Literature Criticism

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.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, First Edition, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 249 pages. Hardcover. Grey cloth covered boards with white titles to spine. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear, now protected with a plastic sleeve. Black & white illustrations, tight binding, clean & unmarked pages throughout.

Hardcover. Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, Reprint, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 321 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with light wear to edges & black titles to spine. Faint soil to top edge. Otherwise clean inside and out. Tight copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 430 pages. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 530 pages. Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Clean, bright copy, as new.

Hardcover. London , B. Blake, 1st Thus, 1837, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 848 pages. Hardcover. Marbled edges and endpapers. Raised bands on spine. Clipping of a silhouette of Edward Gibbon pasted on to front end paper. Previous owners notes in pencil on front endpapers. Wear to covers, especially corners. Rubbing. Chipping at spine. Clean, unmarked text.

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 178 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket with light wear - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 897 pages. John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and - in a concluding section, 'Personal Matters' - paragraphs on himself and his work. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Ann Arbor, MI, Ardis, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Fade to dust jacket spine, price-clipped flap. Otherwise, a clean, sharp copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 62 pages. Hardcover. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Fading to spine and along left edge of front cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner , 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Novelist and critic Colm Toibin provides "a fascinating exploration of writers and their families" (Entertainment Weekly) and "an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires" (The Evening Standard) in this brilliant collection of essays that explore the relationships of writers to their families and their work. Colm Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind. Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Toibin examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Clean copy.