Literary Criticism Book List
Dark Smiles – On Sale
Race and Desire in George Eliot
Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot's problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.…
Decadent Style – On Sale
In Decadent Style, John Reed defines “decadent art” broadly enough to encompass literature, music, and the visual arts and precisely enough to examine individual works in detail. Reed focuses on the essential characteristics of this style and distinguishes it from non–esthetic categories of “decadent artists” and “decadent themes.…
Detection and Its Designs – On Sale
Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction
By Peter Thoms
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure.…
Dickens and Thackeray
Punishment and Forgiveness
Attitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important.…
Edmund Wilson
A Critic For Our Time
By Janet Groth
In the course of a career that spanned five decades, Edmund Wilson’s literary output was impressive. His life’s work includes five volumes of poetry, two works of fiction, thirteen plays, and more than twenty volumes of social commentary on travel, politics, history, religion, anthropology, and economics.…
Edmund Wilson, the Man in Letters
By Edmund Wilson
Edited by David Castronovo and Janet Groth
Among the major writers of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald generation, Edmund Wilson defied categorization. He wrote essays, stories and novels, cultural criticism, and contemporary chronicles, as well as journals and thousands of letters about the literary life and his own private world.…
Educating Women – On Sale
Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature
In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign.…
The Enemy Opposite
The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis
Among modernist critics Wyndham Lewis stands out because of the energy and drama of his "aggressive partisan pen—made to hurl epithets, or of the sort to use, in controversy, as a dangerous polemical lance.…
Es’kia Mphahlele – On Sale
Themes of Alienation and African Humanism
By Ruth Obee
"If you really want to understand South Africa, read black African writers. Read Es'kia Mphahlele," is the advice proffered to diplomats and scholars by professor and publisher Donald Herdeck.…
Fetter’d or Free?
British Women Novelists, 1670-1815
Edited by Mary A. Schofield and Cecilia Macheski
Traditional literary theory holds that women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century produced works of limited range and value: simple tales of domestic conflict, seduction, and romance. Bringing a broad range of methodologies (historical, textual, post-structuralist, psychological) to bear on the works of Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Smith, Sarah Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and others.…
The Fin-de-Siècle Poem
English Literary Culture and the 1890s
Edited by Joseph Bristow
Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England.…
A Frank Waters Reader – On Sale
A Southwestern Life in Writing
By Frank Waters
Edited by Thomas J. Lyon
Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region's literary world.…
From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson
Edited by Janet Groth
By Edmund Wilson
Many of Wilson's writings have been anthologized. But there is another body of work — over fifty fine essays on aspects of contemporary literature and ideas — that have been scattered in a variety of magazines, including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, and The Nation.…
Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time – On Sale
Edited by Christine L. Krueger
We are a century removed from Queen Victoria's death, yet the culture that bears her name is alive and well across the globe. Not only is Victorian culture the subject of lively critical debate, but it draws widespread interest from popular audiences and consumers.…
Ghanaian Popular Fiction – On Sale
Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life and Other Tales
This is a study of the 'unofficial' side of African fiction—the largely undocumented writing, publishing, and reading of pamphlets and paperbacks—which exists outside the grid of mass production.…
Haunted by Waters
Fly Fishing in North American Literature
Four essential questions: Why does one fish? How should one properly fish? What relations are created in fishing? And what effects does fishing have on the future? Haunted by Waters is a self-examination by the author as he constructs his own narrative and tries to answer these questions for himself.…
Hidden Hands
Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction
Tracing the Victorian crisis over the representation of working-class women to the 1842 Parliamentary bluebook on mines, with its controversial images of women at work, Hidden Hands argues that the female industrial worker became even more dangerous to represent than the prostitute or the male radical because she exposed crucial contradictions between the class and gender ideologies of the period and its economic realities.…
Hired Pens – On Sale
Professional Writers in America's Golden Age of Print
By Ronald Weber
Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber's narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.…
Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies – On Sale
Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market
Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the "Family Bible with Notes.…
