Literary Criticism eBooks

Advertising, which developed in the late eighteenth century as an increasingly sophisticated and widespread form of brand marketing, would seem a separate world from that of the'literature' of its time. Yet satirists and parodists were influenced by and responded to advertising, while copywriters bo... More...

Though best-known today for his Old English homilies, the Anglo-Saxon scholar ?lfric also composed a Latin 'letter' to his fellow monks at Eynsham (Oxfordshire) containing a detailed outline of their daily and seasonal round of prayer and other duties. The document offers a rare glimpse of what ordi... More...

Slave narratives were one of the earliest forms of African American writing. These works, autobiographical in nature, later fostered other pieces of African American autobiography. Since the rise of Black Studies in the late 1960s, leading critics have constructed black lives and letters as antithes... More...

Despite their significant contributions to the American theater, African American dramatists have received less critical attention than novelists and poets. This reference offers thorough critical assessments of the lives and works of African American playwrights from the 19th century to the present... More...

Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Taking the singular instance of the African American writer to heart, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not devel... More...

This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by 'Africa' and 'Blackness' throughout the century. Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a compli... More...

Africa has long captured the Western imagination as a land shrouded in danger and mystery. British and American novels written before World War II established popular conventions and stereotypes about Africa that have been increasingly challenged by contemporary American novels set in Africa. Kuhne'... More...

Afro-Cuban identity in Post-Revolutionary Novel and Film examines the changing discourse on race as portrayed in Cuban novels and films produced after 1959. More...

In the last decades of the twentieth century, French poststructuralist 'theory' transformed the humanities; it also met with resistance and today we frequently hear that theory is 'dead'.In this brilliantly argued volume, Colin Davis:reconsiders key arguments for and against theory, identifying sign... More...

After the Celebration explores Australian fiction from 1989 to 2007, after Australia's bicentenary to the end of the Howard government. In this literary history, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman combine close attention to Australian novels with a vivid depiction of their contexts: cultural, social, polit... More...