Literary Criticism Book List · 
A Frank Waters Reader
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.…
Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast
Pitting the Imaginary Worlds against the Actual
By Ode Ogede
Ghanaian novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Ayi Kwei Armah has won international recognition as one of Africa’s most articulate writers. In this book, Ode Ogede argues that previous critics have misinterpreted the aesthetic and literary influences that have shaped Armah’s artistic vision and overlooked his most significant and valuable contribution to the problems of writing “outside the prison-house of conventional English.…
Amy Levy
Her Life and Letters
After a century of critical neglect, poet and writer Amy Levy is gaining recognition as a literary figure of stature.This definitive biography accompanied by her letters, along with the recent publication of her selected writings, provides a critical appreciation of Levy's importance in her own time and in ours.…
Transcendental Wordplay
America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature
By Michael West
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of “etymology.” New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay.…
Pebbles, Monochromes and Other Modern Poems, 1891-1916
Edited by Edwin Cady
By W. D. Howells
For William Dean Howells, the 1880s throbbed with literary warfare over theory and criticism (realism), and social justice. But the terrible climax was more personal and came in the death of his daughter in 1889.…
Value and Vision in American Literature
Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White
Edited by Joseph Candido
The widely divergent voices in this collection are united by their common interest in the American literary heritage and by their intention to redefine that heritage by altering our angle of vision or forcing us to re-examine some traditional values.…
Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors
The Poetics of the Public and the Personal
In the two decades that have passed since Robert Lowell’s death, Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors is the first critical survey of the poet's aesthetic efforts to make personal vision and public exhortation cohere and thus combine poetic genres that have been historically discrete.…
The Culture of Christina Rossetti
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts
Edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society's attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.…
Virginia Woolf
Reading the Renaissance
Edited by Sally Greene
The story of “Shakespeare’s sister” that Virginia Woolf tells in A Room of One’s Own has sparked interest in the question of the place of the woman writer in the Renaissance. By now, the process of recovering lost voices of early modern women is well under way.…
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
An Explanation of Meter and Versification
Perfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by one of our best contemporary practitioners of traditional poetic forms.…
Es’kia Mphahlele
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.…
Ruskin’s Mythic Queen
Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture
John Ruskin's prominence as the author of “Of Queen's Gardens,” his principal statement of Victorian gender opposition, makes him an ideal example for analyzing the power of mythic discourse to undermine gender division.…
A Paris Year
Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932
The Depression that follows the 1929 stock market crash is emptying Paris of many American expatriates. Two exceptions are Dorothy and James T. Farrell, the naïve young couple who have fled their home in Chicago for the fabled liberation that Paris seems to offer.…
Shakespeare in Production
Whose History?
Shakespeare in Production examines a number of plays in context. Included are the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, unpopular with critics of filmed Shakespeare, but very much a “photoplay” if its time; the opening sequences of filmed Hamlets which span more than seventy years; The Comedy of Errors on television, where production of this script is almost impossible; and the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, a “popular” film discussed in the context of comedy as a genre.…
Word Play Place
Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias
Edited by Robert Archambeau
The poetry of John Matthias has long been admired by other poets for the way it refuses to be categorized. Lyrical and experimental, cosmopolitan and rooted in place, it challenges our received notions of what poetry can be at the end of the twentieth century.…
José María Arguedas
Reconsiderations for Latin American Studies
Edited by Ciro A. Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval
José María Arguedas (1911-1969) is one of the most important authors to speak to issues of the survival of native cultures. José María Arguedas: Reconsiderations for Latin American Cultural Studies presents his views from multiple perspectives for English-speaking audiences for the first time.…
Under Criticism
Essays for William H. Pritchard
Edited by David Sofield and Herbert F. Tucker
American literary life has been enriched over the past generation by habits of criticism practiced at Amherst College during the tenure of William H. Pritchard. These essays, which were commissioned as a tribute to Pritchard, celebrate his fortieth year at Amherst and demonstrate the breadth of his influence in the fields of theory, criticism, and pedagogy.…
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.…
Detection and Its Designs
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.…
Writing in Disguise
Academic Life in Subordination
By Terry Caesar
Writing in Disguise is a series of increasingly personal essays that both discuss and dramatize through firsthand experience the significance of subordination in academic life, in terms of issues and structures but above all in terms of texts.…
