Included are discussions of Jane Austen, George Sand, Colette, Simone Weil, and Virginia Woolf.

    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fame, it's not widely known that he wrote a critical history of supernatural horror in literature that has yet to be superceded as the finest historical discussion of the genre.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.

    This bestseller balances a comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory — from Plato to the present — with the most thorough editorial support for understanding these challenging readings.

    With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind??—??a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

    Based on the author's 40 years of teaching experience and extensive publication, this time-tested, hands-on introduction to poetry, fiction, and drama writing addresses the dynamics of the creative process while providing a non-technical analysis of each genre.

    This volume contains all of "Lyrical Ballads" with Wordsworth's preface of 1800/1802, and a wide range of both poets' other work across their poetic careers.

    This anthology covers all of the major topics that fall within this subject and includes essays and excerpts from fifty authors, including C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Sayers, and Frederick Buechner.

    Although widely popular in its time, the work in its entirety has been out of print since the early twentieth century. This volume returns Sesame and Lilies to easy availability and reunites the two halves of the work: Of Kings’ Treasuries, in which Ruskin critiques Victorian manhood, and Of Queens’ Gardens, in which he counsels women to take their places as the moral guides of men and urges the parents of girls to educate them to this end. Feminist critics of the 1960s and 1970s regarded Of Queens’ Gardens as an exemplary expression of repressive Victorian ideas about femininity, and they paired it with John Stuart Mill’s more progressive Subjection of Women. This volume, by including the often ignored Of Kings’ Treasuries, offers readers full access to Ruskin’s complex and sometimes contradictory views on men and women. The accompanying essays place Sesame and Lilies within historical debates on men, women, culture, and the family. Elizabeth Helsinger examines the text as a meditation on the pleasures of reading, Seth Koven gives a wide-ranging account of how Victorians read Sesame and Lilies, and Jan Marsh situates the work within controversies over educational reform. Deborah Epstein Nord is professor of English and director of the Program in the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton University.

    In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

    Even if you already know your Hunter S Thompson from your Jim Thompson, you''ll still find it hard to resist a book which tells you which cult novel has been implicated in assassinations, which world famous novelist offered to throw himself off a train to prove his devotion to his literary idol and which cult poet and prose stylist inspired a Broadway musical and the Velvet Underground. There''s a critical guide to over 150 cult authors - from Kathy Acker to Yevgeny Zamyatin, including potted biographies, their must reads, and their surprising influences. Reviews of 100 cult novels - seminal works by authors who never quite achieved cult status themselves but still produced one classic work. Finally, there''s a cult collection - a feast of literary trivia which categorises writers by the diseases they suffered for their art, reveals 12 literary giants who wrote standing up, and pores over the little known fictional epics of Sarah Bernhardt and Benito Mussolini.

    Seuss, Mark Twain to Beatrix Potter--and shows that the best-loved children's books tend to challenge rather than uphold respectable adult values.

    In Promised Land, Jay Parini repossesses that vibrant intellectual heritage by examining the life and times of 'thirteen books that changed America.' Each of the books has been a watershed, gathering intellectual currents already in motion and marking a turn in American life and thought. Their influence remains pervasive, however hidden, and in his essays Parini demonstrates how these books entered American life and altered how we think and act in the world."-- from the book's front flap

    Skal chronicles one of our most popular and pervasive modes of cultural expression. He explores the disguised form in which Hollywood's classic horror movies played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind control catalyzed by the Cold War; the preoccupation with demon children that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the vogue in visceral, transformative special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the AIDS epidemic and the current fascination with vampires; and much more. Now with a new Afterword by the author that looks at horror's popular renaissance in the last decade, The Monster Show is a compulsively readable, thought-provoking inquiry into America's obsession with the macabre.

