"Concentrating primarily on the 19th century, Lukacs offers brilliant reflections on Scott, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Flaubert, the methods of creating a feeling of historical reality, the tradition of epic, the use of the past by the rising bourgeoisie, the negative influence of naturalism, and the place of overt ideology." Washington Post Book World

    Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Toibin creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Toibin.For Toibin, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop's famous attention to detail, Toibin describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop's attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents--and how this connection finds echoes in Toibin's life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Toibin's travels to Bishop's Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today's most acclaimed novelists.

    This fascinating, definitive biography by the premier world authority on Proust redefines the way we look at both the artist and the man. A bestseller in France, where it was originally published to great critical acclaim, Jean-Yves Tadie's monumental life of Proust makes use of a wealth of primary material only recently made available, Marcel Proust: A Life provides a scrupulously researched and engaging picture of the intellectual and social universe that fed Proust's art, along with an indispensable critical reading of the work itself. The result is authoritative, magisterial, and a beautiful example of the art of biography.

    One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon.For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."

    Not only does it describe the genre authoritatively, but it redefines it, offering an exciting new analysis of this highly diverse and hugely popular sphere of art. With more than 4,000 entries and over one million words, this volume covers every aspect of fantasy-literature, film, television, opera, art, and comics. Written and compiled by a team of editors with unparalleled collective experience in the field, it is an invaluable reference for anyone interested in the art of the fantastic. This paperback edition includes thirty-two pages of update material obtained since the hardcover when to press.

    In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers, including Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

    His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. The book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.

    In this Very Short Introduction, Robert Eaglestone provides a clear and engaging exploration of the major themes, patterns, and debates of contemporary fiction. From genre, form, and experimentalism to the legacies of modernism and postmodernism, the relationship between globalization and terrorism, and the impact of technology, Eaglestone examines how works both reflect the world in which we live and the artistic concerns of writers and readers alike. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

    Derek Attridge argues that such resistance represents not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art.In this lively, original volume, the author:considers the implications of regarding the literary work as an innovative cultural event, both in its time and for later generations; provides a rich new vocabulary for discussions of literature, rethinking such terms as invention, singularity, otherness, alterity, performance and form; returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues the ethical importance of the literary institution to a culture; demonstrates how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a 'responsible, ' creative mode of reading.The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic.

    In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions.From the evolutionary model of ‘Modern European Literature‘, through the geo-cultural insights of ‘Conjectures of World Literature‘ and ‘Planet Hollywood‘, to the quantitative findings of ‘Style, inc.‘ and the abstract patterns of ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis‘, the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of ‘distant reading‘, that has come to define—well beyond the wildest expectations of its author—a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.

    The 2019 edition of The New York Times Bestselling Guide.PLAY BALL! The 24th edition of this industry-leading baseball annual contains all of the important statistics, player predictions and insider-level commentary that readers have come to expect, along with significant improvements to several statistics that were created by, and are exclusive to, Baseball Prospectus, and an expanded focus on international players and teams.Baseball Prospectus 2019 provides fantasy players and insiders alike with prescient PECOTA projections, which The New York Times called “the überforecast of every player’s performance.” With more than 50 Baseball Prospectus alumni currently working for major-league baseball teams, nearly every organization has sought the advice of current or former BP analysts, and readers of Baseball Prospectus 2019 will understand why!

    For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense importance for any discussions of the history of the novel, and for contemporary thinking about the future of fiction.

    He believes that they deny the existence of truth and substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda.

    Its fans tend to be fanatical, congregating at 'Lebowski Conventions' in bowling alleys across American and Britain, and even dressing up as characters from the film. Among the funniest films of the last twenty-five years, and one of the high-water marks of 1990s genre recycling and pastiche, The Big Lebowski is also littered with playful and subversive references to film history, especially to Raymond Chandler's world of hardboiled detective classics and the world of film noir. The Big Lebowski is the rarest kind of film, a comedy whose jokes become funnier with repetition. The same goes for its multitudinous jukebox-like references to other films, many of which open up vistas for intertextual interpretation. Underneath the film's breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed characters, a farcical collection of flakes, losers, and phonies, is a surprisingly humane account of what fools we mortals be. It is one of the oddest buddy films ever made, with extraordinary performances by Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. In this study, The Big Lebowski is set into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomised for its witty relationship with the classics which it satirises, and discussed in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of ridiculously unmanly men in the world of discombobulated, mixed-up, or put-on identities that is Los Angeles.