Subject Guide: Literature

Offers a provocative look at some of Western civilization's most infamous authors and their literary works and shows how these works have inflicted great evil in the world and still cause suffering.

Entries range from environmental writer Edward Abbey to investigative reporter/biographer Bob Woodward.

Descriptions of 500 books based upon interviews with teenagers and divided into 22 topics.

Helps readers to appreciate the full impact of impressionist aesthetics on modern British and Irish writers.

Introduces more than 400 recent fiction and nonfiction multicultural resources for preschool through grade 6 and encourages readers to make literature about diversity an integral part of their program of instruction.

Examines 19th-century social, political, and representational literacies and reading practices to reveal how Black women's complex and confrontational commentary often expressed directly in their journalistic prose and organizational involvement.

Summary of the story of black America through literature.

Traces the extensive and complex engagement with the past that characterized the imaginative writing of the 1930s.

Places major literary works within the context of the topics that engaged a great number of American writers from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression.

Discusses the issues and events that engaged American writers who lived between 1600 and 1865, providing original and useful readings of important literary works that demonstrate how context contributes to meaning.

First full study of the autobiography, examining both the conditions and the practice of autobiographical writing in Romantic literature.

Reading guide and selection tool for 12,000 fiction and nonfiction teen titles published from 2001 to 2003

Covers over 14,000 titles of some classics, but mostly published between late 1999 and 2003.

Uses diverse authors to show how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.

Offers a variety of perspectives on John Dryden's work and its contexts.

Seeks to recover the lives and particular experiences of medieval women by concentrating on various kinds of texts.

Guide to the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937), the most influential single movement in African American literary history.

Explains the very significant pleasures of reading modernist novels and demonstrates how and why reading modernist fiction can be difficult through the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Djuna Barnes.

Presents new historical perspectives and critical approaches to the classic authors and texts of English literature produced in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

Introduces Victorian literature and discusses influential critical debates and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts.

Offers an account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life who was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement.

Provides high quality critical material on a selection of important classic and contemporary children's books.

Investigates literary texts, documentary texts, and material culture, spanning the Greek and Roman worlds to address the basic questions of when civil war began in Rome and when it ended.

Surveys the history of poetics and provides an introduction and brief biography for each reading.

Introduces nearly 90 of the world's most entertaining classic books.

Brings together elements of modernist culture, contemporary intellectual and aesthetic movements, and all the genres of modernist writing and art.

Guide to the creative output of the U.S. in the postwar period after the Vietnam War.

Uses the study of the writings of men and women in the 17th century to argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it.

Collects essays on writers and covers historical and geographical contexts that challenges the critical opposition between the monolithic state and the individual artist.

Profiles of 50 modern Southern writers of essays, poems, drama, and novels.

Describes how the British state and war machine struggled to produce a fully modernized and persuasive war culture in two world wars by freely cannibalizing art and literature in times of crisis.

Reexamines the fiction of the great 20th century American author from the interdisciplinary perspective of sociobiology.

Discusses Darwin as an artist and writer even more influential than his great contemporaries Dickens, George Eliot, and Tennyson.

Collection of conversations regarding the development and future of the literary canon.

Argue that the democratic ideal and practice of equality are grounded less in government documents written by a handful of white men than in the actions and writings of the radical abolitionists of the 19th century.

Shows how gender bias affected what counted as more valuable among Latin and other clerical modes of literacy and vernacular forms of speech and demonstrates how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations.

John Updike's 6th collection of literary biographies and essays on various topics.

Uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity.

Argues that a more accurate picture of Edith Wharton's appreciation of American culture and democracy develops through less engagement with controversial views about native Americans.

Examines the way pivotal 20th century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America.

Comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson's part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy.

Provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers and topics.

Guide to the history and development of feminist literature, from early fairy tales to works by great women writers of today.

Explores the complex relationship between literature and politics.

Considers the writings of the British dynasty family, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley collectively.

Highlights Wayne Booth's contributions to literary and rhetorical studies.

Explores the history of women and feminism throughout literature, from classical antiquity to modern times.

Provides an overview of popular feminist fiction from the late 1960s to the end of the 1990s, looking at how key feminist texts influenced popular contemporary works.

Analyzes novels, nonfiction prose, poetry, paintings, and photographs to examine the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work.

Examines southern women writers and explores the craft of writing while tracing her own development from rebellious college student to award-winning author of 19 books.

Examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War.

