criticism literature

Hardcover. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 160 pages. This book offers eleven essays on Fante's career, ranging from close thematic analysis of individual stories and novels to broadly informed assessments of Fante's life and art in the context of his times. Major areas explored in the book include Fante's treatment of the Italian-American experience; his relationship to other American writers of the 1930s and beyond; the deeply Catholic nature of Fante's fiction; his unique and still-seminal vision of Los Angeles; and his lifelong concern to render in fiction both the comedy and the horrors of the writing life. Clean copy.

Softcover. Bowling Green OH, Journal of Popular Culture, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages 701-909. Articles include: Philip Gordon on Ayn Rand. Louis F. Helbig on Struwwelpeter: an inquiry into the effects of violence in children's literature. French folk songs. D. L. Ashliman on the American Indian in German Travel Narratives and Literature. Clean.

Softcover. Bowling Green OH, Journal of Popular Culture, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages 1-258. Articles include: The tragedy of Bert Williams, mystery writer John D. MacDonald, Edward R. Murrow's WW2 radio broadcasts, the dance marathon craze, Spider-Man - Superhero in the Liberal Tradition, others. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 200 pages. Joyce Cary long a popular author among discriminating readers, is gaining a wider audience for his novels every year. This critical study of his work considers the developing relationship between his matter and his manner. It especially emphasizes his growth as artist and thinker. Looking closely at the language and structure of Cary's books, the author examines all the novels- the African ones, the historical ones, and the two trilogies most of them in detail. To gain an overall view he also considers Cary's nonfiction and some as yet unpublished material. While this study is essentially non-biographical, it does analyze Cary's interpretations of history, sociology and politics as they are gathered from the actions and words of his colorful characters. One of the most intriguing features of Dr. Wolkenfeld's book is the dialogue between characters of the various novels, where likenesses as well as dissimilarities, which reveal so much about Cary as a writer, become evident. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1926, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale orange cloth with title on spine label. Former copy belonging to COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946), with his signature on the front fly leaf. Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. 248 pages, b&w frontis. Small paper scars to front endpapers, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Paris, Jose Corti, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 215 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half title page. French text. Wraparound red band with light wrinkle, wear. Otherwise very good.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 263 pages. Clean copy.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st transl., 1944, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 246 pages. Philosophical aesthetics has seen an amazing revival over the past decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of aesthetic experience-and in particular of the limits of the aesthetical-can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open model for human understanding. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed than the complex paragraphs modestly inserted into Kant's Critique of Judgment as sections 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime.This book is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these sections. First, Lyotard reconstitutes, following the letter of Kant's analysis, the philosophical context of his critical writings and of the European Enlightenment. Second, because the analytic of the sublime reveals the inability of aesthetic experience to bridge the separate realms of theoretical and practical reason, Lyotard can connect his reconstitution of Kant's critical project with today's debates about the very conditions-and limits-of presentation in general.

Softcover. London, Village Press, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 367 pages. Volume 1 only. Selected and edited by Malcolm Elwin. With his younger brother Llewelyn, to whom he had been an impressive protective figure since childhood, he spoke almost without reserve, although the tow brothers were fundamentally so different, one from the other, as brothers can be. John's imaginative ability to put himself in another's place, together with his acute awareness of human suffering, made it impossible for him to wound. Llewelyn's vivid, spontaneous and sensual response to life was sometimes not so sensitive to the feelings of others.Had their understanding not been so deeply rooted he might have wounded John by his outspoken criticism of his brother's undisciplined and torrential writing power. But in literary criticism he did not surpass John, who could and did point out flaws in Llewelyn's own work. The Mutual criticism was only one aspect of the constant exchange, when they were apart, of their thoughts and feelings in an unending flow of letters. Spine faded, a clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 3rd pr., 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Two hardcover volumes in worn, soiled dust jackets. Dark green cloth covers with gilt titles to upper covers and spines. As a result of djs, both volumes are bright and clean, 261. 243 pages. No markings.

Hardcover. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University, 1st Ed., 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with a short closed tears. B&w photos, 297 pages. The first comprehensive intellectual biography of the Georgia writer, Lillian Smith, based on an extensive collection of autobiographical writings and correspondence, as well as on Smith's published books and articles. Smith is best known as an early critic of racial segregation and as a civil rights worker.

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company,, 1st, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Three hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets, complete set. Blue cloth covers and gilt spine lettering. Volumes 1 & 2 are historical and cover the development of American literature from its European roots, and volume 3 is a comprehensive bibliography. This is a standard work in its field. Vol. 1: 636 pages, Vol.2: 639-1422; Vol. 3: 817 pages. The contents are clean and unmarked--there are no bookplates or ownership names. Dust jackets in protective mylar, no slipcase.

Hardcover. Gale Group, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 195 pages, b&w illustrations. A scholarly examination of Camus's famous short novel. Like new, clean.

Hardcover. Gale Group, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 196 pages, b&w illustrations. A scholarly examination of Camus and his work. Like new, clean.

Hardcover. Iowa City, University Of Iowa Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the half-title page. 268 pages. In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, New Directions, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket that's unclipped. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company, 1st Ltd. Ed., 1921, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a tan dust wrapper with black lettering, 111 pages. A tight, lovely first edition of Brown's first book, a study of the works of the just-deceased and little-known New England poet and essayist Guiney (1861-1920). The frontispiece, a head and shoulders wood engraving of a young woman (presumably Guiney) wearing a crown of laurels, is signed boldly in pencil just below the image by famed wood engraver TIMOTHY COLE (1852-1931). ALSO INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR BROWN on the front fly leaf. Number 11 of 100 special copies.

Hardcover. NY, Criterion, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 603 pages. Classic study of American Fiction from 1789 till 1960. Tight and square. Unmarked, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 497 pages. "The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost's poems . . . Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost's peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost's personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man." -Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket with light tape repairs, 318 pages. Stated First Edition. No markings.

Softcover. Wilkes-Barre PA, Etruscan Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 304 pages. This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1999, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 292 pages. In the teens and twenties, New York was home to a rich variety of literary subcultures. Within these intermingled worlds, gender lines and other boundaries were crossed in ways that were hardly imaginable in previous decades. Among the bohemians of Greenwich Village, the sophisticates of the Algonquin Round Table, and the literati of the Harlem Renaissance, certain women found fresh, powerful voices through which to speak and write. Enda St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker are now best remembered for their colorful lives; Genevieve Taggard, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson are hardly remembered at all. Yet each made a serious literary contribution to the meaning of modern femininity, relationship, and selfhood. Making Love Modern uncovers the deep historical sensitivity and interest in these women's love poetry. Light shelf wear. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1st US, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 300 pages, maroon cloth covers with a chipped, edgeworn dust jacket. A collection of scholarly essays with subjects from Herodotus to Kipling, from Greek and Roman literature to Shakespeare.

Softcover. University of Toronto Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 264 pages. Two critical discourses central to current Canadian literary theory emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s: post-colonialism as a political paradigm and postmodernism as a literary practice in Canadian and Quebecois fiction. Sylvia Soderlind considers the current debate about the relationship between these two discourses, and proposes a methodology that makes it possible to identify and distinguish between features pertaining to the two. Clean, bright copy.