Subject Guide: Literature

Comprehensive list of mood-altering stories

Explores why a novel succeeds (or doesn't), and how the novel has changed over time.

Summary of the story of black America through literature.

Explores African American historical fiction written by women in the last four decades of the 20th century.

Examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War

Examines the writings of F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein to show that this period brought a focus on shifting morals, searches for solid identities and the inevitable tensions caused by the economic decline and the rift between the old and the new.

Reads the rich body of 1990s American fiction in the context of key cultural concerns of the period.

Introduction to American literature and culture that addresses four common conceptions of the United States: that it is big, rich, new, and free.

Situates American literature from the Great Depression to the present day in its historical context.

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.

Explores issues of identity, history, family, nation, and aesthetics, as well as cultural movements and narrative strategies from over 70 different American authors and novels since 1980.

Contains 80 profiles of American novelists.

Re-evaluates the role of the past in recent American fiction, outlines the development of the postmodernist historical novel, and considers the waning influence of postmodernism in contemporary American literature.

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

Addresses Suzanne Collins's work from a number of literary and cultural perspectives in an effort to better understand both its significance and its appeal.

Presents a wide-ranging look at how whiteness-defined in terms of race or ethnicity-forms a category toward which people strive in order to gain power and privilege.

Analyses of literary texts and historical sources to show how a culture return to peace after a war.

Integrates perspectives from digital literary studies and film and literature studies.

Shows how particular landmark books took on the hot-button subjects of the 1950s and how literature shaped today's American culture.

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

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.

An eight-state literary tour of great writers from the Midwest of the U.S. and famous places associated with them.

Each entry provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading.

Includes the main currents of radical and innovative thinking in the 1890s, as well as the attempts to resist them.

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

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

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.

Explains how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres.

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.

Demonstrates that American writers have consistently tied the subject of national identity to the that the novel of manners is a dominant form of American fiction.

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

Traces the Indian English novel from its 19th-century colonial origins to the turn of the twenty-first century, with each chapter focusing on a particular historical moment.

Examines the connections between American philosophy and often-neglected works of literature.

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

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

Comprehensive study of the modern American novel.

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

Comprehensive interpretive history of novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 2001.

Examines plays by Black and Asian women in Britain.

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.

The reading habits, intellectual development, and contributions of the cultural giants of the 20th century are traced.

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

Covers contemporary authors and works that have enjoyed commercial success in the United States but are typically neglected by more "literary" guides.

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

Short essays about important British writers of the 19th or the 20th century.

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

Covers the most important writers outside of the U.S., Britain, and Ireland since 1800.

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

Investigates the claims made by Dan Brown in his novel, The Da Vinci Code, and provides quick, straightforward answers to the most troubling aspects of the popular novel and major motion picture

Explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and 20th-century American literature.

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.

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.

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.

Explores the cultural bearings of literary modernism across multiple fields, geographies, symbolic forms, and media.

Recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters and fictitious journalists in novels.

Examines the specific connections between contemporary cultural meta-narratives (the stories humans typically tell about themselves) and the ideas of hope found in Christianity.

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.

Offers a reassessment of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and examines her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.

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

Explores how character, courage, and human and moral understanding can be fostered by reflecting on the lives of others, through stories.

Compares the factual details of an event, political or artistic movement, or life with the literary treatment it inspired.

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.

Addresses these intriguing questions as What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression?

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

Analyzes the history of Western ideology from its pre-Enlightenment roots to its current incarnations.

Explores the concept and practice of improvisation in literary modernism and The interconnections between American literature and music.

Discusses the author's three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010 which speculates about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond, and investigates Utopias and Dystopias.

Traces the preoccupation in Murdoch's fiction with the way the past makes its mark upon us, haunting us and eluding our attempts to grasp it.

Claims that Irish long fictions were plentiful, readable, and illuminating.

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 career biographies and criticism of Japanese writers from between 1868-1945.

Presents career biographies and criticism of Japanese writers since World War II.

Shows how the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of the modern arts and literature between 1920 and 1950.

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.

Highlights the lives and extraordinary careers of Latina authors, as well as the social and political issues their works address.

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.

Helps those researching the American Realism and Naturalism literary period lasted from roughly 1861 to 1914.

