Besides discussions of Austen's novels and letters, there are essays on religion, politics, class consciousness, publishing practices, domestic economy, style in the novels and the significance of her juvenile works. A chronology provides biographical information, and assessments of the history of Austen criticism highlight the most interesting recent studies in a vast field of critical diversity.

    This anthology of classic and cutting-edge statements in literary theory has now been updated to include recent influential texts in the areas of Ethnic Studies, Postcolonialism and International StudiesA definitive collection of classic statements in criticism and new theoretical work from the past few decades All the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory are represented, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Enables students to familiarise themselves with the most recent developments in literary theory and with the traditions from which these new theories derive

    The author, who draws on thousands of letters Sayers wrote, reveals her to be a complex woman. Sayers was a very private person who even hid the existence of an illegitimate child from her closest friends. She was also someone to whom faith was central and wrote many theological books as well as the famous detective novels. Her radio play on the life of Christ, "The Man Born to be King", caused a furore when it was first broadcast and went on to win acclaim. She was linked with the Inklings - the group of writers which included C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien and others.

    His illustrations for Scribner's Illustrated Classics (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans, The Yearling) are etched into the collective memory of generations of readers. He was hailed as the greatest American illustrator of his day. For forty-three years, starting in 1902, N.C. Wyeth painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals, as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literature. Yet despite worldwide acclaim, he judged himself a failure, believing that illustration was of no importance.David Michaelis tells the story of Wyeth's family through four generations -- a saga that begins and ends with tragedy -- and brings to life the huge-spirited, deeply complicated man, and an America that was quickly vanishing.

    Fans of The Mitfords, D.J. Taylor’s Bright Young People, and Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons will find much to savor in Paula Byrne’s wonderful Mad World.

    But, barely one thousand days into his Presidency, he was assassinated. JFK in an Hour provides a compelling and comprehensive overview of this man credited with introducing an aspirational new approach to American politics.Learn about the Kennedy family, the cast that propelled JFK to success despite family tragedy. Discover Kennedy’s talented diplomatic skills when navigating the Space Race, the nuclear missile crisis and his sympathies with the fledging civil rights movement. Learn about the man himself, the charming son, brother and husband, who maintained a charismatic public image, despite suffering from chronic illness all his life. JFK in an Hour provides key insight into why Kennedy epitomised the hopes of a new decade, and remains such an influential figure to this day.Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour…

    After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself.

    He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria and personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, a library of books never written.

    This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer.  This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early  rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias.  In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper, and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction." For all readers who have loved The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must.  From the Hardcover edition.

    This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father.Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka’s German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka’s demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka’s poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka’s story “The Judgement,” about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka’s books—stories suffused with guilt and frustration—derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime.Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.

    In Process, acclaimed journalist Sarah Stodola examines the creative methods of literature’s most transformative figures. Each chapter contains a mini biography of one of the world’s most lauded authors, focused solely on his or her writing process. Unlike how-to books that preach writing techniques or rules, Process puts the true methods of writers on display in their most captivating incarnation: within the context of the lives from which they sprang. Drawn from both existing material and original research and interviews, Stodola brings to light the fascinating, unique, and illuminating techniques behind these literary behemoths.

     MAX PERKINS: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg took the literary world by storm upon its publication in 1978, garnering rave reviews and winning the National Book Award. A meticulously-researched and engaging portrait of the man who introduced the public to the greatest writers of this century, Berg's biography stands as one of the finest books on the publishing industry ever written. Unavailable for the last few years, MAX PERKINS is now being re-released (on the fiftieth anniversary of the great editor's death. The driving force behind such literary superstars as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, Max Evarts Perkins was the most admired book editor in the world. From the first major novel he edited (Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise) to the last (James Jones's bestselling From Here to Eternity), Perkins revolutionized American literature. Perkins was tirelessly committed to nurturing talent no matter how young or unproven the writer. Filled with colorful anecdotes about everything from Perkins's struggles to convince the old guard at Scribners to publish his visionary (and often controversial) authors to his falling out with one of his most brilliant discoveries, Thomas Wolfe, MAX PERKINS reveals with insight and humor the professional and personal life of one of the most legendary figures in the history of American publishing. Given unprecedented access to the correspondence between Perkins and his writers, Berg has fashioned a compellingly thorough biography that is as entertaining as it is informative. A vivid portrait of one man's life and a revealing behind-the-scenes look at the creation of literature, A. Scott Berg's MAX PERKINS: Editor of Genius is a masterful achievement in scholarship and writing.

    (The Great Courses #302)Keats compared discovering Homer to "finding a new planet." What is it in Homer's great works—and especially the Odyssey—that so enthralled him? Why have readers before and since reacted the same way?By joining award-winning classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver for these lectures on the Odyssey, you can get answers to these and hundreds of other questions.

    A revelatory look into the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, considered in his time to be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer, winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Mary Dearborn's new biography gives the richest and most nuanced portrait to date of this complex, enigmatically unique American artist, whose same uncontrollable demons that inspired and drove him throughout his life undid him at the end, and whose seven novels and six-short story collections informed--and are still informing--fiction writing generations after his death.

    P. Lovecraft, the seminal, enigmatic horror writer of the early 20th century. Houellebecq’s insights into the craft of writing illuminate both Lovecraft and Houellebecq’s own work. The two are kindred spirits, sharing a uniquely dark worldview. But even as he outlines Lovecraft’s rejection of this loathsome world, it is Houellebecq’s adulation for the author that drives this work and makes it a love song, infusing the writing with an energy and passion not seen in Houellebecq’s other novels to date.