Product Description: This new edition of an established text provides a lively, concise and up-to-date historical overview of the story of English literature. Focusing on how writing both reflects and challenges the periods in which it is produced, John Peck and Martin Coyle combine close readings of key texts with recent critical thinking on the interaction of literary works and culture...read more

Product Description: An insight into a popular yet complex genre that has developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume explores the contemporary anxieties to which crime fiction responds, along with society's changing conceptions of crime and criminality...read more

Product Description: Introducing the dynamic study of a literary period stretching from 1900 to the Second World War, the book reflects the exciting mix of European avant-garde, writers of the Harlem Renaissance and regional voices within Britain. Three distinct sections explore the major concepts, themes and issues that characterise the literature...read more

Product Description: This Columbia Critical Guide steers a clear path through the huge body of critical material on Richard II that has accrued over the past three centuries, elucidating the play's reception by audiences, critics, and scholars since its first production...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This collection of essays is aimed at readers who are looking for new ways of thinking about Shakespeare's most controversial play and new ways of thinking about their own practice as critics. The collection offers a spectrum of the more recent writings on the play that opens up its historical, cultural, and political significance and also serves to demonstrate some of the ways in which contemporary criticism is both based upon critical theory and is also about the practice of criticism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Few texts have attracted more controversy over the centuries than "The Prince". This collection of essays offers a challenging sequence of close readings of Machiavelli's text. The essays, by international scholars and critics, form a rich mix of traditional and modern critical approaches, including feminist and deconstructive criticism...read more

Product Description: What are the differences between traditional readings of Hamlet and those produced by modern criticism? What sort of questions does structuralist or feminist criticism raise? What issues are foregrounded by contemporary critics and how do these challenge our understanding of the play? This new collection on Hamlet brings together three traditional essays on the play and sets them alongside nine pieces of modern criticism that reflect the way in which contemporary discussion of Shakespeare is now heavily indebted to the ideas of structuralism, feminism, deconstruction, Marxism and new historicism...read more

Product Description: This Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive guide yet both to the nature and content of literature, and to literary criticism. In ninety essays by leading international critics and scholars, the volume covers both traditional topics such as literature and history, poetry, drama and the novel, and also newer topics such as the production and reception of literature...read more

Product Description: This Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive guide yet both to the nature and content of literature, and to literary criticism. In ninety essays by leading international critics and scholars, the volume covers both traditional topics such as literature and history, poetry, drama and the novel, and also newer topics such as the production and reception of literature...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare is often the first dramatist people study. You may have read, seen and even acted in plays, but Shakespeare may well be the first writer whose plays you are expected to analyse and discuss. This book provides a crystal clear method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.