Discusses traditional and new resources for researching this period of British literature and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.

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.

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.

Charts the history and confluence of literature and film.

Examines eight contemporary novels from eight cultures.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Covers a wide range of films adapted from a variety of sources, including classic and popular literature, drama, biography, and memoir.

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.

Tells how 30 popular writers were influenced to write.

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.

Essays on the lives, work, and influence of modern American women writers.

Contains 24 essays about writers whose work touched on Japanese youth in the closing decades of the 20th century.

Includes essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

Introduces readers to the history of the novel in the 20th century and demonstrates its ongoing relevance as a literary form.

Discussions of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Rose Macaulay that show how their work participated in contemporary debates about journalism.

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.

Probes the work of three writers who wrestled with new conceptions of time, place, and civilization.

Features authors from various countries and cultures who have lived in a culture other than their own and written about their experiences.

Explores contemporary feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial women writers' use and revisions of fairy tales and myths.

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.

Study of the African American novel that seeks to answer the question: what has been the impact of the African American vernacular tradition from the spirituals, blues, gospel, and jazz to hip hop on the structure and style of the modern African American novel?

Demonstrates the importance of rurality to the imaginative construction of modernism/modernity and asserts that women had a special stake in that relation.

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.

Probes the trilogy's meaning using several literary theories.

Considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling.

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.

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

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.

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.

Argues persuasively for new attention to the oft-neglected issue of class in southern literary studies.

Sheds new light on what is actually at issue in postcolonial criticism, focusing on major works, such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djebar's autobiography, Camus's The Outsider, and Fanon's polemics.

Sheds new light on what is actually at issue in postcolonial criticism, focusing on major works, such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djebar's autobiography, Camus's The Outsider, and Fanon's polemics.

Analyzes the criticism of English-language literature from the major regions and countries of the postcolonial world.

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.

Analyses the fictional and critical work of four contemporary Japanese writers: Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin.

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.

Explores the roots of the epic fiction of John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo.

Each chapter is devoted to a particular novel and provides a plot summary, an overview of the work's historical background, a literary analysis, and suggestions for further reading.

Examines how Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man, addresses the social, cultural, political, economic, and racial contradictions of America.

Identifies and explores a prevalent trend within the last thirty to forty years for re-visioning and rewriting the past according to modern social and political ideological assumptions.

Focues on the role of the acts of reading depicted in Proust's novel, A la recherche du temps perdu.

Examines what it means to return to works of fiction that have influenced us.

Insightful study of British fiction in the first half of the 20th century.

Revisits the Bildungsroman genre with a special interest in self-development and identity, as well as the viability of the classical concept of Bildung in the modernist era.

Explores the eventful times in which Baum lived, which influenced nearly every aspect of the Oz tales.

Clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars.

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 our literary mothers have influenced us in our writing and in life.

Reveals that women, as subjects of writing and as writing subjects themselves, played a far more important role in shaping the landscape of modernism than has been previously acknowledged.

Explores why African American writers-whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere-have consistently both loved and hated the South.

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.

Explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction.

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

Explores the ethical implication of the nearly universal human obsession with narratives.

Uses case histories of shell shock and novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf to show how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination.

Identifies a Virgil who speaks in female tones of the anxieties, exclusions pleasures and threats of the contemporary world.

Takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of many house museums of well-known American authors.

Highlights some 330 major Spanish American novelists and poets.

Seeks to recuperate the idea of a common American culture while simultaneously recognizing how much that tradition has occluded.

Presents the history of the 20th-century American novel as a continuous narrative dialogue between white and black voices.

Traces the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons and considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers.

Offers an original approach to Hardy's art as a novelist and entirely new readings of certain musical scenes in Hardy's works.

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

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.

Shows that The Da Vinci Code is filled with numerous historical mistakes, and offers background information on early Christianity from an unbelieving skeptic.

Analyse major film adaptations of 20th century American fiction.

Presents excerpts from criticism on major literary figures and nonfiction writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights and literary theorists of 1900 to 1999.

A reference for students in late high school and early college who are examining literature from the perspective of literary movements.

Shows how the meaning of Uncle Tom's Cabin changed over time.

