criticism literature

Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 306 pages. Morse Peckham "considers the various roles played by pornography, especially within that hateful siege of contraries which constitutes stability and innovation." Chapters: What is Pornography?, The Art in Pornography, An Explanation for Pornography, Pornography and Culture.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with spine label, 319 pages. First printing with 1931 on title page and Scribner's "A" on copyright page. Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism - a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer." Light tanning to spine label, clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Peter Owen , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages. An acclaimed and most unusual biography of Baudelaire, showing him ensnared by his passions for poetry, prostitutes, and drugs.A crucial link between romanticism and modernism, Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal figure in European literature and thought. His influence on modern poetry is immense. In the English language, where his literary reputation is less well known, it is his link with drug culture that gives him contemporary resonance. It is commonly known that Baudelaire used opium. Many writers have described him as being addicted to the drug, but none of his biographers, Frank Hilton argues, has fully understood the effect of opiate addiction on the personality and, in the case of Baudelaire, the extent to which it damaged his life and work. In this original contribution to Baudelaire studies Hilton contends that the drug is at the root of all Baudelaire's problems and in particular--something that constantly tormented him--his chronic inability to apply himself to any prolonged creative work. Unquestionably, there is significantly more to Baudelaire than his opium addiction. But a proper awareness of what it did to the poet helps to illuminate those puzzling aspects of his life and behavior that were not previously understood. Written with the general reader in mind, Baudelaire in Chains will give those who know little or nothing about him a comprehensive picture of his life. To those who know a great deal it will present him in an unexpected light.

Softcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 414 pages. A work of literary criticism in which Said differentiates between the concept of "origin" and "beginning", also reflecting reflexively on the role of criticism and of the intellectual within a larger culture. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Dallas TX, Spence Publishing Company, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with light fading to spine, 224 pages. One of the twentieth century's most widely read writers and its most influential Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis has nevertheless eluded the understanding of the numerous scholars who have approached him only as a religious thinker and man of letters. A new book by a leading Lewis authority explores the full range of his manifold genius and finds for the first time the surprising secret of Lewis's enduring literary and spiritual achievement. It will astonish Lewis's admirers and critics alike to learn that he was far from the settled convert he appeared to be. Yet this very unsettledness, which Lewis himself found alarming, was the source of the appealing tension in his work and of his unrelenting commitment to his apologetic vocation. It was in the service of this vocation that he exercised his overarching rhetorical genius-a dazzling adroitness at suiting word, voice, and argument to a particular purpose-always militant, compelling, and persuasive. As Professor Como explores Lewis's hitherto uncharted inner landscape-the core of both his spiritual insight and his intellectual greatness-there emerges a more complex and integrated figure than we have known before. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 201 pages. A fascinating look at the theories behind fairy tales and fantasy. The works of J.R.R.Tolkien and his essay 'On Fairy Stories' is a major focus of the book as are German fairy tales or Marchen and Marx and Fairy tales. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Metheun, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Illustrated in color and b&w. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 244 pages. Notable collection of writings about children's books by such contributors as Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Paula Fox, Arnold Lobel, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Rosa CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 67 pages. Printed paper over boards backed in brown cloth with matching paper spine label. Acetate dust jacket. Remainder mark to top edge.

Hardcover. Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans Publishing , 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 199 pages. A brief account of Williams' life and examination of his early poems, the criticism, biographies and plays, the novels, the Arthurian poems and his theological writings. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Softcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages, color & b/w plates, text illustrations, notes, bibliography. This book looks closely at the whiz kid of graphic novelists whose 'Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth' (2000) inspired praise from critics & readers alike, and demonstrated that Ware's graphic novels challenged traditional definitions of literature. Here is the career, the work methods, and the graphic innovations, which include pullout, flip-up, and three-dimensional insertions, along with cut-out-and-assemble paper projects that require construction by readers.

Softcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages, color & b/w plates, text illustrations, notes, bibliography. This book looks closely at the whiz kid of graphic novelists whose 'Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth' (2000) inspired praise from critics & readers alike, and demonstrated that Ware's graphic novels challenged traditional definitions of literature. Here is the career, the work methods, and the graphic innovations, which include pullout, flip-up, and three-dimensional insertions, along with cut-out-and-assemble paper projects that require construction by readers.

Hardcover. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly rubbed dust jacket, 290 pages. These brief essays appeared in a regular column that Rexroth did for The Saturday Review of Literature. The subjects include many of the standard classic texts from world literature, i.e., Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Gibbon, Whitman, Tolstoy, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st US, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket, 492 pages. Includes his renowned essays on Churchill, Hobsbawn, Max Eastman, De Gaulle, and Simone Weil. No markings.

Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 2nd pr., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 334 pages. Sunning to spine, else near fine in wrappers. Edited by Anne Wright. A volume in the "Poets on Poetry". Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st pbk, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 472 pages. The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910-1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse. The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 196 pages. investigates the intersection between post-colonial and feminist criticism, via the Western fascination with veiled women of the Orient. Her original and compelling argument calls into question dualistic conceptions of identity and difference, West and East masculinist assumptions of Orientalism, and Western feminist discourses that seek to 'liberate' the veiled woman. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Chatto and Windus, 1st, 1960, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 260 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front flyleaf. Hardcover. Gilt title on spine. Covers bound in purple cloth. Boards have a touch of age wear at edges. Gutter split at title page, otherwise, binding tight. Clean inside. Edges and preliminary pages have some age-yellow and foxing. Still in great shape for its age.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket, 248 pages. Errata slip laid in. Name on blank prelim pages. Otherwise clea.

Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble Books, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Light edge wear, fading to dust jacket. Foxing to edges and end papers. Else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Advance Music, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 534 pages. The understanding of the musical techniques of composition cannot be reduced to a handbook of simplified rules. Music is complex and ever changing. It is the purpose of this book to trace the path of musical growth from the late Romantic period to the serial techniques of the contemporary composer. Through the detailed analysis of the musical characteristics that dominate a specific style of writing, a graduated plan is organized and presented here in the form of explanations and exercises. A new analytical method substitutes for the diatonic figured bass and makes exercises and the analysis of non-diatonic literature more manageable. The explanations describing each technique are thorough. They are designed to help the teacher and the student see the many extenuating circumstances that affect a particular analytical decision. More important than a dogmatic decision on a particular key center or a root tone, for example, is the understanding of why such an underdeterminate condition may exist. Minor wear to covers, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 238 pages. This collection of reviews and criticism, written from 1962 through 1967, is an example of literary journalism at its best. Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Muriel Spark, and Saul Bellow are among the literatti examined. Clean copy.

Softcover. University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 320 pages. Here is a collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 166 pages. Virtues's place in Spanish drama is partly as one of the few to attempt tragedy, partly as one of the precursors of the national comedia, but above all as a pivotal figure in an important transitional period of Spain's political and cultural history. Clean copy.