Literary History & Criticism

An intellectual detective story, this history audiobook directs probing questions at orthodox history, presenting disturbing new evidence that historians have tried - but failed - to explain....

A brilliant investigation into the motivations and methods, Dumbledore dives between the lines of the Harry Potter books to create a portrait of the controversial Headmaster....

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic....

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic....

The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!). These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance....

In the rigid theocracy of Salem, Massachusetts, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town....

Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.”

The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come....

From the moment Claire Randall stepped through a standing stone circle and was thrown back in time to the year 1743, fans have been hungry to know everything about this world ....

Legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story John Truby provides a guide to understanding the major genres of the story world.

The tellers of Greek myths—historically men—have routinely sidelined the female characters....

Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay....

In Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian illuminates the power of classic tales and their impact on the moral imagination. He demonstrates how these stories teach the virtues through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil....

All Souls fans have been captivated from the start by the many sources of inspiration Harkness draws on in her novels. Here, with her signature historian's touch, she offers an encyclopedic look at the series, complete with synopses, character bios, maps, recipes, and more....

More than a decade ago, number-one New York Times best-selling author Diana Gabaldon delighted her legions of fans with The Outlandish Companion....

In You Can’t Joke About That, Kat Timpf shows why much of the way we talk about sensitive subjects is wrong....

From breakout stand-up comedian Iliza Shlesinger comes a subversively funny collection of essays and observations on a confident woman's approach to friendship, singlehood, and relationships....

One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish....

Discover the powerful and universal lessons from the music and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, the genius behind such musical theater masterworks as Company, West Side Story, and Into the Woods.

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition....

In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them....

This CliffsNotes study guide on J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye supplements the original literary work....

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics....

From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death....

When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of 60 after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted listeners who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century....

More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.

From the childhood nostalgia of Peter Pan in Speak Now to the haunted halls of Rebecca in Evermore, Taylor Swift’s lyrics are packed with literary connections. Make sure you’re catching them all with this expert guide to the novels, poems, and plays that influenced her songwriting. Let a literature professor and a musical theater artist guide you through the Swift canon—from Shakespeare to Dickinson to the Brontë sisters. Learn what “New Romantics” has to do with the old Romantics, get to know the Gothic monsters haunting Midnights, and spot Taylor’s many Great Gatsby references.

While books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings beneath the surface. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the practiced analytical eye—and the literary codes—of a college professor.

Stephen Sondheim died on November 26, 2021, but for countless fans around the world, he is “still here,” to quote one of his lyrics. With acclaimed revivals of his landmark shows occurring around the world and introducing new generations to the man who transformed American musical theater, Sondheim’s legacy has only grown. What is it about such classic songs as “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy, “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music, and “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods that speaks to us so intimately and profoundly?

In this book, psychotherapist Dr. Stacey Simmons explores the tracks women are placed on that turn them against themselves at a young age. Using fairy tales, stories, films, television, musicals, and the lives of her patients, Dr. Simmons reveals an ancient pattern hidden in plain sight for over a thousand years. She named it The Queen’s Path, and in this book she explains how it has been used against women for millennia, and how women can turn the pattern to their advantage, and use it themselves to overcome obstacles and become the rightful queens of their own lives.

What kind of mother abandons her child? During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who overcame both society’s condemnation and their own maternal guilt to leave their children—at will or due to economic or other circumstances. The Abandoners is sharp, at times slyly humorous, and always deeply empathetic.

Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative has radically expanded our view of the Bible by recasting it as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In this seminal work, Alter describes how the Hebrew Bible’s many authors used innovative literary styles and devices such as parallelism, contrastive dialogue, and narrative tempo to tell one of the most revolutionary stories of all time: the revelation of a single God. In so doing, Alter shows, these writers reshaped not only history, but also the art of storytelling itself.

Auf diesem Hörbuch werden folgende 5 Texte, die jeweils den Gegenstand Kunst auseinandersetzen und verdeutlichen zu finden sein: Der Verfall der Lüge, Stift – Gift – Schrifttum, Kritik als Kunst 1, Kritik als Kunst 2, Die Wahrheit der Masken. Text 1: Ohne Lügen wäre Kindererziehung unmöglich, ohne Lügen wären Wahrheiten unmöglich.

生きることの喜びと悲しみが心にしみる人間洞察の達人が最後にどうしても伝えたかった先人たちの言葉

Gli scritti riuniti in questa raccolta vertono sulle funzioni della letteratura, su autori che Eco ha frequentato a lungo come Nerval, Joyce, Borges (ma anche Aristotele e Dante), sull’influenza di alcuni testi più o meno letterari sullo sviluppo degli eventi storici, su alcuni problemi tipici del narrare, come la rappresentazione verbale dello spazio, l’ironia intertestuale, la natura dei mondi possibili della finzione, e su alcuni concetti chiave della scrittura "creativa", come il simbolo, lo stile, la "zeppa" (ovvero i momenti apparentemente "morti", e meramente funzionali nello sviluppo d

Ein amüsanter Streifzug durch die Literaturgeschichte, der zeigt: Romanfiguren sind auch nur Menschen, und jeder gute Held hat eine Macke. Claudia Hochbrunn, Fachärztin für Psychiatrie, und Literaturwissenschaftlerin Andrea Bottlinger fragen: Hätte eine Erziehungsberatung Ödipus' Eltern vor dem Schlimmsten bewahren können? Wäre Romeo und Julias Geschichte anders verlaufen, wenn sie keine pubertierenden Teenager gewesen wären? Und kompensiert in Fifty Shades of Grey Christian nicht seine fehlende Männlichkeit mit erotischen Fantasien?

Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era.

The G.K. Chesterton Classics Collection brings together some of the most celebrated works of one of the 20th century's most influential writers, spanning his diverse contributions to detective fiction, theology, storytelling, and poetry. This richly illustrated edition includes key works such as The Innocence of Father Brown, featuring the iconic amateur detective whose sharp intellect and moral insight unravel complex mysteries; Orthodoxy, Chesterton's profound defense of Christian faith; and The Ballad of the White Horse, a lyrical epic about King Alfred the Great.

The first of its kind, this book is a unique literary examination of the differences and similarities between the American Batman and the Bangladeshi Neelkamal to highlight civilization's view of its heroes. As a comparative analysis, this work shows how both characters represent different cultures, genres, and periods while still sharing many interesting similarities in their characters, actions, and goals.