Evaluates Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison from an orthodox Christian perspective.

Includes excerpts from 30 of the greatest works in western literature and essays about those works written by distinguished professors, lecturers, and authors.

A journey through 2 1/2 millennia of classical books as powerful, thrilling, erotic, politically astute, and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.

Examines the works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound in light of World War 1.

Recounts the full adventures of Harriet Jacobs, before and after slavery.

Collects three decades of writings from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s many fields of interest and expertise.

Offers a wide-ranging narrative overview of literature in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900.

Practical and amusing guide to literature and explores major themes, literary models, narrative devices, and form.

Re-evaluates the authors and texts generally recognized as the 'canon' of Irish literature in the light of newly-identified famine discourse.

Argues that the significance of Coetzee's fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics.

Uses previously unpublished letters by women writers to explore the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences.

Provides a comprehensive history of women's writing in Britain from the Restoration to the French Revolution.

Tracks the evolution of Modernism from its emergence in the late 19th century to its recent incarnations.

Gives analysis and criticism on recent novels and other works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Gives analysis and criticism on recent novels and other works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Provides scholars with the necessary methods and tools for studying literature produced between 1880 and 1945.

Invite residents and out-of-state visitors to explore North Carolina while reading literature from our state's finest writers, including O. Henry and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A survey of the interaction between science and Anglo-American literature from the late medieval period to the 20th century, examining how authors, thinkers, and philosophers have viewed science in literary texts, and used science as a window to the future.

Collection of psychoanalytic readings of literary texts and literary readings of psychoanalytic texts.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life.

Meet Shakespeare, Heine and Hogarth south of the river, find Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, discover Blake and Trollope in Westminster, happen on the Carlyles in Chelsea, come across John Keats in beautiful Hampstead, and search for Bacon and Hanif Kureishi in the London suburbs.

Shows how Whitman approached successive editions of Leaves of Grass as opportunities to establish close, dynamic links between his poetry and visual representation and how he sought out friendships with numerous artists that left a legacy absorbed after his death into the fabric of American modernism.

Shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism.

Offers a new critical examination of the complex and mutually-sustaining relationship between literature and science - and, more broadly, art and nature - in the early modern period.

Argues that the religious import of American environmental literature have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source of "something that takes us out of ourselves."

Compares modern literary treatments of "end of the world" stories and charts an ultimate battle between good and evil that destroys previous social structures and rings in a lasting new order.

Reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of 20th-century writers.

Uses readings of prose and poetry from both the U. S. and abroad to highlight the variety of ways modernist writers represented the quotidian details of modern life, even during times of political crisis and war.

Explores and celebrates the rise and development of modernist and avant-garde literatures and theories of this particular period, from Imagism to the Apocalypse movement.

Shows how Romantic nationalism in Britain explored irony's potential as a powerful source of civic cohesion.

Focuses on Oceania's impact on Victorian culture, most notably travel writing, photography, international exhibitions, literature, and the world of children.

Presents the genre of mythopoeic fantasy from a holistic perspective, arguing that this central genre of fantasy literature is largely misunderstood as a result of decades of incomplete and reductionist literary studies.

Tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in U.S. literature from the founding to the turn of the 20th century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address.

Shows that conceptions of privacy in the 19th century became meaningful only when posed in opposition to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification.

Guide to the classical world and its literary heritage.

Focuses on the distinctive features of literary culture in the years after Water, the years the publishing industry began serving a mass readership, and the novels of Walter Scott, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines.

Compares the writings of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

Documents Hopkins's early family life and her ancestral connections to 19th-century New England, the African slave trade, and 20th-century race activism in the North.

Addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women's tradition of the pictured West.

Tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through various manifestos of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Investigates the emerging gaps between literary scholarship and the reading experience itself.

Defines postmodernism, compares and contrasts it with modernism, and places it in its historical context, and discusses the major theorists of postmodernism.

Anthology of African American women's literature that covers poems, essays, journal entries, and short stories to novels and black feminist criticism in the 18th century through the early 21st century.

Gives insight into the process and development of presidential speechwriting from Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to Ronald Reagan's.

Reports on a 2008 symposium devoted to modern presidents' speechmaking processes that included nine former speechwriters reporting on their work for every president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.

Invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation.

Focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put valorized "natural" feminine traits into practice.

Presents critical annotations for 1300 books published between 2000 and 2004, including reference, nonfiction, and fiction.

