Subject Guide: Literature

Recounts how the work of 19th-century legal historians actually influenced the editing of Old English texts, most notably Beowulf, in ways that are still preserved in our editions.

Focuses on representative literary works that illustrate turns in the history of individuality and subjectivity and the changes in ones relations with community and society.

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.

Examines all four verse continuations that follow Chrétien's unfinished Grail story, a powerful site of rewriting from the late 12th through the 15th centuries.

Examines all four verse continuations that follow Chrétien's unfinished Grail story.

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.

Seeks to provide an inclusive and thorough examination of romance literature in the middle ages.

Surveys the critical literature from the late Middle Ages to the contemporary period to show how editors and critics constructed various voices as a response to Chaucer's work.

Covers poetry from over 40 countries and the history of poetry from antiquity to the 21st 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.

Focuses on the trends and movements that characterized the development of prose narrative in Spanish America, with incisive discussions of representative works from each era.

Comprehensive guide to the literary works, writers, concepts, and terms of the era spanning the years 500 to 1500 from Europe, China, India, Japan, the Islamic world, and elsewhere.

Investigates the scene of debate or agon in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words-and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, historiography and tragedy.

Re-examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War.

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

Traces the historical evolution of feminist writing about literature in English from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.

Excerpts more than 200 feminist primary source documents from Africa to Asia to the Americas to Australia.

Analyzes the shrewd perceptions about human life, and especially human language, that emerge from the rich tradition of beast literature.

Demonstrates that Chrétien, who is credited with inventing the modern novel, and his contemporaries learned the importance of translation from the Mediterranean-centered classical tradition.

An illuminating, learned, well-written, and entertaining survey of the giants of world literature.

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

Charts the development of women's contribution to the world of letters within Great Britain from AD 700 to 1830.

Convincingly shows that our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, richer experience, and greater peace of mind may well be the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves.

Practical and amusing guide to literature that unlocks hidden truths and discovers the world of the works.

Uncovers the almost unknown influences of humanism on English literature in the 15th century.

Traces the process through which Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others adapted, revised, or resisted romance, mapping a world of increasingly uncertain allegiances and affiliations.

Presents examples of the work of more than 100 Japanese women poets, arranged chronologically, and of all the major verse forms.

Demonstrates the ways in which the imprisoned writer in the late medieval era is presented, both within and outside the Boethian tradition.

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.

Complete, critical coverage of the careers and works of the greatest writers and thinkers of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Restoration eras.

Traces English prose fiction from its late medieval origins through its stories of rogues and criminals, family rebellions and suffering heroines, to the present-day novels of immigration.

Poems written by the South Indian Srivaisnava philosopher and saint-poet Venkatesa.

Surveys the history of Western poetry from the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern period.

Includes the work of more than 130 poets-from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and America, from ancient times to the present-and demonstrates how poetry responds to the challenges of our modern world.

Provides some of the cultural context that readers need to know in order to understand medieval literature, such as the religious orientation of the people.

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

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

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

Argues for a relationship between Thucydides and Pindar.

Chronicles world literature from the Classical Age through the 20th century, discussing literary developments and the relationship between literature and the political and social climate of each historical period.

Offers 17 plays with critical commentaries that span the range of Western writing for the theatre from the Greeks to the post-moderns.

Surveys the Western dramatic tradition from Ancient Greece to modern America.

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

Tests readers' knowledge of classic and contemporary literature.

Addresses women's relationship to culture between the 1st century B.C. and the 18th century A.D. by studying women's poetry in Latin.

Analyzes the writings of five late medieval Castilian nuns who preceded Saint Teresa as authors, mystics, and individuals reacting to individual circumstances.

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

Includes a description of the manuscript, complete textual and explanatory notes, and a detailed critical introduction that explains the place of Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon scholarship in his book, Beowulf and the Critics.

Examines the intricate and unusual relationship between the sacred and secular spheres of English medieval culture.

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.

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

Reviews and critiques the works of many Christian authors who created mythological stories.

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

Provides both background information on and new assessments of Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds.

An illuminating, learned, well-written, and entertaining survey of the giants of world literature.

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

Works chronologically through the entire text of Piers Plowman and is designed to be read alongside it.

Practical and amusing guide to literature that unlocks hidden truths and discovers the world of the works.

Uncovers the almost unknown influences of humanism on English literature in the 15th century.

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.

Examines each of Latin epics in detail, showing how the three authors Juvencus, Sedulius, and Arator repackage the New Testament as epic, and try to make a bridge between two very different cultures.

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.

The Old English poems in this volume are among the first retellings of scriptural texts in a European vernacular.

Treats several important aspects of late 14th-century life: ideological conflict, social upheaval, and the changing role of religious thought.

Journeys through The Divine Comedy to discover what Dante reveals about love in his literary masterpiece.

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.

Provides some of the cultural context that readers need to know in order to understand medieval literature, such as the religious orientation of the people.

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.

Explores the lives of four Catholic women, Dorothea of Montau, Margery Kempe of Lynn, Mary Ward of Yorkshire, and Elizabeth Cary of Drury Lane, and the fate of their writings.