Literary Criticism

By Robert Hass

Universally lauded poet Robert Hass deals a beautiful, wide-ranging number of essays on paintings, mind's eye, and the usual world—with accompanying pictures throughout.

What gentle Can Do is a powerful better half piece to the previous U.S. Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and nationwide e-book Award-winning poetry assortment, Time and Materials, in addition to his previous publication of essays, the NBCC Award-winner 20th Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on a lot of his favourite topics—on writers starting from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and at the artwork of images in different memorable pieces—in What gentle Can Do, a striking literary treasure that may most sensible be defined as “luminous.”

By John Granger

Harry Potter. The identify evokes J.K. Rowling's wondrous global of magic that has captured the imaginations of thousands on either the broadcast web page and the silver display with bestselling novels and blockbuster movies. the genuine magic present in this children's delusion sequence lies not just in its entice humans of every age yet in its connection to the higher global of vintage literature.

Harry Potter's Bookshelf: the nice Books in the back of the Hogwarts Adventures explores the literary panorama of issues and genres J.K. Rowling artfully wove all through her novels-and the influential authors and tales that encouraged her. From Jane Austen's Emma and Charles Dickens's category struggles, throughout the gothic romances of Dracula and Frankenstein and the detective mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers, to the dramatic alchemy of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and William Shakespeare, Rowling forged a strong spell with the nice books of English literature that remodeled the tale of a tender wizard right into a around the world popular culture phenomenon.

By Kevin J. Hayes

The lifetime of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) is the indispensable writer’s biography—great works bobbing up from a lifetime of depression, poverty, alcoholism, and a mysterious solitary loss of life. it may well appear like a cliché now, however it used to be Poe who contributed to shaping this concept within the renowned mind's eye. regardless of or maybe even encouraged through his many hardships, Poe wrote essentially the most famous poems and intricately crafted tales in American literature. In Edgar Allan Poe, Kevin J. Hayes argues that Poe’s paintings expected the various instructions Western inspiration could soak up the century to come back, and he identifies hyperlinks among Poe and writers and artists equivalent to Walter Benjamin, Salvador Dalí, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean Cocteau.

Whereas prior biographers have tended to pay attention to the sorry info of Poe’s existence, in contrast Hayes takes an unique process via reading Poe’s lifestyles in the context of his writings. the writer bargains clean, insightful readings of lots of Poe’s brief tales, and provides newly-discovered information regarding formerly unknown books from Poe’s library, in addition to up-to-date biographical info got from nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. This well-researched biography is going past prior scholarship and creates a whole photo of Poe and his major physique of work.

Approachably written, Edgar Allan Poe will attract the numerous enthusiasts of Poe’s work—from “The Raven” to the “Tell-Tale Heart”—as good as readers attracted to American literary history.

By Cleanth Brooks

A vintage that has been typical by means of numerous generations, this publication contains exact commentaries on ten well-known English poems from the Elizabethan interval to the present.

Cleanth Brooks (October sixteen, 1906 – may well 10, 1994) was once an influential American literary critic and professor. he's top recognized for his contributions to New feedback within the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the educating of poetry in American larger schooling. His best-known works, The good Wrought Urn: stories within the constitution of Poetry (1947) and smooth Poetry and the culture (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a manner of figuring out poetry. together with his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist feedback, emphasizing “the inside lifetime of a poem” (Leitch 2001) and codifying the rules of shut reading.

Brooks was once additionally the preeminent critic of Southern literature, writing vintage texts on William Faulkner, and co-founder of the influential magazine The Southern evaluate (Leitch 2001) with Robert Penn Warren.

By Catriona Kelly

Catriona Kelly takes an enlightening and nontraditional method of exploring Russia's designated literary traditions. instead of continuing chronologically, she makes use of Pushkin because the crucial determine in Russia's literary genesis and analyzes how this “Russian Shakespeare” encouraged his compatriots, the origins of Russian literature (including folktales), and the way Russians regard their very own position in literary heritage.

By Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick

The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one among modern America's so much impressive writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, within which she considers the careers of ladies writers in addition to the bigger query of the presence of ladies in literature, is her so much passionate and focused paintings of feedback. A gallery of unforgettable portraits--of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle--as good as a provocative interpreting of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso functionality, a huge writer's reckoning with the family members among women and men, ladies and writing, writing and existence.

By Matthew Sperling, Piers Pennington

Geoffrey Hill is without doubt one of the most important poets at present at paintings within the English language. The essays collected during this publication current a few new contexts during which to discover a variety of his writings, from the poems he wrote as an undergraduate to the new volumes A Treatise of Civil energy (2007) and picked up serious Writings (2008). Connections are made among the early and the later poetry, and among the poetry and the feedback, and archival fabrics are thought of in addition to the broadcast texts. The essays additionally make comparisons throughout disciplines, discussing Hill’s paintings when it comes to theology, philosophy and highbrow historical past, to literature from different languages, and to the opposite arts. In doing so, they forged clean mild upon Hill’s dense, unique and infrequently not easy writings, establishing them up in new methods for all readers of his paintings.

By David Hopkins

Publish yr note: First released in hardback as English Poetry through Routledge 1990
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The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets collects jointly writings via the entire significant poetic figures from Chaucer to Yeats demonstrating their vibrant responses to one another, starting from elegiac eulogy to burlesque and satire.

The anthology is prepared in sections.
• half One includes poets' writings at the nature, characteristics and objective of poetry
• half is a chronological choice of poets' writings on their friends, with anyone access for every poet.

Each extract is gifted in modernized spelling and punctuation, and is punctiliously annotated to supply complete motives of unusual words and references. The index has been absolutely revised for this paperback edition.

The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets can be stimulating and relaxing for somebody attracted to the heritage of English poetry, yet may also be a useful choice of fundamental resource fabric for college kids and their lecturers.

By Thomas Cousineau

This examine explores the dialectic of destruction and renewal within the paintings that Samuel Beckett considered as his masterpiece: the trilogy of novels he wrote after global struggle II. It translates the trilogy as offering a subversive critique of the 3 idols -- mom, father, and self -- to which humanity has sought for safety and assistance all through history.

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Note: no ocr.

By Edward Albee

America's most vital residing playwright, Edward Albee, has been rocking our country's ethical, political and creative complacency for greater than 50 years. starting together with his debut play, The Zoo tale (1958), and directly to his barrier breaking works of the Nineteen Sixties, so much particularly the yankee Dream (1960), Who's terrified of Virginia Woolf? (1963), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning a fragile stability (1966), Albee's provocative, unsparing indictment of the yank lifestyle earned him early contrast because the dramatist of his new release. His acclaim was once superior even additional within the many years that with prize-winning dramas equivalent to Seascape and 3 Tall girls, in addition to fresh works just like the Play concerning the child and who's Sylvia? Albee has introduced a similar severe strength to his non-theatrical prose.

Stretching My brain collects for the 1st time ever the author's writings on theater, literature, and the political and cultural battlegrounds that experience outlined his profession. a few of the choices have been drawn from Albee's deepest papers, and just about all formerly released material—dating from 1960 to the present—has by no means been reprinted. subject matters comprise Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Sam Shepherd, in addition to autobiographical writings approximately Albee's existence, paintings, and worldview.