Introduces Renaissance literature and its historical, cultural and intellectual background from 1533-1642.

Takes as its starting point the wide-ranging work of Marilyn Butler on Romantic literature, and includes contributions by some of the most prominent scholars of Romanticism working today.

Explores how well-known women writers have influenced us in our writing and in life.

Argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative.

Aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalized.

Provides a comprehensive, conceptually challenging history of Russian literature, including prose, poetry and drama.

Uses seven popular novels about the Civil War to show that the war owes much of its cultural power to postwar memoirs, regimental histories, and other narratives authored by Union and Confederate veterans.

Claims that the history of the U.S. is hidden-in plain sight-within the pages of 20th-century American fiction and non-fiction literature.

Helps readers to appreciate the full impact of impressionist aesthetics on modern British and Irish writers.

Captures and examines sociological insights in 32 essays that discuss scholars and writers not normally associated with any sociological school of thought.

Offers both a detailed biography and a comprehensive appraisal of the literary achievement of Solzhenitsyn.

Uses contemporary poetry, essays, fiction, scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism in the first half of the 19th century to give a new account of this literature's relationship with science.

Insider's view of politics, critique of presidential and congressional rhetoric, and personal look at the political leaders for whom he wrote speeches.

Provides an overview of each of the major poets, dramatists, prose stylists, and historians of ancient Greece and Rome.

Looks at history as seen through the poetry and memoirs of three generations of literary women of the Zhang family

Comprehensive collection of Nadine Gordimer's nonfiction works - from reports on the 1976 Soweto uprising and observations of Zimbabe at the dawn of independence to portraits of such figures as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media.

Combines memoir with family history and reflections on the creatures and beings that command Silko's attention and inform her vision of the world, taking readers along on her daily walks through the arroyos and ledges of the Sonoran desert in Arizona.

Addresses the ways literature and theory have engaged with literary criticism, philosophy, and history and related concerns.

Anthology of the final works of great poets.

Argues that the private homes in transnational women's fiction reflect public legacies of colonialism.

Several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books.

Examines novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence.

Traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism.

Traces the steady rise of antiwar writing in American literature from the Civil War to the eve of World War I.

Humorous tour of the Western literary canon from the ancient Greeks to the Modernists.

Examines the role played by the men and women who help presidents find the words they hope will define their places in history - from FDR to George W. Bush.

Presents a bite-sized piece of literary history that looks at the origins and composition of 50 well-known pieces of literature.

Tours nearly 200 bestselling books, ferrets out their persistent themes and determines what those say about what we believe and how we relate to one another.

Enters the consciousness an influential figure in the history of American letters to reveal a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism.

Examines the connections between the innovative and influential writings of Wole Soyinka and his radical political activism.

Examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between 1574 and 1676.

Offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and representational strategies of Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate.

Highlights the significance of English writing between 1530 and 1580 to the formation of English nationhood and examines the impact of the break with Rome on the development of a national language, literary style, and canon.

Spans the boundaries between literary studies and history and looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance.

Opens a window onto exile in the years 1640-1680, as it is experienced across a broad spectrum of political and religious allegiances, and communicated through a rich variety of genres.

Examines the cultural history of Zora Neale Hurston's writing and the reception of her work.

Presents the 25 most spiritually influential and important books for Christians to read.

Organizes Greco-Roman, Jewish, and pagan primary sources relevant to the New Testament into a comprehensible and manageable format, and points scholars to both the primary sources and the important secondary literature on these texts.

Examines contemporary art and literature that grapple with the perennial questions of religious faith from Image journal.

Covers over 14,000 titles of some classics, but mostly published between late 1999 and 2003.

Examines the ways in which Catholic writers between the reigns of Mary Tudor and James I fashioned their own competing discourses of national and cultural identity.

Demonstrates the effects of the word-centeredness of the Tudor-Stuart Church of England on the literature produced during and immediately after the reigns of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts.

Study of the Roman Catholic, Japanese novelist Endo Shusaku who combined western and Japanese religious, theological and philosophical thought.

Provides a student resource to understand the tradition of Christianity in English literature.

Examines the relationship between the Christianity of the medieval world and romance.

This book links the concepts of patriotism, Christianity, and nationhood in the journalistic writings of G.K. Chesterton.

Focuses on the critically neglected area of Rossetti's devotional poetry and her prose.

Hill's criticism of poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley).