With primary documents and critical analysis, situates war fiction and poetry within the historical contexts of WWI and relates it to issues of diplomacy, combat, propaganda, women's perspectives, and the aftermath of war.

Explores the modernist commitment to "unknowing" by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner.

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.

Showcases 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women.

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

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

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.

Describes the distorted, canonized history of the 20th-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.

Tests readers' knowledge of classic and contemporary literature.

Defends a rich conception of the space of literature that retains its links to issues of self-formation and metaphysics and does not let that space collapse into just another reflection of social space.

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

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.

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture.

Analyses novels written by and for women from 1945 to the present.

Tracks the development of the historical novel written by women across the 20th century.

Traces the history of male emotionalism in American discourse from the Civil War to the early 20th century.

Presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain from 1870 to 1914, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade.

Provides what the author considered the best and favorite scenes and insights as to what the author wishes to accomplish with this passage and the literary devices he or she employs.

Integrates perspectives from digital literary studies and film and literature studies.

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.

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

Explains how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres.

Account of a streetwise and cynical newfound faith of a famous screenwriter, and of how he discovers God in the most intimate and routine moments of life.

Comprehensive biography that uses extensive theater and film archives to reveal in detail Mamet's ideas on writing, acting, and directing.

The reading habits, intellectual development, and contributions of the cultural giants of the 20th century are traced.

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

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

Covers the most important writers outside of the U.S., Britain, and Ireland since 1800.

Demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in expressionism were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning.

Explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and 20th-century American literature.

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

A study of women playwrights from a feminist perspective.

Brings alive Lawson's era of screenwriting and drama in the 1930s and 1940s and features many of his prominent friends and associates.

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

Examines how Williams's confessional style and subject matter influenced a diverse group of American playwrights over the past six decades.

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

Discusses traditional and new resources for researching this period of British literature and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.

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.

Covers a wide range of films adapted from a variety of sources, including classic and popular literature, drama, biography, and memoir.

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.

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

Essays on the lives, work, and influence of modern American women writers.

Includes essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

Examines this Pulitzer Prize winning legend with a meticulously researched, sensitive look at the life and work of a major American screenwriter.

Features authors from various countries and cultures who have lived in a culture other than their own and written about their experiences.

Recovers a much ignored model of political theater for cultural criticism.

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

Considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling.

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.

Features over 125 American, English, Irish and AngloIndian plays by 70 dramatists that were published between 1890 and 1918 in 14 American general interest periodicals aimed at the middle-class reader and consumer.

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.

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

Explores why African American writers-whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere-have consistently both loved and hated the South.

Brings to light the important role played by drama between the Depression and the conclusion of World War 2.

Analyzes a group of 20th century British playwrights' respective strategies for persuading audiences of the need for radical restructuring of society.

Fifty screenwriters share how they broke into the business, how they transformed their ideas into box-office blockbusters, how their words helped launch the careers of major stars, and how they earned accolades and Academy Awards.

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

Presents excerpts from criticism on major literary figures and nonfiction writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights and literary theorists of 1900 to 1999.

A reference for students in late high school and early college who are examining literature from the perspective of literary movements.

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.

Traces the art of screenwriting from the era of the studio system and the blacklist through the rise of the writer/director. (Library Journal)

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

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

Contains 100 of the greatest poems written by 48 women in English over the past 150 years.

Describes the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry.

Analyses of literary texts and historical sources to show how a culture return to peace after a war.

Integrates perspectives from digital literary studies and film and literature studies.

The former editor and senior editor of Poetry magazine tells the story of the last half-century of the magazine's leadership in the publication of American poetry through correspondence with a myriad of poets.

Shows how particular landmark books took on the hot-button subjects of the 1950s and how literature shaped today's American 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.

An eight-state literary tour of great writers from the Midwest of the U.S. and famous places associated with them.

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

Explains how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres.

Takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world.

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.

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

Offers a collection of interviews with America's youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate.

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

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.

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

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

Short essays about important British writers of the 19th or the 20th century.

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

Covers the most important writers outside of the U.S., Britain, and Ireland since 1800.

Explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and 20th-century American literature.

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.

Examines the relationship between modernist and postmodernist 20th century American poetics.

