Literary Criticism

Zola's heroine Nana is a prostitute in Napoleon III's France for whom rich men give up their fortunes, and poor men their lives, yet Nana squanders fortunes and her life ends in squalor. This concise supplement to Emile Zola's Nana helps students understand the overall structure of the work, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author. more...

Price: $5.99

A greedy, unscrupulous man loses his business and lover. In his humility he begins to think of others and makes not a material, but spiritual and ethical rise. This is a book of tragicomedy, romanticism, realism, society and art, as well as a study of American culture. more...

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From one of the world’s premier Shakespeare scholars, author of Shakespeare After All (“the indispensable introduction to the indispensable writer”– Newsweek ): a magisterial new study whose premise is “that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare. more...

Price: $30.00

As well as an informed introduction to the Christie phenomenon, this book examines all her novels and short stories. The film, TV and stage adaptations are listed, and the appendices point you to books and websites where you can find out more. more...

Price: $9.99

Written by a leading critic, this invigorating introduction to modernist American poetry conveys the excitement that can be generated by a careful reading of modernist poems. It encourages readers to confront the difficulties involved in tackling this literature and to identify with the modernists' sense of the revolutionary possibilities of their art. Altieri's account embraces four generations of American poets, tracing the ambitions, the disillusionments and the continuities of modernist poetry through to the 1980s. He describes how the sense of liberation created by early modernist formal experiments was followed by disappointment as the limitations of these discoveries emerged. He contends that, in response, poets such as Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden reformulated modernist strategies to develop new ways for poetry to take social responsibility. Finally, he shows how these transformations were carried through by later poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and Robert Creeley, with whom the narrative ends. more...

Price: $75.95