Literature Criticism

Softcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st pbk, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 123 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. Lexington Books , 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glazed boards, 299 pages. John McWilliams has written the first, much needed account of the ways the promise and threat of political revolution have informed masterpieces of the historical novel. McWilliams provides close readings of some twenty historical novels, from Scott and Cooper through Tolstoy, Zola and Hugo, to Pasternak and Lampedusa, and ultimately to Marquez and Hilary Mantel, but with continuing regard to historical contexts past and present. He traces the transformation of the literary conventions established by Scott's Waverley novels, showing both the continuities and the changes needed to meet contemporary times and perspectives. Although the progressive hopes imbedded in Scott's narrative form proved no longer adaptable to twentieth century carnage and the rise of totalitarianism, the meaning of any single novel emerges through comparison to the tradition of its predecessors. A foreword and epilogue explore the indebtedness of McWilliams's perspective to the Marxist scholarly tradition of Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson, while defining his differences from them. This is a scholarly work of no small ambition and achievement. Clean copy.

Softcover. London, The Hogarth Press, 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover pamphlet, pink covers faded slightly at spine edge, 44 pages. Day to Day Pamphlet No. 29 with 1500 copies printed. Previous owner's name, date on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth lettered in gilt at the spine. Illustrated with eight photographic plates. 422 pages. Extended passages from Jefferies' work, with a general introduction in two parts: 'The English Genius' and 'To the Two Types of Jefferies Readers', introductions to each section, notes on the text, and the Epigraph. No dust jacket, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 162 pages. The first full-length critical treatment of this significant and neglected figure in American realism. Arguing that raw naturalism and subtle craftsmanship - seemingly incompatible qualities join to make Yates one of the most accomplished writers of the post - World War II period, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of his life and work. An introductory chapter outlines the historical, literary, and social contexts important to Yates's writings, comparing him, for example, with his contemporaries Philip Roth and Mary McCarthy and articulating strong lines of continuity between his themes and the ideas of the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the Marxist-oriented socialist C. Wright Mills, and the social theoretician Erving Goffman. Next a thorough biographical portrait illuminates Yates's obsession with the American middle class and its dislocated, disordered, and psychologically stifled populace, followed by sharp readings of the novels and story collections, including unfinished and minor works. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with faded gilt lettering on spine. 191 pages, b&w frontis. of Hawker. Small name stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean copy.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization," and the urgency of promoting emigration.Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Ashgate, reprint, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 248 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Silver gilt on spine. 'Like "the ring" itself, this book is viral: it gathers into itself literature and film, disease and survival, cultural studies and aesthetics, Japan and America, technology and the family. We won't read Suzuki's novels or watch the films in the same way again. A thoroughly readable and teachable text!' Steven Bruhm, Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English, The University of Western Ontario, and author of Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic 'Taking as its point of departure the phenomenon of The Ring in all its manifestations"the Japanese novel, the Japanese film, the American film, and the various sequels"The Scary Screen offers an in-depth and sustained speculation about the anxiety created by the development of communication technologies. The collection introduces startling insights into the relationship between changes in media forms and widespread fears of contagion, while also identifying a new universal form of horror that has emerged in recent decades as the status of reproduction"both technological and biological"has undergone a profound transformation. The essays included here represent a powerful theoretical response to this transformation.' Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, and author of The Impossible David Lynch and The Real Gaze '... The Scary Screen is a useful contribution to studies of The Ring, horror film, and cultural anxieties evoked by technology.' Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

Softcover. London, Between the Lines, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages. A 17,000 word interview, with a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, and a representative list of quotations from Heaney's critics and reviewers. Also included is Heaney's poem, 'Known World'. Spine faded, clean copy.

Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 188 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 276 pages. Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 308 pages including index. Friendship between the sexes is notoriously difficult to describe. Seeing Together examines the efforts of some of England's key writers - from poets to propagandists - during a period when 'mere friendship' came to seem intensely important and when discussion of professional relations between men and women came to touch upon a troubling network of sexual, social and political dynamics. Among the authors discussed are John Stuart Mill, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Small name on fly leaf otherwise a bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. "In 'Shakespeare After All,' Marjorie Garber - professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University gives us a magisterial work of criticism, authoritative and engaging, based on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years. Richly informed by Shakespearean scholarship of the latter half of the twentieth century, this book offers passionate and revealing readings of all thirty-eight of Shakespeare's plays in chronological sequence". 989 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Duffield & Company, reprint, 1909, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 557 pages, originally compiled by C. M. Ingleby, L. Toulmin Smith and Dr. F. F. Furnivall. Gilt top edge and title on green cloth board. Minor foxing on fore edge, light edge wear and slight spine cock, otherwise, very clean and bright.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a chipped, tape repaired dust jacket. Maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 266 pages. INSCRIBED BY SIPE on the front fly leaf to fellow professor Roger Mitchell. English majors are used to being told that Shakespeare frequently broke the rules of iambic pentameter, and that as he matured artistically, his usage became bolder and freer. Well, it isn't true. Shakespeare's iambics turn out to be extremely orthodox (which just makes all the more impressive the variations he was able to create within the rules). In 1968 Dorothy Sipe went to the remarkable labor of demonstrating this objectively through a painstaking analysis of over 13,000 lines of verse. She also supplied information I've never found anywhere else on the prosodic rules taught by poets to poets in Shakespeare's day. All this said, including a five star rating for the perfect achievement of its goal, the book is definitely not for everyone interested in Shakespeare's verse and methods. It is devoted to proving a highly specific case by means of many, many examples that non-specialists are likely to find tedious. But if you are deeply interested in some subjects -- Shakespeare's iambics, his coinages, and the history of English iambic technique -- it is well worth your time. Dust jacket tanned, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, A sociological look at the influence of Shakespeare's Shylock on world mythology describes the character's creation and his evolution on the stage, and presents writing about him by Proust, James, T. S. Eliot, and others. Amazingly, Shylock is in only five scenes in the Merchant of Venice. Yet, as pointed out by Gross, the theater critic for the London Sunday Telegraph , his impact and significance transcend his physical presence, so much so that his name and "pound of flesh" idea are almost universally known. In the first part of this character/cultural study, Gross examines the antecedents of Shylock and the play, and his development within the play. The second part considers "interpretations" both theatrical and literary in England and America until World War II; the third part considers Shylock more broadly as a touchstone (e.g., how his "type" is used by the Victorians--Trollope's Lopez, Dickens's Riah, Ruskin's use of him in Munera Pulveris ). Clean copy.

Softcover. Willamette, Willamette Week, 1st wraps, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Columns from her early column in the Willamette Week newspaper. SIGNED BY DUNN.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 266 pages. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, more often the voice of the soul than the socially marked self, speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. 'Souls Says,' the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection. In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible and explores the force and beauty of contemporary lyric verse. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, William Pickering, 1st, 1835, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 298 pages. Black leather covers with gilt rules, faded gilt title on ribbed spine. All edges gilt. Covers with edgewear and the top 6th of the spine leather is gone. Marbled endpapers with bookplate inside front cover. Rear flyleaf with a chunk cut out. Interior is very good. Medieval and Renaissance French poetry, translated into English by an acclaimed poet, travel writer, historian, and painter. Louisa Costello (1799-1870), was an accomplished Anglo-Irish artist and prolific poet and author. She was also a fine miniature painter, and her illustrations show her exquisite sensibility. 4 beautifully hand-colored lithograph plates by the author. Not all copies contain these plates.

Softcover. Columbus OH, Ohio State University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 189 pages. Looks at the response of American writers to Prohibition with an analysis of fictional portrayals of bootleggers, moonshiners, cabarets, speakeasies, and Prohibition-era characters. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Random House , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 402 pages. Cloth boards in a bright dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. The subjects of Salman Rushdie's collection of non-fiction range from The Wizard of Oz, U2, India and Indian writing, the death of Princess Diana, and football, to twentieth-century writers including Angela Carter, Arthur Miller, Edward Said, J. M. Coetzee and Arundhati Roy. In a central section, 'Messages from the Plague Years', Rushdie focuses on the fight against the Iranian fatwa, presenting texts both personal and political, which show for the first time how it was to live through those days. Rushdie's columns for the New York Times confront current issues - Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Islam and the West - as well as lighter topics such as reality TV, sport and sleaze. The book ends with the lectures that give it its title - Rushdie's exploration of the theme of frontiers: crossing them, breaking taboos, and - in the light of September 11 - the world of permeable frontiers in which we all live.

Softcover. London, Routledge, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages. Horror fiction has provided our culture with some of its most enduring themes. In examining the cultural apparatus surrounding it, Grixti argues that such narratives raise important questions about the relationship between fiction and society. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Knoxville, University Of Tennessee Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 432 pages. Shields shows how both the myth of Adam and the myth of Aeneas, in crossing over to America from Europe, dynamically intermingled in the thought of the earliest American writers. This rearticulation of the myths of Adam and Aeneas became peculiarly adapted to the demands of the American adventure in freedom. Shields argues that uncovering and acknowledging the classical roots of our culture can allay the American fear of "pastlessness" that the long-standing emphasis on the Adamic myth has generated. The authors probing analysis sheds new light on the works of such seminal figures as Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, Phillis Wheatley, George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, red cloth in a worn and chipped dust jacket with closed tears, 191 pages with index. Dr. Worcester presents a theory of satire, surveying the whole field since Dryden's Discourse of the Origin of Satire and drawing illustrations not only from English but from classical, French, German, and American literature. At the same time he makes a penetrating study of irony and its uses. Name on inside front cover otherwise clean.