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.

Offers a detailed evaluative documentary record of the publications, activities and achievements of 20th century British women poets.

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

Explores the concept and practice of improvisation in literary modernism and The interconnections between American literature and music.

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

Examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women since the end of slavery and Reconstruction.

Explores the personal and professional histories of writers such as, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Sean O'Casey and examines their relationships with the people, culture, and landscapes of Ireland.

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.

Discusses traditional and new resources for researching this period of British literature and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.

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.

Examines the Russian literary circle, a feature of Russian intellectual and cultural life from tsarist times into the early Soviet period, through the life story of the poet Maximilian Voloshin.

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

Comprehensive view of the major literary movements in Western history.

Essays on the lives, work, and influence of modern American women writers.

Includes essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

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.

Discusses modernist poetics and explores the peculiarities of the American literary field.

Argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known 20th century authors and canonical Romantic writers.

Features authors from various countries and cultures who have lived in a culture other than their own and written about their experiences.

Examines case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s.

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

Considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling.

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.

Brings together key critical and theoretical texts from the 20th century which have animated debates about modern poetry.

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.

Analyses the fictional and critical work of four contemporary Japanese writers: Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin.

An anthology of New Criticism of American poetry which is marked by a rigorously close textual reading detached from biographical or other extra-textual material.

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.

Addresses the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman-) and various important contemporaries (Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker).

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.

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

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

Explores why African American writers-whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere-have consistently both loved and hated the South.

Highlights some 330 major Spanish American novelists and poets.

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.

Brings together many of the great prose pieces--essays, letters, declarations, defenses, manifestos, and apologia--by the most influential European and American poets.

Presents excerpts from criticism on major literary figures and nonfiction writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights and literary theorists of 1900 to 1999.

A reference for students in late high school and early college who are examining literature from the perspective of literary movements.

With primary documents and critical analysis, situates war fiction and poetry within the historical contexts of WWI and relates it to issues of diplomacy, combat, propaganda, women's perspectives, and the aftermath of war.

Showcases 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women.

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

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

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.

Explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the U.S. into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development.

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.

Situates American literature from the Great Depression to the present day in its historical context.

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.

Analyses of literary texts and historical sources to show how a culture return to peace after a war.

Shows how particular landmark books took on the hot-button subjects of the 1950s and how literature shaped today's American 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.

Explains how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres.

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.

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

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.

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

The reading habits, intellectual development, and contributions of the cultural giants of the 20th century are traced.

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.

Short essays about important British writers of the 19th or the 20th century.

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

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

Provides academics and general readers with a collection of essays representing the range of feminist literary criticism.

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

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

Explores the personal and professional histories of writers such as, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Sean O'Casey and examines their relationships with the people, culture, and landscapes of Ireland.

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

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

Discusses traditional and new resources for researching this period of British literature and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.

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.

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

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Covers a wide range of films adapted from a variety of sources, including classic and popular literature, drama, biography, and memoir.

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

Essays on the lives, work, and influence of modern American women writers.

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

Includes essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

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.

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

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.

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.

Shows the astonishing range of poetic encounters with Jesus, with a special emphasis on 20th century poetry.

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.

Analyses the fictional and critical work of four contemporary Japanese writers: Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin.

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.

Examines how six female authors employed images of daily life to depict women's experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present.

Reevaluates the New Critical corpus, traces its legacy, and explores resources it might offer for the future of theory, criticism, and pedagogy.

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

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.

Explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction.

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

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.

Analysis of Terry Eagleton's influential writings that examines the arguments and implications of his major publications, as well as how they have intervened in wider debates in cultural theory.

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.

Presents excerpts from criticism on major literary figures and nonfiction writers, including novelists, poets, playwrights and literary theorists of 1900 to 1999.

A reference for students in late high school and early college who are examining literature from the perspective of literary movements.

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

Examines literature in its connection to virtue and moral excellence.

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture.

Contributes to current feminist scholarship on the "gender of modernism" and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the 20th century.

Explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the U.S. into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development.

Exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them.

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

Explores the period's vigorous exchange about the nature and identity of black childhood and uncovers the networks of African Americans who worked together to transmit black history and culture to the next generation.

