It introduces a selection of seminal modern and contemporary architectural projects,...

This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and the written word. The Introduction provides an overview of the topic as a whole and links the chapters...