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.

Comprehensive list of mood-altering stories

Describes the physical surroundings and objects of Shakespeare's world.

Includes 1,300 biographies mostly from the U.S.

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.

Looks at the life of Andrew Marvell from his early employment as a tutor and gentleman's companion to his suspicious death, reputedly a politically fueled poisoning.

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.

Exploration of the influence of the Roman Augustan aesthetic on English neo-classical poets of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Constructs a tradition of American women's writing that is multiple and inclusive and that brings together women's voices from across a broad spectrum of U.S. social life.

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.

A portrait of the diverse literary cultures of the city from its beginnings as a Dutch colony to the present.

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

Covers American literature from the beginnings to the Revolutionary 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.

Examines plays by Black and Asian women in Britain.

Facts about Shakespeare's life and works.

Provides an overview of developments of French children literature from the 17th century to the present day.

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

Provides new perspectives on early children's literary texts and the work of children's literature scholar Mitzi Myers through the use of new historicist, feminist, and cultural studies critiques.

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.

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

Comprehensive information about the literary works, writers, and concepts of literature from approximately 1500 to 1660 CE in Europe, China, India, Japan, the Islamic world, and the Jewish diaspora, the New World, Africa, and Oceania.

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.

Companion for literature surveys of feminist critical and theoretical texts from over 100 writers and scholars are featured.

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

Tells how rape and seduction came to be distinguished according to measures of women's resistance and consent in low-brow " writing and how amatory fictions interrogated the implications of their own procedures.

Describes the ideological, intellectual, and literary role of ghost stories in early modern French culture.

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

Offers an interdisciplinary investigation of the historical evidence for the presence of ancient Greek tragedy in the post-Restoration British theatre.

Examines the span of Spanish and Latin American arts.

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

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

Discusses the works of three female American poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).

Argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the 16th century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama.

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

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.

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

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

Explores the relationship of gender and justice represented in English Renaissance drama.

Presents the lives and critical works of over 170 women writers in Latin America between the 16th and 20th centuries.

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

Argues that kinship relations between writers, both literal and figurative, played a central part in the creation of a national tradition of English literature.

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.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Provides an introduction to the process and art of literature-to-film adaptations.

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.

Examines figures afflicted with romantic love in early modern literature, provides a historical context for their malady, and discusseshow the literary representation of lovesickness relates to wider issues of gender and identity.

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.

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.

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.

Explores how ongoing engagements reflected the nature of the 'Turke' in 16th century English literature.

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

The most comprehensive coverage available on all aspects of Shakespeare's life and works.

Treats translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right from the Middle Ages to the year 2000, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers.

Comprehensive guide to the historical and cultural context of English Literature that covers the core periods of literature and history from the English Renaissance to the present.

Examines English patriotism in the 16th century to discern its nature and modes of cultural expression and to consider its use in political and religious propaganda.

Analyses of space map a variety of ways medieval narratives encoded meaning.

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.

Focuses on Andrew Marvell and the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, anti-clericalism.

Offers a new understanding of Victorian novels through Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Discusses how literature influences the United States.

Promotes reading women's poems, rather than forming theories about them, and tells why until quite recently anthologies of English poetry contained very few poems by women.

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

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

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

Provides an introduction to literature and its context from 1603-1688, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background.

Applies historical formalism to Shakespeare's works.

Demonstrates that the classics are of central importance in Shakespeare's plays and in the structure of his imagination.

Examines the ways in which William Shakespeare's stories have been adapted for children, particularly in Mary and Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare in 1807.

Explores Shakespeare's understanding and use of the metaphor body politic in a range of plays.

Covers the plays, the life of Shakespeare, his world continuing influence on modern culture.

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

First study of English historical plays about the Turks in relation to their sources and analogues, including histories originating in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish.

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

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.

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.

Uses works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne to show that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement.

Lists Renaissance writers, a brief descriptive annotation, and relevant websites about them.

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

Showcases 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women.

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.

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

The author recounts the story of his life through Shakespeare, and in turn shows us what Shakespeare can tell us about the world.

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.

Collection of a wide variety of works by Spanish women writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Collection of a wide variety of works by Spanish women writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.

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

Examines the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), author of the Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, and The Defence of Poesy, and the most immediately influential writer of the Elizabethan period.

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.

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

Weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice.

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.

Assesses the complexity and fluidity of Christian identity along with debate about readmission of the Jews in 17th-century England.

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

Reveals in the works of Shakespeare and his sources the figure of the citizen-saint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception.

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

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).

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

Challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty.

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.

Posits new ways of understanding the relations between devotional literature and early modern English culture.

Offers a comprehensive account of the literary and theological background to English devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, concentrating on Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw.

Pairs full-color reproductions of some of Rembrandt's most powerful religious paintings with finely crafted poems reflecting on them.

Offers a close reading of pivotal passages and critical concerns in 'Paradise Lost' and examines Milton's presentation of Adam and Eve's relationship through the intersections of theology and gender in the poem.

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

Shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600.

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

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.

Explores Donne's divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occassions, and his sermons.

Argues the thesis that John Donne's poetry can now profit from being read in the context of early modern cultural experience, specifically its visual culture.

Assesses Milton's significance to the development of early modern English political thought, his conception of the English nation, and his response to pressures exerted by a secular modernity grounded on international commercial activities.

To understand how Johnson creatively appropriates Milton's texts, critically challenges and confirms Milton's status, and constructs him as a biographical subject, is to deepen the modern reader's understanding of both writers in the context of historical continuity and change.

Moves seamlessly through a wide range of post-Reformation writers encountering and sometimes confronting institutional Christianity.

Examines how a literary tradition of dissent against joining the state church after the return of monarchy in 1660 was produced by those who suffered political defeat and religious exclusion in Restoration England.

Focuses on the Book of Common Prayer's importance in England's political, intellectual, religious, and literary history.

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."

Explores the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past.

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.

Challenges many received ideas about Milton's brand of Christianity, philosophy, and poetry.

Addresses Milton's treatment of millennial and apocalyptic ideas, topics of major importance in the religious and philosophical thought of his day.

Considers how John Milton's later works demonstrate the intensive struggle of spiritual reading.

Offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination.

Highlights the importance of Stanley Fish to Milton studies and provides major insights into the nature of Miltons works.

Examines patterns of ecclesiological and affective imagery in several of Milton's poems, including Lycidas, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes.

Examines the important ways in which Lewis so clearly echoes Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen and John Milton's Paradise Lost in The Chronicles of Narnia.

An account of the life, times, politics, loves, and letters of the great English poet John Milton.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Tells of over 500 literary locales across the United States and Europe.

Applies interdisciplinary approaches to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

Combines commentaries on Milton's Paradise Lost in the last three centuries.

Studies and compares the poetry of George Herbert and R.S. Thomas.

Uses various approaches and deals with various texts to show the complexity of Traherne's work by placing it directly within current critical debates and within 16th-century contexts.

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.

Examines the impact of theology on Shakespeare's poetry.

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

Examines the religious background of Shakespeare's works and helps students use his plays to understand religion in Elizabethan England.

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.

Provides an introduction to literature and its context from 1603-1688, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background.

Deals with the topic of Shakespeare and religion from the history and postmodern philosophy and theology.

Brings together 16 original essays by leading scholars who examine Shakespeare's works in light of this new scholarship: their goal is to explore a possible interpretive consensus from Protestant, Catholic, and secular perspectives.

Argues that throughout his career Shakespeare positioned his writing politically and ideologically in relation to the ongoing and changing church-state controversies.

Traces the path of friendship through Miltons epistolary friendship with Charles Diodati, his elegies, divorce pamphlets and poems.

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.

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 Shakespeare's thoroughgoing engagement with the religious culture of his time.

Studies the figure of God as a literary character in the writings of John Milton.

Focuses on Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and uses feminist and relational psychoanalytic theory to study the challenge intersubjective experience poses to doctrinal formulations of difference.

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.

Shows how understanding the Elizabethan religious and legal context in which Shakespeare lived illuminates many of Shakespeare's works

Argues for a new way of reading the figure of Milton's God, contending that Milton rejects kings on earth and in heaven.

Focuses on the work of Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer, Lyn Bennett to show how rhetoric enabled these poets to articulate what the 16th century rhetorician Henry Peacham called 'divine and human things'.

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