Children’s Literature in Context
Author: Fiona McCulloch
Edition: First
Publisher: Continuum
Pages: 192
Price: £50.00 and £16.99
ISBN: 9781847064868 and 64875
Through close readings and a consideration of their critical and popular afterlives, this book takes students through well-known texts. It considers key issues involved in the study of children’s literature and its social, cultural and literary contexts. Works by C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are examined to highlight major themes.
The Life in the Sonnets
Author: David Fuller
Edition: First
Publisher: Continuum
Pages: 134
Price: £45.00 and £14.99
ISBN: 9781847064530 and 64547
In this controversial text, David Fuller works to recover the life in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and argues that the emotion that criticism often ignores should again become a central concern. First, he engages with the poems through feelings fundamental to the “young man” sequence of sonnets as presented in other writing and art by figures such as Plato, Michelangelo, Thomas Mann and Derek Jarman. Second, he recommends reading the words aloud without translating them into other terms, which brings out their expressivity and leads to a fuller understanding of their form, structure and meaning.
The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time
Author: Jane Gallop
Edition: First
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages: 184
Price: £58.00 and £14.99
ISBN: 9780822350637 and 350811
Jane Gallop revitalises debates on the “death of the author” theory by examining the effect the theory has on the author of a landmark work. She uses readings of influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to connect an author’s theoretical, literal and metaphoric deaths to discuss the idea.
Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings
Author: Vanessa Joosen
Edition: First
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Pages: 362
Price: £26.95
ISBN: 9780814334522
Using psychoanalytical and feminist critiques alongside Post-Modern retellings, Vanessa Joosen offers insights into the workings of fiction and criticism that are intended to resonate with fairy-tale scholars, literature scholars and general readers interested in intertextuality and fairy tales.
The Comic Mode in English Literature: From the Middle Ages to Today
Author: Murray Roston
Edition: First
Publisher: Continuum
Pages: 288
Price: £60.00 and £18.99
ISBN: 9781441195883 and 12316
Intended as a comprehensive guide to comedy in the English literary canon, it begins with a critical exploration of historical and philosophical theories of humour, and offers close readings of a wide range of major texts, authors and genres. Among those texts considered are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Austen’s Emma, Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.
The Art of Writing Fiction
Author: Andrew Cowan
Edition: First
Publisher: Longman/Pearson Education
Pages: 240
Price: £16.99
ISBN: 9781408248348
Drawing on his own experience as a writer, Andrew Cowan lays bare the notes and experiences that he has used in his career, aiming to give an introduction to the creative writing process. The book is intended to help readers master essential aspects of writing fiction such as structure, character, voice and setting.
Authorial Ethics: How Writers Abuse their Calling
Author: Robert Hauptman
Edition: First
Publisher: Lexington
Pages: 214
Price: £37.95
ISBN: 9780739134443
Introduced with a foreword by eminent classicist Mary Lefkowitz, Authorial Ethics is a normative study that considers the many ways in which writers abuse their commitment to truth and integrity. In case studies divided by academic discipline, it trains a particular focus on literature, journalism and art. Robert Hauptman argues that two major abrogations by authors are inadvertent error and purposeful misconduct.
Shakespeare and Material Culture
Author: Catherine Richardson
Edition: First
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Pages: 240
Price: £40.00 and £14.99
ISBN: 9780199562282 and 625
Examining the question of how language and material culture interact throughout Shakespeare’s writings, Catherine Richardson allows a reader to see how Shakespeare’s plays depend on objects and spaces of the early modern stage. By using contemporary diagrams, the author provides a visual guide to the objects of the time alongside critically focused text.
Romantics and Victorians
Editors: Nicola J. Watson and Shafquat Towheed
Edition: First
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Pages: 352
Price: £65.00 and £19.99
ISBN: 9781849666237 and 66244
Romantics and Victorians introduces the reader to European Romanticism and Victorian culture, using Wordsworth, Shelley and Thomas de Quincey’s writings as key examples of the genre. When looking at Victorian culture, the authors use Emily Bronte and Arthur Conan Doyle as points of departure to discuss a range of topics and concepts.
The Cambridge Companion to H.D.
Editors: Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay
Edition: First
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Pages: 208
Price: £17.99
ISBN: 9780521187558
This multi-author text contains essays on all of H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle’s) major works, focusing on critical analysis and the impact of her writing on the early development of Modernist poetry. In addition, the editors discuss her subsequent exclusion from the canon and her tendency to merge fact and fiction.
Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader
Editor: Timothy Corrigan
Edition: Second
Publisher: Routledge/Taylor & Francis
Pages: 488
Price: £75.00 and £24.99
ISBN: 9780415560092 and 0108
Film and Literature aims to introduce the historical and theoretical exchanges and links between the two art forms. The fully updated text is divided into three sections: a guide to the history of film and literature, 28 key essays by leading theorists and a section offering advice to students writing about film and literature.
The Romanticism Handbook
Editors: Sue Chaplin and Joel Faflak
Edition: First
Publisher: Continuum
Pages: 284
Price: £55.00 and £17.99
ISBN: 9781441164025 and 90024
Furnishing case studies for reading literary and critical texts, The Romanticism Handbook is conceived as a one-stop resource. Exploring the historical and cultural context of key authors, texts and genres, the collection seeks to provide a starting point for anyone beginning a study of Romantic literature. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary approaches, consideration of race and ethnicity, and a look at current and future directions in the field are offered, while guided further reading should serve to support independent work.
Doing Shakespeare
Author: Simon Palfrey
Edition: Second
Publisher: Arden Shakespeare/A&C Black
Pages: 372
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 9781408132142
In this revised edition of a successful text first published in 2005, Simon Palfrey offers close readings of speeches and scenes, seeks to demystify the language of the plays and suggests critical approaches to them. This edition introduces a different way of approaching Shakespeare’s texts through ideas of performance and the actor’s role, and the content has been restructured to aid navigation. Palfrey’s view is that the plays are not finished “monuments” but living material, in process and up for grabs.