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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMarxism and Literature
Raymond Williams · 217 pages
This study examines the place of literature within Marxist cultural theory, and offers an assessment of the contributions of previous thinkers to Marxist literary theory.
Poetics
Aristotle · 144 pages
One of the first books written on what is now called aesthetics. Although parts are lost (e.g., comedy), it has been very influential in western thought, such as the part on tragedy.
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
Christopher Booker · 736 pages
Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida · 407 pages
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
David Foster Wallace · 343 pages
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult-video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or conf
Master of Middle-Earth
Paul H. Kocher · 247 pages
Russian Thinkers
Isaiah Berlin, Jason Ferrell · 312 pages
Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' Berlin considers the social and p
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Fredric Jameson · 438 pages
This wide-ranging work seeks to crystallize a definition of postmodernism. The author looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from high art to low; from market ideology to architecture, from painting to punk; film, from video art to literature.
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Susan Buck-Morss · 493 pages
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin · 280 pages
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Julia Kristeva · 219 pages
"Kristeva is one of the leading voices in contemporary French criticism, on a par with such names as Genette, Foucault, Greimas and others ... [Powers of Horror is] an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse. The sections on Céline, for example, are ind
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
Walter Kaufmann · 384 pages
God: A Biography
Jack Miles · 446 pages
Miles shows us God in the guise of a great literary character, the hero of the Old Testament. In a close, careful, and inspired reading of that testament - book by book, verse by verse - God is seen from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. The God whom Miles reveals to us is a warrior whose greatest battle is with himself. We see God torn by conflicting urges. To his o
The Road to Middle-earth
Tom Shippey · 252 pages
"The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey's classic work, now revised and expanded in paperback explores J.R.R. Tolkien's creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien's professional background led him to write The Hobbit and create a timeless charm for millions of readers. He argues convincingly that the source of Tolkien's inspiration lay not just in his love of
The History of the Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins
John D. Rateliff, J.R.R. Tolkien · 512 pages
Six Memos For The Next Millennium
Italo Calvino · 124 pages
"Six memos for the Next Millenium" is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watch-words for out appreciation of Calvino himself. What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, toe each of five indispensable qualities: lightness, qu
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood · 1,288 pages
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell · 456 pages
A thoroughly intense and all-embracing read. In the 2-page preface written in 1948, he states such ground-shakingly obvious facts about the human psyche, that you'll wonder why these ideas had never dawned on you before. Then, into the main text of the book, and you're spirited away into an adventure that explores all forms of mythology and their importance in founding different cultures all aroun
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Jacques Barzun · 896 pages
"Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.". "In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of
On Photography
Susan Sontag · 207 pages
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography, among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with