Reflecting the continuing change and development in modern literacy theory, the key features of this book includes its clarity, brevity, equal coverage of the main literary theories and useful bibliographies of further reading.Literature students will find its clearly defined sections easy to navigate and whilst avoiding over-simplification, it makes a complex subject accessible.

    His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory.As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aur lia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

    Besides discussions of Austen's novels and letters, there are essays on religion, politics, class consciousness, publishing practices, domestic economy, style in the novels and the significance of her juvenile works. A chronology provides biographical information, and assessments of the history of Austen criticism highlight the most interesting recent studies in a vast field of critical diversity.

    It contains his only novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray as well as his plays, stories, poems, essays and letters. Illustrated with many photographs, the book includes introductions to each section by Wilde's grandon, Merlin Holoand, Owen Dudley Edwards, Declan Kibertd and Terence Brown. A comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Oscar Wilde together with a chronological table of his life and work are also included.

    Reflections on my life --On the structural analysis of science fiction --Science fiction : a hopeless case --with exceptions --Philip K. Dick : a visionary among the Charlatans --The time-travel story and related matters of science-fiction structuring --Metafantasia : the possibilities of science fiction --Cosmology and science fiction --Todorov's fantastic theory of literature --Unitas oppositorum : the prose of Jorge Luis Borges --About the Strugatsky's Roadside picnic

    Lovecraft (1890-1937), the most important American supernaturalist since Poe, has had an incalculable influence on all the horror-story writing of recent decades. Altho his supernatural fiction has been enjoying an unprecedented fame, it's not widely known that he wrote a critical history of supernatural horror in literature that has yet to be superceded as the finest historical discussion of the genre. This work is presented in this volume in its final, revised text. With incisive power, Lovecraft here formulates the esthetics of supernatural horror & summarizes the range of its literary expression from primitive folklore to the tales of his own 20th-century masters. Following a discussiom of terror-literature in ancient, medieval & renaissance culture, he launches on a critical survey of the whole history of horror fiction from the Gothic school of the 18th century (when supernatural horror found its own genre) to the time of De la Mare & M.R. James. The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Vathek Charles Brockden Brown, Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, Bulwer-Lytton, Fouqué's Undine, Wuthering Heights, Poe (full chapter), The House of the Seven Gables, de Maupassant's The Horla, Bierce, The Turn of the Screw , M.P. Shiel, W.H. Hodgson, Machen, Blackwood & Dunsany are among those discussed in depth. He also notices a host of lesser writers--enough to draw up an extensive reading list. By charting so completely the background for his own concepts of horror & literary techniques, Lovecraft throws light on his own fiction as well as on the horror-literature which has followed. For this reason this book will be especially intriguing to those who've read his fiction as an isolated phenomenon. Any searching for a guide thru the inadequately marked region of literary horror, need search no further. Unabridged & corrected republication of 1945 edition. New introduction by E.F. Bleiler.

    To be fair, Ellmann does have some distinct advantages. For starters, there's his deep mastery of the Irish milieu--demonstrated not only in this volume but in his books on Yeats and Wilde. He's also an admirable stylist himself--graceful, witty, and happily unintimidated by his brilliant subjects. But in addition, Ellmann seems to have an uncanny grasp on Joyce's personality: his reverence for the Irishman's literary accomplishment is always balanced by a kind of bemused affection for his faults. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches on Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or talking dirty to his future wife via the postal service, Ellmann's account always shows us a genius and a human being--a daunting enough task for a fiction writer, let alone the poor, fact-fettered biographer. Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.

    “The writers in this volume invite us into hidden places: a surgical pathologist’s laboratory, the boxing gym where a college professor and his student learn unexpected lessons about discipline, pain, and growing to adulthood. There are many discoveries to be made here, and I gladly invite the reader to an uncommonly rich and rewarding book.” — Kathleen Norris

    Starting at 'The Beginning' and concluding with 'The End', chapters range from the familiar, such as 'Character', 'Narrative' and 'The Author', to the more unusual, such as 'Secrets', 'Pleasure' and 'Ghosts'. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle's classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter.The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters - 'Feelings', 'Wounds', 'Body' and 'Love' - to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms.A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader's eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

    Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first bullfight in Mexico while high on opium; catching up with the beat night life in New York; burying himself in the snow-capped mountains of north-west America; meditating on a sunlit roof in Tangiers; or falling in love with Montmartre and the huge white basilica of Sacré-Coeur – Kerouac reveals the endless diversity of human life and his own high-spirited philosophy of self-fulfilment.

    E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."

    More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II.

    This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer.  This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early  rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias.  In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper, and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction." For all readers who have loved The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must.  From the Hardcover edition.

    As Walter Kaufmann, one of the world's leading authorities on Nietzsche, notes in his introduction, "Few writers in any age were so full of ideas," and few writers have been so consistently misinterpreted. The Portable Nietzsche includes Kaufmann's definitive translations of the complete and unabridged texts of Nietzsche's four major works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In addition, Kaufmann brings together selections from his other books, notes, and letters, to give a full picture of Nietzsche's development, versatility, and inexhaustibly. "In this volume, one may very conveniently have a rich review of one of the most sensitive, passionate, and misunderstood writers in Western, or any, literature." -Newsweek

    Turn on a single lamp and read it while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone sleeps next to you. Say it over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of culture-the constant buzzing noise that surrounds you-has momentarily stopped. This poem has come from a great distance to find you." So begins this astonishing book by one of our leading poets and critics. In an unprecedented exploration of the genre, Hirsch writes about what poetry is, why it matters, and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message-which is of vital importance in day-to-day life-can reach us and make a difference. For Hirsch, poetry is not just a part of life, it is life, and expresses like no other art our most sublime emotions. In a marvelous reading of world poetry, including verse by such poets as Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Charles Baudelaire, and many more, Hirsch discovers the meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts. A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives but don't know how to read it.