Literature round-up

Children’s Literature in Context

Author: Fiona McCulloch

Edition: First

Publisher: Continuum

Pages: 192

Price: £50.00 and £16.99

ISBN: 9781847064868 and 64875

Through close readings and a consideration of their critical and popular afterlives, this book takes students through well-known texts. It considers key issues involved in the study of children’s literature and its social, cultural and literary contexts. Works by C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are examined to highlight major themes.

The Life in the Sonnets

Author: David Fuller

Edition: First

Publisher: Continuum

Pages: 134

Price: £45.00 and £14.99

ISBN: 9781847064530 and 64547

In this controversial text, David Fuller works to recover the life in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and argues that the emotion that criticism often ignores should again become a central concern. First, he engages with the poems through feelings fundamental to the “young man” sequence of sonnets as presented in other writing and art by figures such as Plato, Michelangelo, Thomas Mann and Derek Jarman. Second, he recommends reading the words aloud without translating them into other terms, which brings out their expressivity and leads to a fuller understanding of their form, structure and meaning.

The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time

Author: Jane Gallop

Edition: First

Publisher: Duke University Press

Pages: 184

Price: £58.00 and £14.99

ISBN: 9780822350637 and 350811

Jane Gallop revitalises debates on the “death of the author” theory by examining the effect the theory has on the author of a landmark work. She uses readings of influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to connect an author’s theoretical, literal and metaphoric deaths to discuss the idea.

Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

Author: Vanessa Joosen

Edition: First

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Pages: 362

Price: £26.95

ISBN: 9780814334522

Using psychoanalytical and feminist critiques alongside Post-Modern retellings, Vanessa Joosen offers insights into the workings of fiction and criticism that are intended to resonate with fairy-tale scholars, literature scholars and general readers interested in intertextuality and fairy tales.

The Comic Mode in English Literature: From the Middle Ages to Today

Author: Murray Roston

Edition: First

Publisher: Continuum

Pages: 288

Price: £60.00 and £18.99

ISBN: 9781441195883 and 12316

Intended as a comprehensive guide to comedy in the English literary canon, it begins with a critical exploration of historical and philosophical theories of humour, and offers close readings of a wide range of major texts, authors and genres. Among those texts considered are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Austen’s Emma, Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.

The Art of Writing Fiction

Author: Andrew Cowan

Edition: First

Publisher: Longman/Pearson Education

Pages: 240

Price: £16.99

ISBN: 9781408248348

Drawing on his own experience as a writer, Andrew Cowan lays bare the notes and experiences that he has used in his career, aiming to give an introduction to the creative writing process. The book is intended to help readers master essential aspects of writing fiction such as structure, character, voice and setting.

Authorial Ethics: How Writers Abuse their Calling

Author: Robert Hauptman

Edition: First

Publisher: Lexington

Pages: 214

Price: £37.95

ISBN: 9780739134443

Introduced with a foreword by eminent classicist Mary Lefkowitz, Authorial Ethics is a normative study that considers the many ways in which writers abuse their commitment to truth and integrity. In case studies divided by academic discipline, it trains a particular focus on literature, journalism and art. Robert Hauptman argues that two major abrogations by authors are inadvertent error and purposeful misconduct.

Shakespeare and Material Culture

Author: Catherine Richardson

Edition: First

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Pages: 240

Price: £40.00 and £14.99

ISBN: 9780199562282 and 625

Examining the question of how language and material culture interact throughout Shakespeare’s writings, Catherine Richardson allows a reader to see how Shakespeare’s plays depend on objects and spaces of the early modern stage. By using contemporary diagrams, the author provides a visual guide to the objects of the time alongside critically focused text.

Romantics and Victorians

Editors: Nicola J. Watson and Shafquat Towheed

Edition: First

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Pages: 352

Price: £65.00 and £19.99

ISBN: 9781849666237 and 66244

Romantics and Victorians introduces the reader to European Romanticism and Victorian culture, using Wordsworth, Shelley and Thomas de Quincey’s writings as key examples of the genre. When looking at Victorian culture, the authors use Emily Bronte and Arthur Conan Doyle as points of departure to discuss a range of topics and concepts.

The Cambridge Companion to H.D.

Editors: Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay

Edition: First

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Pages: 208

Price: £17.99

ISBN: 9780521187558

This multi-author text contains essays on all of H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle’s) major works, focusing on critical analysis and the impact of her writing on the early development of Modernist poetry. In addition, the editors discuss her subsequent exclusion from the canon and her tendency to merge fact and fiction.

Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader

Editor: Timothy Corrigan

Edition: Second

Publisher: Routledge/Taylor & Francis

Pages: 488

Price: £75.00 and £24.99

ISBN: 9780415560092 and 0108

Film and Literature aims to introduce the historical and theoretical exchanges and links between the two art forms. The fully updated text is divided into three sections: a guide to the history of film and literature, 28 key essays by leading theorists and a section offering advice to students writing about film and literature.

The Romanticism Handbook

Editors: Sue Chaplin and Joel Faflak

Edition: First

Publisher: Continuum

Pages: 284

Price: £55.00 and £17.99

ISBN: 9781441164025 and 90024

Furnishing case studies for reading literary and critical texts, The Romanticism Handbook is conceived as a one-stop resource. Exploring the historical and cultural context of key authors, texts and genres, the collection seeks to provide a starting point for anyone beginning a study of Romantic literature. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary approaches, consideration of race and ethnicity, and a look at current and future directions in the field are offered, while guided further reading should serve to support independent work.

Doing Shakespeare

Author: Simon Palfrey

Edition: Second

Publisher: Arden Shakespeare/A&C Black

Pages: 372

Price: £12.99

ISBN: 9781408132142

In this revised edition of a successful text first published in 2005, Simon Palfrey offers close readings of speeches and scenes, seeks to demystify the language of the plays and suggests critical approaches to them. This edition introduces a different way of approaching Shakespeare’s texts through ideas of performance and the actor’s role, and the content has been restructured to aid navigation. Palfrey’s view is that the plays are not finished “monuments” but living material, in process and up for grabs.