Literary Criticism

Oedipus, the banished king of Greek mythology who killed his father and married his mother, is the subject of Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy, a series of three tragedies that tell a...

A deeply moving and revelatory reading experience, the essays collected in Portrait of an Island on Fire form a searing account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history....

Cultural studies - indisputably the hottest subject on planet earth! But what exactly is it? Where does it come from? What is it for? It is a discipline that claims...

The Underground Sea is a succinct, urgent collection of writing from John Berger's archive. It brings together for the first time his work on mineworkers and the miners' strikes and...

In this collection of essays, Tom Paulin looks at the work of a selection of poets - ranging from Robert Southey to Philip Larkin, from John Clare to Ted Hughes...

"Who would write who had anything better to do?" queried Lord Byron rhetorically, and in this anthology, Philip Gooden finds hundreds of illuminating anecdotes about writers in support of this...

Who wrote Peyton Place? Was Animal Farm published before or after Nineteen Eighty-Four? Find out quickly who wrote what book with the help of this reference guide to writers and...

A collection of the year's best essays, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Wesley Morris and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman."Imparting some piece of yourself-any part-is arduous and warrants some kind...

"The Cultural Studies Reader" provides an introduction for students of this discipline. It presents a selection of influential and innovative essays in the field by writers such as Barthes, Adorno,...

With an introduction by Kamila Shamsie'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.'GEORGE ORWELL is one of the world's...

Jack Zipes has put together the first comprehensive anthology of feminist fairy tales and essays to appear since the women's movement gained momentum in the 1960's. He has selected works...

The publishers of Ulysses by James Joyce were brought to trial and convicted of obscenity in the USA in 1921. The immortal prose, ultimately recognized as the greatest English language...

Like its three predecessors, this fourth instalment of Trinity Tales gathers together recollections of a decade at Trinity College Dublin. This time, the story is taken up by 1990s graduates-...

This handsome volume presents more than twenty images of book covers, poems and other works that reflect Sligo's presence in the work of W.B. Yeats and his family. Thoughtful reflections...

The essential guide to the Bard and his work, celebrating 400 years of his legacy.The works of William Shakespeare have been a permanent feature on school curricula for years, and...

Informative, broad-ranging, this title sheds new light on the life and literary art of one of the last century's most celebrated authors. The first volume to be authorized by the...

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent lover Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida'sletters to the man she loves tell of daily events...

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers in English. His first book, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man laid down the template for the Coming of...

James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. This volume, with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more...

'Donoghue was alert to the idea of the unsayable, as he circled around the idea of language itself as pliable material, all the more beautiful for that and worthy of...

Irish life between 1930 and 1960 is normally presented as a sort of cultural wasteland. In a radical re-examination of the period, Brian Fallon challenges this sterotype and argues that...

That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. Now, after...

Shakespeare's sonnets of 1609 are as thrilling and persuasive today as they were when they were first published: perhaps no collection of verses before or since has so captured the...

"I greatly admire the work of Tiziana de Rogatis. She is a reader of deep refinement. Often I think that she knows my books better than I. So, I read...

When we think of great events in the history of the world, we tend to think of war, revolution, political upheaval or natural catastrophe. But throughout history there have been...

A-Z Great Modern Writers is an essential reference guide to the world's most important contemporary writers, boldly illustrated by Andy Tuohy.Artist and graphic designer Andy Tuohy turns his hand to...

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: How should a...

These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry's special ability to redress...

Traces the history of the Peppercanister Press and illuminates the evolving development of Kinsella's ambitious poetic project. The poems are discussed chronologically and the clear interpretations are accompanied by drawings...

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches...

Chuck Palahniuk's world has been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise Non-Fiction prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with...