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.

    Using an array of examples from Melville and Dostoyevsky to contemporary writers Paula Fox, Edward P. Jones, and Lorrie Moore, Baxter explains how fiction writers create those visible and invisible details, how what is displayed evokes what is not displayed.The Art of Subtext is part of The Art of series, a new line of books by important authors on the craft of writing, edited by Charles Baxter. Each book examines a singular, but often assumed or neglected, issue facing the contemporary writer of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The Art of series means to restore the art of criticism while illuminating the art of writing.

    Jacqueline Rose stands back from the debates and looks instead at the swirl of controversy, recognizing it as a phenomenon in itself--one with much to tell us about how a culture selects and judges writers; how we hear women's voices; and how we receive messages from, to, and about our unconscious selves.

    During his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published only a handful of short stories, the best known being The Transformation. His other three novels, published after his death, helped to found his reputation as a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the twentieth century.Discussing both Kafka's crisis-ridden life and the subtleties of his art, Ritchie Robertson provides an intriguing and accessible look at the life of this fascinating author. Using Metamorphosis as a recurring example, Robertson shows how Kafka's work explores such characteristically modern themes as the place of the body in culture, the power of institutions over people, and the possibility of religion after Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of God.

    Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opens up appreciation of Heidegger beyond the study of philosophy to the reaches of poetry and our fundamental relationship to the world. Featuring "The Origin of the Work of Art," a milestone in Heidegger's canon, this enduring volume provides potent, accessible entry to one of the most brilliant thinkers of modern times.

    The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.

    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

    Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time.Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away -- escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso -- works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work: * love's labours lost and found* feminine hours* autobiographies of writing* the prehistory of the work of artStigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and our times.

    . . quite irresistible."--"Washington Post Book World."

    Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These “aphorisms” appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings–some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka’s death in 1924. While working on K., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zürau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka’s opus–a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.

    Less well known is Gaddis's body of excellent critical writings. Here is a wide range of his original essays, some published for the first time. From "Stop Player. Joke No. 4", Gaddis's first national publication and the basis for his projected history of the player piano, to the title essay about missed opportunities in America during the past fifty years, to "Old Foes with New Faces", an examination of the relationship between the writer and the problem of religion-this diverse collection displays the power of an autonomous literary intelligence in an age increasingly dominated by political and religious conservatism.

    New features include: a new chapter on queer theory; every chapter has been revised with new introductions with appropriate new critical vocabulary, critical terms, further readings sections, and web sites; new student essays; structuralism and deconstruction have been combined into one section to make the material clearer and more streamlined; and the addition of Plotinus, Giovanni Boccaccio, Joseph Addison, Percy Pysshe Shelley, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

    Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To Show and To Tell reads like a long walk with a favorite professor—refreshing, insightful, and encouraging in often unexpected ways.

    Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, "The Novel: An Alternative History" is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the premodern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these premodern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining - "The Novel: An Alternative History" is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.

    Instead, they saw themselves both as the end products of a dying civilization and as prophets of the coming chaos of the twentieth century. In this brilliant combination of biography and lucid exposition, their apocalyptic visions of the future are woven together into a provocative portrait of modernity.