This text aims to provide students with a critical introduction to the major developments in literary criticism and literary theory in English since the 1890s.

Product Description: Surveys a war-haunted, self-consciously disoriented but exceptionally vibrant decade of writingThe 1920s emerge in this study as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist, non-Modernist and semi-Modernist writers met on shared ground with common memories and preoccupations...read more

Product Description: The tradition of Decadent writing in the 19th century remains a fascinating current in the evolution of modern literature. This new anthology brings together key texts from an international range of Decadent writings and writings about Decadence, many of them previously hard to find and some freshly translated from French, German, Italian, and - in a special section on ancient Roman antecedents - from Latin...read more

A collection of thirty-seven gothic horror tales includes stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Eudora Welty, and Isak Dinesen

John Polidori's classic tale "The Vampyre"(1819), was a product of the same ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The present volume selects thirteen other tales of mystery and the macabre, including the works of James Hogg, J.S. LeFanu, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer, and William Carelton. The introduction surveys the genesis and influence of "The Vampyre" and its central themes and techniques, while the Appendices contain material closely associated with its composition and publication, including Lord Byron's prose fragment "Augustus Darvell."

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Provides explanations of literary terms and includes information on such topics as drama, rhetoric, and textual criticism.

Provides succinct, often witty explanations of terms from such important contemporary theories as poststructuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, and reader-response criticism.

Product Description: The story of Frankenstein and the monster he created is one of our most important modern myths. This study surveys the history of the myth in literature before the advent of film. First examining the range of meanings generated by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in light of images of political "monstrosity" produced by the French Revolution, Baldick goes on to trace the protean transformations of the myth in the fiction of Hoffmann, Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, as well as in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx and the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells...read more

Product Description: Examining the transformation of English literary criticism, this book focuses on the social objectives of the pioneer critics and educationalists who established modern English studies. Of particular concern is their view of literary culture as a civilizing influence capable of reconciling class conflict, and their desire to preserve this culture in the face of the new dangers of "mass society"--advertising, pulp fiction, and the cinema...read more