    Classic stories and poems of American literature are found in the pages of Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Whitman, Faulkner, James, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, and many others. As Professor Arnold Weinstein reminds us: "American classics are wonderfully rich fare. America is a mythic land, a place with a sense of its own destiny and promise, a place that has experienced bloody wars to achieve that destiny. The events of American history shine forth in our classics." When was the last time you read them? Possibly not as recently as you'd like. Why? Not because you wouldn't love it. But perhaps the demands of your daily life or some other reason have prevented this pleasure. Now, here is the opportunity to gain an extraordinary familiarity with each of these authors within a manageable amount of time, as well as review the great works you may already know. What Explains Greatness? These works are both American and classics. The course has been crafted to explain why some works become classics while others do not, why some "immortal" works fade from our attention completely, and even why some contemporary works now being ignored or snubbed by critics may be considered immortal one day. One memorable work at a time, you'll see how each of these masterpieces shares the uncompromising uniqueness that invariably marks the entire American literary canon. From Sleepy Hollow to The Great Gatsby, Professor Weinstein contends that the literary canon lives, grows, and changes. What links these writers to each other—and to us readers today—is the awareness that the past lives and changes as generations of writers and readers step forward to interpret it anew. The course was born from Professor Weinstein's conviction that American literature is our "great estate," and that claiming this rightful inheritance—the living past and the lessons we can take from it—should be nothing less than a unique and joyous learning experience. Experience Two Centuries of America's Greatest Works Professor Weinstein explains that America's classic works should be savored as part of our inner landscape: part of how we see both America and ourselves. He leads you through more than two centuries of the best writers America has yet produced, bringing out the beauty of their language, the excitement of their stories, and the value in what they say about life, power, love, adventure, and what it means, in every sense, to be American. Perhaps you recall: --Melville's prowling Ahab, on the search for Moby Dick, and the power of the "grand, ungodly, Godlike man" --The quiet diner in The Grapes of Wrath and the pain of one of John Steinbeck's "Okies" trying to purchase a dime's worth of bread. --The parlor in Long Day's Journey Into Night and the lifetime of tension in a simple request to a father that he turn on the lights. Rip Van Winkle falls asleep for 25 years for some mysterious reason—but what exactly was it? Why did Emerson believe in self-reliance, and why do we? Twain, our first media celebrity, tells stories that have an inkling of Peter Pan: Tom Sawyer never does grow up. But Huck Finn must grow up to face the racism of the South and get past his own polluted conscience—can he do it? James brings American innocents to Europe for them to inherit the world—but do they? Discover the Stories behind America's Immortal Writers Consider that: --Emily Dickinson was virtually unheard of in her own time. --William Faulkner's books were out of print until the mid-1940s. --F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing he had been forgotten. Readers of their times would be astounded if they knew the immortality these writers achieved, just as we are astounded that they once were overlooked. Most of us don't know that when Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass—seemingly in answer to Ralph Waldo Emerson's memorable wish for the poet America deserved—he sent a copy to Emerson, America's most revered man of letters. When Emerson replied in extraordinarily flattering terms, Whitman published his letter, virtually forcing the new poet's acceptance by a literati that would might have preferred to flee from Whitman's startlingly new, often sexual, poetry. Perhaps you share the common picture of Emily Dickinson: a passive, gentle, reclusive spinster content in her father's Amherst, Massachusetts, home. If so, allow Professor Weinstein to introduce you to her friend, clergyman and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who said of "gentle" Emily: "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." Through this course, you will learn to: --Explain the roles of self-reliance and the "self-made man" in the evolution of American literature --Identify the tenets of American Romanticism --Describe the evolution of the American ghost story, from Poe and Hawthorne to James and Morrison --Outline the epic strain in American literature, from Melville and Whitman to Faulkner and Ellison --Explain the importance of slavery as a critical subject for Stowe, Twain, Faulkner, and Morrison --Summarize perspectives on nature revealed in poets Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and Eliot --Identify the tenets of Modernism in the work of Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner --Identify the contributions of O'Neill, Miller, and Williams to American theater --Summarize the threads of the complex relationship between America's great writers and the past. Savor the Joy of Great ReadingDr. Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor at Brown University, where he has been teaching literature to packed classrooms since 1968. Brown University student course evaluation summaries reported: "By far, students' greatest lament was that they only got to listen to Professor Weinstein once a week." One customer writes: "Professor Weinstein is inspiring. Not only am I enjoying these lectures, but I am also rereading these wonderful classics and having a wonderful time." The course will lead you to read or reread masterpieces that intrigue you most. And with the deeper understanding you gain from the lectures, you will likely experience such joy from great reading that you may wonder why you have spent so much time on contemporary books. The 84 carefully crafted lectures in this course, each 30 minutes long, are your royal road to recapturing the American experience—and our intellectual and cultural heritage. Just review the lecture titles. All of this can be yours, and the journey will be as rewarding as the arrival.

    In fourteen brief chapters that draw from Shakespeare's world and works, and from other writers past and present, Scott Newstok distills enduring practices that can make learning more creative and pleasurable.Challenging a host of today's questionable notions about education, Newstok shows how mental play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraint, and freedom through discipline. It was these practices, and a conversation with the past--not a fruitless obsession with assessment--that nurtured a mind like Shakespeare's. And while few of us can hope to approach the genius of the Bard, we can all learn from the exercises that shaped him.Written in a friendly, conversational tone and brimming with insights, How to Think like Shakespeare enacts the thrill of thinking on every page, reviving timeless--and timely--ways to stretch your mind and hone your words.