Criticism category: 58377 books

In all the complex cultural history of the islands of Britain and Ireland the idea of the coast as a significant representative space is critical. For many important artists coastal space has figured as a site from which to braid ideas of empire, nation, region, and archipelago. They have been drawn...

Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's most popular tragedies and has provoked a rich diversity of interpretations. Definitively passionate, it is much more than the archetypal love story: the play tests the limits of tragedy and comedy, challenges gender roles and explores the nature of language.In...

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are major plays by Tennessee Williams, one of America's most significant dramatists. They both received landmark productions and are widely-studied and performed around the world. The plays have also inspired popular screen adaptations...

What is the relationship between feminist critical theory and literature? This book deals with the relationship between women and writing, mothers and daughters, the maternal and history. It addresses the questions about language, writing and the relations between women which have preoccupied...

Tom Murphy shot to fame with the London production of A Whistle in the Dark in 1961, establishing him as the outstanding Irish playwright of his generation. The international success of DruidMurphy, the 2012-13 staging of three of his major plays by the Druid Theatre Company, served to underline his...

How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s...

How true is the Old Testament? For over two centuries Biblical scholars have held to the so-called documentary hypothesis, namely, that Genesis-Deuteronomy was not authored by Moses, but rather by several writers, some of whom lived centuries after Moses’ time. How have many scholars questioned...

His contemporaries recognised John Donne (1572-1631) as a completely new kind of poet. He was, wrote one enthusiast, ‘Copernicus in Poetrie’. But in the winter of 1614-15 Donne abandoned part-time versification for full-time priestly ministry, quickly becoming one of the most popular preachers...

This volume explores the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and seeks to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is the 'common' in its double sense of something shared and something...

In the 1880s and 1890s, materialism in art was counterbalanced by attention to the subjective individual experience, expressed in the new modes inaugurated by Symbolism, Decadence and Aestheticism. In particular, Decadent artists and writers inspired the lasting name of an age fascinated by the contemplation...

This book is concerned with language, genre, drama, and literary and historical narrative and examines the comedy of Shakespeare in the context of comedies from Italy, Spain, and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1721) together defined a new way of writing fiction in the eighteenth century. Each was highly controversial in Defoe's time, and each has generated a very large amount of criticism since. This Guide examines the major trends and movements in...

Dead Masters: Mentoring and Intertextuality in Samuel Johnson examines the dual issues of mentoring and intertextuality as an integrated phenomenon. Through a series of fresh and novel readings of Johnsonian and Boswellian texts, the book offers insight not only into these two issues, but further...