How to Read Literature is the book of choice for students new to the study of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity, and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on classicism, Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism along with spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett and J. K. Rowling.

    However, since all of the letters referenced in the film did exist, we decided to publish this gorgeous keepsake ourselves.Love Letters of Great Men follows hot on the heels of the film and collects together some of history's most romantic letters from the private papers of Beethoven, Mark Twain, Mozart, and Lord Byron. For some of these great men, love is a delicious poison (William Congreve); for others, a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music (Charles Darwin). Love can scorch like the heat of the sun (Henry VIII), or penetrate the depths of one's heart like a cooling rain (Flaubert). Every shade of love is here, from the exquisite eloquence of Oscar Wilde and the simple devotion of Robert Browning, to the wonderfully modern misery of the Roman Pliny the Younger, losing himself in work to forget how much he misses his beloved wife, Calpurnia.Taken together, these letters show that perhaps men haven't changed all that much over the last 2,000 years--passion, jealousy, hope and longing still rule their hearts and minds. In an age of e-mail and texted i luv us, this timeless and unique collection reminds us that nothing can compare to the simple joy of sitting down to read a letter from the one you love.

    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.

    At her death in 1964, O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime. The keen writings comprising Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simplicity of the author's style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Also included are: three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two pieces on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the 8th Grade"; and four articles concerning the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are widely seen as gems.This bold and brilliant essay-collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of contemporary American literature.

    S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

    She invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. And she offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. As she works her way through one hundred novels–from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith and Alice Munro–she infects us anew with the passion for reading that is the governing spirit of this gift to book lovers everywhere.

    But the human legacy of the British Empire will be left behind in the shape of sixty-two Anglo-Burmese children, born to local women after affairs with foreign men. Half-castes, they are not acknowledged by either side and they are to be abandoned with no one to protect them. Their teacher, Grace Collins, a young Englishwoman, refuses to join the European evacuation and instead sets out to deliver the orphans to the safety of India. She faces impossible odds because between her and India lie one thousand miles of jungle, mountains, rivers and the constant, unseen threat of the Japanese. With Japanese soldiers chasing them down, the groups chances of survival shrink - until they come across a herd of fifty-three elephants who, with their awesome strength and kindness, quickly become the orphans only hope of survival. Based on a true story, Elephant Moon is an unforgettable epic tale of courage and compassion in the midst of brutality and destruction.

    The volume includes over forty of the Grimms' most beloved stories, including:Rapunzel * Hansel and Gretel * The Brave Little Tailor * Cinderella * Little Red Riding Hood * The Robber Bridegroom * Briar Rose * Snow White * Rumplestilskin * The Golden Goose * The Singing, Soaring Lark * The Frog King * The Juniper Tree * and Mother HolleWith over 150 paintings and drawings from the most celebrated fairy tale illustrators, including George Cruikshank, Paul Hey, Walter Crane, Warwick Goble, Kay Nielsen, and Arthur Rackham.

    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

    Non-fiction.

    Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams."A magical book. . . . The Poetics of Space is a prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the new foreword by John R. Stilgoe

    From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. In addition, this new edition offers a much broader representation of women authors, such as Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, as well as non-Western writers such as Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Chinua Achebe, Mishima Yukio and many others. This fourth edition also features a simpler format that arranges the works chronologically in five sections (The Ancient World; 300-1600; 1600-1800; and The 20th Century), making them easier to look up than ever before. It deserves a place in the libraries of all lovers of literature.

    In 1985, under the editorship of Margaret Drabble, the text was thoroughly and sensitively revised to bring it up to date.The sixth edition, published in 2000, was extensively revised, expanded, and updated. Almost 600 new entries covered new writers, genres, and issues, and existing entries were reworked to incorporate the latest scholarship. In addition to the extensive coverage of writers, works, literary theory, allusions, and characters, there are sixteen featured entries on key topics including black British literature, fantasy fiction, and modernism. The Companion remains an unrivaled work that places English literature in its widest context: no other book offers such extensive exploration of the classical roots of English literature, and the European and non-European works and writers that have influenced its development.The sixth edition has now been revised to ensure that it remains absolutely up to date: the invaluable appendices - the chronology, and lists of winners of major literary awards - have been updated, as have many of the entries. Informed by the latest scholarly thinking, and comprehensively cross-referenced to guide the reader to topics of related interest, the Companion retains its position as the best guide to English literature available.

    Forster's Aspects of the Novel is an innovative and effusive treatise on a literary form that, at the time of publication, had only recently begun to enjoy serious academic consideration. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Oliver Stallybrass, and features a new preface by Frank Kermode.First given as a series of lectures at Cambridge University, Aspects of the Novel is Forster's analysis of this great literary form. Here he rejects the 'pseudoscholarship' of historical criticism - 'that great demon of chronology' - that considers writers in terms of the period in which they wrote and instead asks us to imagine the great novelists working together in a single room. He discusses aspects of people, plot, fantasy and rhythm, making illuminating comparisons between novelists such as Proust and James, Dickens and Thackeray, Eliot and Dostoyevsky - the features shared by their books and the ways in which they differ. Written in a wonderfully engaging and conversational manner, this penetrating work of criticism is full of Forster's habitual irreverence, wit and wisdom.In his new introduction, Frank Kermode discusses the ways in which Forster's perspective as a novelist inspired his lectures. This edition also includes the original introduction by Oliver Stallybrass, a chronology, further reading and appendices.E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was a noted English author and critic and a member of the Bloomsbury group. His first novel, Where Angels Fear To Tread appeared in 1905. The Longest Journey appeared in 1907, followed by A Room With A View (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. Howards End (1910) was a story that centered on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. Maurice was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971.If you enjoyed Aspects of the Novel, you might like Forster's A Room with a View, also available in Penguin Classics.

    Presents an introduction to Shakespeare's greatest plays including Hamlet Othello, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest and Pericles.