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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.
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
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton · 203 pages
The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why this is so. How Proust Can Change Your Life takes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the basis for a sustained investigation into the power and signif
The Pleasure of the Text
Roland Barthes · 67 pages
"What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism ... not only a poetics of reading ... but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading ... Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and
What We See When We Read
Peter Mendelsund · 419 pages
"A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading--how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images
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
Why Orwell Matters
Christopher Hitchens · 224 pages
Literary Theory: An Introduction
Terry Eagleton · 244 pages
This classic work covers all of the major movements in literary studies in this century. Noted for its clear, engaging style and unpretentious treatment, Literary Theory has become the introduction of choice for anyone interested in learning about the world of contemporary literary thought.
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Roger Shattuck · 369 pages
Forbidden Knowledge boldly traces the tragic arc of Western literature and culture as it explores the notion of "forbidden knowledge," from the sexual innocence of Adam and Eve to the awe-inspiring discoveries of modern scientists who have created the atomic bomb and recombinant DNA. The result is a dire portrait of human presumption and of a culture that has abandoned all limits in the quest for
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John P. McGowan, Barbara Johnson, Jeffrey L. Williams · 2,624 pages
This welcome addition to the Norton anthologies binds the writings from 148 authors--among them Gorgias of Leontini, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Quintilian, Dante, Corneille, Dryden, Aphra Behn, Vico, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Poe, Baudelaire, Lukacs, Heidegger, Gramsci, Barthes, Raymond Williams, Haraway, Hebdige, hooks, Judith Butler, and the most recent theorist, Stuart Moulthrop.
Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
A.O. Scott · 282 pages
"The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever. Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Sc
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Jonathan Culler · 152 pages
Culler offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, looks at whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience, and outlines the ideas behind deconstruction and semiotics.
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
M.H. Abrams · 416 pages
A study of different trends in English criticism during the first several decades of this century.
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
Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography
Francis Wheen · 130 pages
At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
Susan Sontag, David Rieff · 245 pages
Sontag's incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer's responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. This collection gathers sixteen essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag's life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, w
Negotiating with the Dead
Margaret Atwood · 219 pages
What is the role of the Writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain--or excuse!--their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
David Shields · 219 pages
An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century.Reality TV dominates broadband. YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed with "reality" precis
Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
Milan Kundera · 280 pages
Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera once again celebrates the art of the novel, from its birth in a spirit of humor unique to European culture and sensibility - illustrated by some wonderful examples from the work of Rabelais and Cervantes - through
The Hatred of Poetry
Ben Lerner · 96 pages
"No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my pu