Covers important topics in the study of literature and film adaptations and the relationship between world literature and film.

Uses the study of the writings of men and women in the 17th century to argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it.

Gives readers the opportunity to listen in on the author's thoughtful conversations with ten contemporary writers,
especially for what they say about "wrestling with the sacred" in their writing.

Introduces the literature of early monasticism.

Approaches the thought of three colonial New England divines--Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Edward Taylor--from the perspective of literary theory.

Includes earliest Christian works from the 1st to the beginnings of the medieval period along with respected contemporary writings.

Presents the earliest Christian writings in a historically meaningful order and includes writings similar in age and historical importance to the books of the New Testament.

Organizes over 600 titles into subject categories ranging from biography, the arts, and education, to theology, devotion, and spiritual warfare.

Explores the roles that women played in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of early Christian books, and how the representation of female characters was contested through the medium of writing and copying.

Argues for the life-long influence of Catholicism on Greene's literary works.

A journey through 2 1/2 millennia of classical books as powerful, thrilling, erotic, politically astute, and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.

Includes excerpts from 30 of the greatest works in western literature and essays about those works written by distinguished professors, lecturers, and authors.

Equips readers to become better writers by introducing quality writing with over 60 classic and contemporary selections from numerous writers.

Brings words from some of the brilliant women who have been the revealers of their times, from a 9th-century mother in France writing a poignant self-help book for the son from whom she is separated, to a modern-day social campaigner in New York.

Seeks to bring to light the vital role that religion has played in the literature of the U.S.

Offers a theology for reading and practical suggestions for reading widely, reading well, and for making it all worthwhile.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Argues that the religious import of American environmental literature have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source of "something that takes us out of ourselves."

Covers over 500 classic and contemporary works of Christian fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, providing a plot summary, analysis of Christian themes, and an annotated bibliography for each title.

Asks why these ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants were so deep, why they continued into the 19th century and how novelists and poets, theologians and preachers, historians and essayists reinterpreted the religious debates.

Explores the interrelation of religion, cultural identity, politics, literature, myth, and memory by focusing on the cultural dynamics embedded in and surrounding Philostratus’s Heroikos, an early third-century C.E. dialogue about Homer and the heroes of the Trojan War.

Explores apocalyptic literature and seeks to understand why American evangelicals find the idea of the rapture so compelling.

Systematically grounds Augustine's theological reception in the history of reading and the material culture of books and manuscripts, offers a cross-confessional account of Augustine's appropriation in early modern Europe, and and provides crucial insight into the nature of intellectual authority in the early modern period.

Introduces the reader to the primary sources of Church history with commentary.

Helps the reader see God everywhere especially in things they read.

Explains the ways both regional and religious contexts inform the production, circulation and interpretation of Renaissance literary texts.

Develops a history of literacy between the middle of the 16th century and the middle of the 17th century by focusing on how Protestant and Catholic paradigms of the Word affect the understanding of how meaning manifests itself in language.

Uses literature and culture to show how anti-Catholic sentiment particularly shaped U.S. conceptions of pluralism and its relationship to diverse issues in society.

Explores a broad range of writings on spirituality in contemporary Japanese literature.

Presents a vibrant, complex picture of the role that religion plays in shaping and defining Latino/a identity through literature.

Shows us that in most instances style and faith remain apart, but that when the two are in accord the work are are witnesses against the enemies of truth.

Explores the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the 18th century.

Explores the place of faith in the lives of writers who wrote after Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1837 call to establish a national literary culture free from "the learning of other lands."

Addresses the ways literature and theory have engaged with literary criticism, philosophy, and history and related concerns.

Uses pairings of key writers and painters to track the varied meanings of the self in America.

Offers essays for Christian wayfaring.

Examines Wendell Berry's main themes of community, place, and conservation in his writings

Explores Dostoevsky's critique and exploitation of the jury trial for his own ideological agenda, both in his journalism and his fiction, contextualizing his portrayal of trials and trial participants in the political, social, and ideological milieu of his time.

Engages the field of Gospel studies over the last hundred years, arguing convincingly for viewing the Gospels as biographical documents of the sort common throughout the Graeco-Roman world.

Tours nearly 200 bestselling books, ferrets out their persistent themes and determines what those say about what we believe and how we relate to one another.

Offers a window into the soul of American culture and its literary figures.

Contains the great Separatist's solus writings from 1590-1591.

Spans the boundaries between literary studies and history and looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance.