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

Explores how readers received and responded to literary works in the 18th century and focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne's fiction and its adaptations.

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.

Presents career biographies and criticism of American travel writers between 1776 and 1864.

Spans from colonial days to the present.

Information about American women writers.

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.

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

Uses botanical language to read courtship novels from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James.

Recovers the lost lives and poems of British women poets of the Romantic era.

Highlights the ways in which women writers were key to the creation of the worlds of politics and letters in the 18th century.

Highlights the energy, variety, and inventiveness of the literature written in response to events in France and the political reaction at home from 1789 to 1799.

Introduction to British literature challenging traditional 18th century and Romantic studies and exploring the development of literary genres and modes in a period of rapid change.

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.

Offers the intellectual history of early southern American women.

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.

Covers American literature from the beginnings to the Revolutionary War.

Provides a comprehensive treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from its emergence in the 18th century to the present.

Demonstrates that philosophy, history, politics and social theory both influence and are influenced by 18th century literature.

Provides new perspectives on the relationships between literature and culture in Britain from 1780 to 1830.

Examines plays by Black and Asian women in Britain.

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.

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

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.

Offers a broad view of the writing and careers of 18th-century women poets.

Traces the development of English criticism from an obscure fad into a recognizable institution and a richer understanding of critical practice today.

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

Covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction.

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

Contains 75 Fables in original French with new English line-for-line literal translations.

Offers an inspired counterpoint to studies that emphasize differences between male and female Romantic-era writers.

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.

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

Provides students and scholars with historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism.

Argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern individual are quite literally one and the same.

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

Emphasizes the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach.

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.

A study of the history of reading Jane Austen's novels.

A study of the history of reading Jane Austen's novels.

Argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment and that her allegiance to a skeptical tradition within it lasted throughout her career.

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

Demonstrates how Johnson's criticism has for long been divided from the issues of modern criticism by historical narratives that have marked the progress of criticism from 'classic to romantic'.

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

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.

Discusses resources for both primary and secondary research of the British Romantic Era.

Tells of the rise and development of literary tourism in 19th-century Britain, associated with authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats and Burns to Scott, the Brontë sisters, and Thomas Hardy.

Charts the history and confluence of literature and film.

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.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

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

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

Analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women's sonnets ranging from the late 18th-century works of Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett, Christina Rossetti, Isabella Southern, and other, lesser-known female poets.

Offers analysis of Stael's life and mentality.

Assesses the importance of the 1750s in literary history and argues that women novelists engaged in critical renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it as a proto-feminist project.

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.

A study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s.

Uses German writing since 1750 to study literature as a cultural and spiritual resource in modern societies.

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.

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

Profiles 80 significant African American literature writers spanning from the 18th century to the present.

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

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

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.

Lists hundreds of places in Britain and Ireland and details their connections with the lives of famous writers.

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.

Offers the 1st full-length biography of the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the 2nd woman of any race or background to do so in America.

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.

Argues that long-neglected Whig poets were more popular and successful in their own time than they have been since.

Seeks to contextualize Swift within the political arena of his day.

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.

Discusses how literature influences the United States.

Provides valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of fictional genres produced in the United States from the late 18th century until the Civil War.

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.

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.

Study of the co-emergence of the U.S. nation and the new literary genre of the novel.

Demonstrates how Richard Brinsley occupies a significant and unique place in the theatrical and political life of Great Britain.

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.

Anthology of Romantic authors in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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

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

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

Considers Sheridan's theatrical and political commitments side by side.

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.

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.

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

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

Focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne's fiction and its adaptations.

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

Examines Dickens the Christian and shows how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work.

Suggests that graveyard poetry is closely connected to the mid-century aesthetic revision of poetics.

Emphasizes the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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

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

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