Six Walks in the Fictional Woods


Umberto Eco - 1994
    We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.

A Glossary of Literary Terms


M.H. Abrams - 1957
    A Glossary of Literary Terms covers the terminology of literature - from literary history to theory to criticism - making it a valuable addition to any literary theory or literature course.

Find What You Were Born For: Discover Your Strengths, Forge Your Own Path, and Live The Life You Want - Maximize Your Self-Confidence


Zoe McKey - 2017
     The only route to success is to know yourself, inside and out. Through the framework of Professor Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory, you find your strengths, unique ways to enhance them, and ultimately use them to catapult yourself to success and the life that you’ve always wanted to live. All my life changes started when I understood that I was making a living from rat race jobs I hated and best case I was mediocre in them. By finding my main intelligence type I started doing something I love and I’m good in. Today I am a bestselling author and interpersonal skills coach and created the life I wanted. Now my goal is to help you create the life you want. I particularly understand what drives success and I also know precisely what's holding you back, and I can help. Finding what you were born for empowers you: - Learn about 8+1 types of intelligence and the research proven methods how to improve each of them - How to find and bring out the maximum of your innate strengths - How to make your vocation your profession - How can you divide lifelong success to small and easy day to day tasks You will also learn: - How to build higher quality of life - How to get out of the 9-5 rat race - How to introduce your passion in your life without the risk of losing your livelihood - How to make the best decisions for short and long term success What improvements will you experience if you follow the advice in this book? - You will live a well-balanced, full life - Wake up every day grateful and excited to see what lies ahead. - Know what – when and how to improve in you for maximum results - Be the role model instead of looking for one If you want to discover your strengths, make them your passion and live a meaningful life… Scroll up and click BUY NOW to step onto the road of success and happiness.

Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic


Alice Kaplan - 2016
    Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus’s novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It’s the rare novel that’s as at likely to be found in a teen’s backpack as in a graduate philosophy seminar. If the twentieth century produced a novel that could be called ubiquitous, The Stranger is it.   How did a young man in his twenties who had never written a novel turn out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than seventy years later? With Looking for “The Stranger”, Alice Kaplan tells that story. In the process, she reveals Camus’s achievement to have been even more impressive—and more unlikely—than even his most devoted readers knew.   Born in poverty in colonial Algeria, Camus started out as a journalist covering the criminal courts. The murder trials he attended, Kaplan shows, would be a major influence on the development and themes of The Stranger. She follows Camus to France, and, making deft use of his diaries and letters, re-creates his lonely struggle with the novel in Montmartre, where he finally hit upon the unforgettable first-person voice that enabled him to break through and complete The Stranger.   Even then, the book’s publication was far from certain. France was straining under German occupation, Camus’s closest mentor was unsure of the book’s merit, and Camus himself was suffering from near-fatal tuberculosis. Yet the book did appear, thanks in part to a resourceful publisher, Gaston Gallimard, who was undeterred by paper shortages and Nazi censorship.     The initial critical reception of The Stranger was mixed, and it wasn’t until after liberation that The Stranger began its meteoric rise. As France and the rest of the world began to move out of the shadow of war, Kaplan shows, Camus’s book— with the help of an aggressive marketing campaign by Knopf for their 1946 publication of the first English translation—became a critical and commercial success, and Camus found himself one of the most famous writers in the world. Suddenly, his seemingly modest tale of alienation was being seen for what it really was: a powerful parable of the absurd, an existentialist masterpiece.   Few books inspire devotion and excitement the way The Stranger does. And it couldn’t have a better biographer than Alice Kaplan, whose books about twentieth-century French culture and history have won her legions of fans. No reader of Camus will want to miss this brilliant exploration.

Poetics


Aristotle
    Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (‘imitation’), hamartia (‘error’), and katharsis (‘purification’). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.Malcolm Heath’s lucid English translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. It is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail and includes suggestions for further reading.

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature


Margaret Atwood - 1972
    Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: “What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?” Her answer is “survival and victims.”Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives.

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature


Erich Auerbach - 1942
    A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.

The Pleasure of the Text


Roland Barthes - 1973
    . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard

How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies


Robert Dale Parker - 2008
    It is also the only up-to-date survey of literary theory that devotes extensive treatment to Queer Theory and Postcolonial and Race Studies. How to Interpret Literature, Second Edition, is ideal as either a stand-alone text or in conjunction with an anthology of primary readings such as Robert Dale Parker's Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies.DISTINCTIVE FEATURES* Uses a conversational and engaging tone that speaks directly to today's students* Covers a variety of theoretical schools--including New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Marxism--weaving connections among chapters to show how these different movements respond to and build on each other* Offers a rich assortment of pedagogical features (charts, text boxes that address frequently asked questions, photos, and a bibliography)

Real Conversations, No.1 (Henry Rollins Jello Biafra Lawrence Ferlinghetti Billy Childish) (Real Conversations (Re/Search))


Henry Rollins - 2001
    Vale: Four leading figures in social movements discuss the state of Western culture and what led to its demise, with firsthand accounts of their own experiences, including subjects that concern every creative artist and thinker: The Internet and social change; why every one must paint( ); mind control, marketing, branding and consumerism; corporate chain stores and the problem of Amazon; punk rock history; the rise of Do-It-Yourself (D-I-Y) culture production; fame and its downside; sex and relationships.

Old Age


Helen M. Luke - 1987
    By examining the work produced by writers at the end of their lives, it elucidates the difference between growing old and disintegrating.

The Classic Fairy Tales


Maria Tatar - 1998
    The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel," and presents multicultural variants and sophisticated literary rescriptings. Also reprinted are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde."Criticism" gathers twelve essays that interpret aspects of fairy tales, including their social origins, historical evolution, psychological drama, gender issues, and national identities.A Selected Bibliography is included.

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory


J.A. Cuddon - 1982
    Geared toward students, teachers, readers, and writers alike, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory explains critical jargon (intertextuality, aporia), schools of literary theory (structuralism, feminist criticism), literary forms (sonnet, ottava rima), and genres (elegy, pastoral) and examines artifacts, historic locales, archetypes, origins of well-known phrases, and much, much more. Scholarly, straightforward, comprehensive, and even entertaining, this is a resource that no word-lover should be without.

The Birth of Tragedy


Friedrich Nietzsche - 1871
    Nietzsche outlined a distinction between its two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He believed the combination of these states produced the highest forms of music and tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provide a consolation for it. Impassioned and exhilarating in its conviction, The Birth of Tragedy has become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism.

Toni Morrison: Beloved


Carl Plasa - 1999
    Chapters focus on the supernatural elements of the work, as well as the author´s treatment of the physical self.