Literary Theory Criticism category: 45208 books

In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences—the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing...

Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts...

Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his return...

A new memoir from acclaimed author Edmund White about his life as a reader. Literary icon Edmund White made his name through his writing but remembers his life through the books he has read. For White, each momentous occasion came with a book to match: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which...

A literary travelogue into the heart of classic Southern literature. What is it about the South that has inspired so much of America's greatest literature? And why, when we think of Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner or Harper Lee, do we think of them not just as writers, but as Southern...

Christopher Murray’s definitive study of Seán O’Casey, the last great writer of the Irish literary revival, provides a strong interpretative context for his life. Murray looks afresh at the Dublin of the 1880s and 1890s in order to provide an authoritative background to O’Casey’s childhood....

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...

This extraordinary collection of letters sheds light on one of the most important postwar American poets and on a creative woman's life from the 1950s onward. Amy Clampitt was an American original, a literary woman from a Quaker family in rural Iowa who came to New York after college and lived in...

From The Death of Nancy Sykes (1897) to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) and beyond, cinematic adaptations of British literature participate in a complex and fascinating history. The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015 is the only comprehensive narration of cinema's 100-year-old...

A sequel to the successful books Kin of Place and The Writer at Work, this collection of critical writing takes the reader on a personal journey from the author’s earliest discovery of poetry as a young man to his latest experiences on the literary trail. This trip through literary history involves...

Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early...

Migration and continuity have shaped both the Chicano people and their oral and written literature. In this pathfinding study of Chicano literature, Teresa McKenna specifically explores how these works arise out of social, political, and psychological conflict and how the development of Chicano literature...

This book* *broadens the scope of Latina/o criticism to include both widely-read and understudied nineteenth through twenty-first century fictional works that engage in critical discussions of gender, race, sexuality, and identity. The essays in this collection do not simply seek inclusion for the...

One of the foremost critics in contemporary American letters, Christopher Benfey has long been known for his brilliant and incisive essays. Appearing in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement, Benfey's writings have helped us reimagine...