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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

Peter Ackroyd · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Book of Legendary Lands

Umberto Eco · 478 pages

"A fascinating illustrated tour of the fabled places in literature and folklore that have awed, troubled, and eluded us through the ages"--Provided by publisher.

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionArt History
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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

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionDense Prose
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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

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionDense Prose
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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

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionArt History
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The History of the Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins

John D. Rateliff, J.R.R. Tolkien · 512 pages

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionDense Prose
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The Pound Era

Hugh Kenner · 606 pages

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The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I

Roger Shattuck · 397 pages

The modernism of our times explained through a study of four significant men.

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionArt History
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The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

Daniel J. Boorstin · 811 pages

In this engrossing companion to his bestselling The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of achievement in the arts. The Discoverers, which has been translated into twenty languages, gave us an epic of the quest to understand the world, from the heavens to the human heart. Now Boorstin puts flesh on the great figures who hav

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionArt History
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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

James Shapiro

For more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that he had written his plays. Since then, however, dozens of candidates have been proposed for the authorship of what is generally agreed to be the finest body of work by a writer in the English language. In this remarkable book, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to questio

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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The Elizabethan World Picture

Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard · 116 pages

This brief and illuminating account of the ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of and ordered Chain of Being is studied by Professor Tillyard in the process of

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

Marina Warner · 463 pages

Marina Warner looks at storytelling, at its practitioners and images in art, legend, and history - from the prophesying enchantresses who lure men to a false paradise to jolly Mother Goose, with her masqueraders in the real world, from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Angela Carter. The storytellers are frequently women (or were until men like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christ

Literary CriticismNonfictionArt HistoryDense Prose
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The Great War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell · 363 pages

In this classic work, Paul Fussell illuminates the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, focusing primarily on the literary means by which The Great War has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized. Drawing on the work of important wartime poets such as David Jones and Wilfred Owen, on the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, and on numer

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionDense Prose
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Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

Christopher Bram · 372 pages

Describes how the trailblazing, post-war gay literary figures, including Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg, paved the way for newer generations, including Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, and Edward Albee.

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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The Lady and Her Monsters

Roseanne Montillo · 322 pages

"A ... blend of literary history, lore, and early scientific exploration that traces the origins of the greatest horror story of all time"--Dust jacket flap. Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Orlando Figes · 748 pages

"Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, this internationally renowned historian does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.". "Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg - a "wind

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionArt History
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Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

Sarah Churchwell · 432 pages

" Tracing the genesis of a masterpiece, a Fitzgerald scholar follows the novelist as he begins work on The Great Gatsby. The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman for America's carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home

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A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

Joseph Loconte · 235 pages

"The untold story of how the First World War shaped the lives, faith, and writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis"--Amazon.com.

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors

Andrew Shaffer · 297 pages

Rock stars, rappers, and actors haven't always had a monopoly on misbehaving. There was a time when authors fought with both words and fists, a time when poets were the ones living fast and dying young. This witty, insightful and wildly entertaining narrative profiles the literary greats who wrote generation-defining classics such as The Great Gatsby and On the Road while living and loving like he

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

Kevin Birmingham · 424 pages

For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. James Joyce's big blue book, "Ulysses, " ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of "Ulysses "was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

Leo Marx · 400 pages

"For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define - and continues to enrich - the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines th

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith

Octavio Paz · 560 pages

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Proust's Overcoat: The True Story of One Man's Passion for All Things Proust

Lorenza Foschini · 128 pages

"Jacques GuErin was a prominent businessman at the head of his family's successful perfume company, but his real passion was for rare books and literary manuscripts. From the time he was a young man, he frequented the antiquarian bookshops of Paris in search of lost, forgotten treasures. The ultimate prize? Anything from the hands of Marcel Proust." "GuErin identified with Proust more deeply than

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfiction
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Georgette Heyer's Regency World

Jennifer Kloester · 381 pages

This book recreates Georgette Heyer's most enchanting characters and their most memorable scenes in the locations in which they actually took place, guiding the reader through them in a series of tours.

Literary CriticismHistoryNonfictionLondon

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