Provides a social and literary overview of the field of English-speaking children's literature, along with its history and genres, current concerns, and possible future directions.

A uniquely in-depth study of the crossover novel, Falconer engages with a ground-breaking range of sources, from primary texts, to child and adult reader responses, to cultural and critical theory.

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.

Celebrates one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century: Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as "Dr. Seuss."

Surveys 400 English children's fantasies from 1850 to 2000.

Presents thematic groupings of titles built around current young adult literature for use in bridging to the classics.

Tells the story behind the creator and sustainer of the Nancy Drew series.

Follows the creation and development of the Hardy Boys series through 1979.

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

Explores the cultural contents of Barrie's creation and the continuing impact of Peter Pan on children's literature and popular culture today, especially focusing on the fluctuations of time and narrative strategies.

Historic overview of radical and progressive writers, illustrators, editors, librarians, booksellers, and teachers who cooperated to create and disseminate children's books that challenged the status quo.

History of the visionaries--editors, illustrators, and others--whose books have transformed American childhood and American culture.

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

Uses conservative-themed children's books to study such diverse fields as cultural studies, literary criticism, political science, childhood studies, brand marketing, and the cult of celebrity.

Provides a social history of girls' series fiction published in America from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century.

Analyzes the phenomenon of American picture books and what their imaginative form and content reveal about the modern nation.

Essays on Sendak, Steig, Gorey, L. Frank Baum, Tomi Ungerer, Jack Keats, Margot Zemach, and Ursula Nordstrom that show the integration of text and image, the abilities of authors and artists of picture books to somehow change our perceptions.

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

Contains 100 of the greatest poems written by 48 women in English over the past 150 years.

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.

Focuses on Christian theology and post-1800 British literature, but also refers to earlier writers, texts from North America and mainland Europe, and other faith positions.

Explores the innovative influences of the Book of Revelation and ideas of an end time on fiction of the twentieth century, and probes philosophical, political, and theological issues raised by apocalyptic writers.

The author tells the story of the spiritual transformation that produced a complete change in her literary goals.

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).

Focuses on contemporary Christian authors who have achieved a wide following through at least one outstanding contribution to the market.

Argues against the idea that postmodernism has undermined the association between religious practice and literature and suggests that the novel has become an increasingly vital, dynamic and problematic space for engaging with the sacred.

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.

Account of a streetwise and cynical newfound faith of a famous screenwriter, and of how he discovers God in the most intimate and routine moments of life.

Contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others.

Builds on the themes of Mud, Water, Fire, Air and Text, and explores the intersection of nature and mystery.

Covers the six decades since the end of World War II.

Explores the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes in William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other Southern writers.

Examines the specific connections between contemporary cultural meta-narratives (the stories humans typically tell about themselves) and the ideas of hope found in Christianity.

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.

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.

Explores the world of magic and mystery created by J. K. Rowling alongside the stories and grand themes of the Bible.

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

Points out general themes in the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling and matches them to the ancient motifs of the biblical writings.

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.

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

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

Essays on the major concerns and questions regarding literature and theology.

Demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective.

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."

Discussions of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Rose Macaulay that show how their work participated in contemporary debates about journalism.

Offers the idea that the modern "crisis of faith" is not a matter of vanishing spiritual concerns and energy but rather of their disorientation, even as they remain pervasive forces in human affairs.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

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.

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

Illuminates the ways in which Elizabeth Bishop's Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the U.S.

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

Celebrates the work of the Welsh poet R S Thomas and illuminates the theological implications of this famous poet-priest's pilgrimage.

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

Examines what it means to return to works of fiction that have influenced us.

Examines what it means to return to works of fiction that have influenced us.

Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

Show that Christian humanism informs a broad and important literature and encourages a genuine diversity of thought based on reason, nature, and the accomplishments of artistic genius.

Interviews writers and readers of the genre of evangelical romance novel and finds a complex religious piety among ordinary people.

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

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

Argues that Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work.

Nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection.

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."

Brings together many of the great prose pieces--essays, letters, declarations, defenses, manifestos, and apologia--by the most influential European and American poets.

Examines the role of war in Tolkien's life and works.

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

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

Positions Sayers' diverse writings within the critical climate of high modernism.