Early literary criticism was undisciplined. Unlike the staid essays and monographs of later academic scholarship, English criticism first appeared in the contentious world of the London theater: dramatists and other poets argued about their craft in contending prefaces and dedications, and their disputes spilled into the public sphere in pamphlet wars, mock epics, lampoons, and even novels. Across these forms, criticism was personal, political, and unconcerned with analysis for its own sake. Yet this unruly discourse laid the groundwork both for modern literary criticism and for the discipline of literary studies. The Invention of English Criticism explores the earliest uses of criticism and the attempts by some to convert a field of literary debate into an archive of useful knowledge. Criticism's undisciplined past thus illuminates its contested, ambivalent, and never fully disciplined present.

Product Description: Inspired by a range of ecological movements, ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine and portray the relationship between humans and the environment in all areas of cultural production, from Wordsworth and Thoreau to Disney and BBC nature documentaries...read more

Product Description: Clearly focussed on the needs of students, Robert Eaglestone and Jonathan Beecher Field have revised the best-selling Doing English specifically for English literature courses in America. Studying English presents the ideas and debates that shape literary studies in America today...read more

Product Description: Ridiculous Critics is an anthology of eighteenth-century writings on the figure of the literary critic, and on the critic’s mixed and complex role. The collection assembles critical texts and satirical images chronologically to suggest a vision of the history of eighteenth-century literary criticism...read more

Product Description: In this classic beginner's guide to English literature, Mario Klarer offers a concise and accessible discussion of central issues in the study of literary texts, looking at: definitions of key terms such as literature and text the genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and film periods and classifications of literature theoretical approaches to texts the use of secondary resources guidelines for writing research essays The new and expanded edition is fully updated to include: a wider range of textual examples from world literature additional references to contemporary cinema, a section on comparative literature an extended survey of literary periods and genres recent changes in MLA guidelines information on state-of-the-art citation management software the use and abuse of online resources...read more

Product Description: This work positions seminal works such as Wordsworth and Shelley alongside lesser-known texts, allowing for a spectrum of literary movements to be represented. The literary defenses are put in the context of the twentieth century, helping to identify with the importance of the documents and relating them to the modern world...read more

Product Description: The Rhetoric of Redemption: Chesterton, Ethical Criticism, and the Common Man examines the literary criticism written by G. K. Chesterton between 1902 and 1913 from a rhetorical standpoint to ascertain whether Chesterton did in fact create the «criticism for the common man» he aimed for...read more

Product Description: Fully revised and updated, this new edition of English in Practice continues to be an essential practical guide to studying English at University. It is for all those who are about to embark on an English degree or are in the midst of completing one, and for those who want to re-engage with their reasons for teaching it...read more

Product Description: H. Lark Hall presents the first comprehensive biography of Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929). The recipient of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize in history for the first two volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington remains one of the most influential literary and historical scholars of the early twentieth century...read more

Judith H. Anderson conceives the intertext as a relation between or among texts that encompasses both Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. Like the Internet, the intertext is a state, or place, of potential expressed in ways ranging from deliberate emulation to linguistic free play. Relatedly, the intertext is also a convenient fiction that enables examination of individual agency and sociocultural determinism. Anderson's intertext is allegorical because Spenser's Faerie Queene is pivotal to her study and because allegory, understood as continued or moving metaphor, encapsulates, even as it magnifies, the process of signification. Her title signals the variousness of an intertext extending from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton and the breadth of allegory itself. Literary allegory, in Anderson's view, is at once a mimetic form and a psychic one-a process thinking that combines mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history. Anderson's first section focuses on relations between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, including the role of the narrator, the nature of the textual source, the dynamics of influence, and the bearing of allegorical narrative on lyric vision. The second centers on agency and cultural influence in a variety of Spenserian and medieval texts. Allegorical form, a recurrent concern throughout, becomes the pressing issue of section three. This section treats plays and poems of Shakespeare and Milton and includes two intertextually relevant essays on Spenser.How Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's plays participate in allegorical form is controversial. Spenser's experiments with allegory revise its form, and this intervention is largely what Shakespeare and Milton find in his poetry and develop. Anderson's book, the result of decades of teaching and writing about allegory, especially Spenserian allegory, will reorient thinking about fundamental critical issues and the landmark texts in which they play themselves out.

This volume examines the way in which we organize knowledge into disciplines, then reorganize it into new configurations when the existing disciplines have come to seem irrelevant or exclusory. Joe Moran traces the history and use of the term interdisciplinarity and tackles such vital topics as: the rise of the disciplines interdisciplinary English Literary and Cultural Studies 'theory' and the disciplines texts and histories literature, science, space and nature. Interdisciplinarity is the ideal entry point into one of today's most heated critical debates.

A guide to income tax returns provides information on the most recent tax legislation, tax-filing tips, advice on how to reduce tax liabilities, helpful financial advice, and sample tax forms, worksheets, and charts

Product Description: Intentionality and the New Traditionalism argues that both the text and the author of a literary work are important to a cogent and full reading of that work. The author creates the text, which then leads the reader into a reading of it through its various elements or literary devices that have been consciously employed by the author...read more