100 Must-Read Books on English: Essays, Writing, and Literary Criticism
100 Must-Read Books on English: Essays, Writing, and Literary Criticism is a reading list for the literate. It contains many of the classic critics of the past, Leavis, Richards, Auerbach, and Empson, with many contemporary greats, such as Eagleton, Wood, Bloom, and Said. There are many of the great texts on writing, by the likes of Orwell, White, King, and Zinsser. And there are the great essayists: Benjamin, Vidal, Macdonald, and Russell. Mixed in there are many superb books on journalism, film criticism, and literary theory.
1. How to Read Literature
What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host ... More »
2. How Fiction Works
By James Wood | Used Price: 70% Off
In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most ... More »
3. The Elements of Style
By E. B. White; William Strunk | Under $1.00
You know the authors' names. You recognize the title. You've probably used this book yourself. This is The Elements of Style, the classic style manual, now in a fourth edition. A new Foreword by Roger Angell reminds readers that the advice of Strunk & White is as valuable ... More »
4. Illuminations
By Walter Benjamin; Hannah Arendt | 70% Off
Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included ... More »
5. Mimesis
By Eric Auerbach | Used Price: 80% Off
A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western ... More »
6. Seven Types of Ambiguity
By William Empson | Used Price: 70% Off
First published in 1930, Seven Types of Ambiguity has long been recognized as a landmark in the history of English literary criticism. Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according ... More »
7. Why I Write
By George Orwell | Under $1.00
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves—and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives—and destroyed them. Now, Penguin brings you the works of ... More »
8. Kill All Your Darlings
By Luc Sante | Used Price: 70% Off
In his books and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. He is “one of the handful of living masters of the American language, ... More »
9. Anatomy of Criticism
By Northrop Frye | Used Price: 80% Off
Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical ... More »
10. A Room of One's Own
By Virginia Woolf | Used Price: 90% Off
Collecting two book-length essays, "A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas" is Virginia Woolf's most powerful feminist writing, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence. This "Penguin Modern Classics" edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Michele Barrett. "A Room ... More »
11. Waiting for the Barbarians
By Daniel Mendelsohn | Used Price: 70% Off
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE PEN ART OF THE ESSAY AWARDOver the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review have earned him a reputation as “one of the greatest ... More »
12. Orientalism
By Edward W. Said | Used Price: 70% Off
Orientalism examines how the West has historically perceived the East and how Western imperialism has shaped these perceptions. Published in 1978, Said's work is a landmark in post-colonial studies. More »
13. Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999
By J. M. Coetzee | Used Price: 90% Off
Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world's greatest novelists. This thought-provoking collection gathers twenty-six of his essays on books and writing. In his opening piece, "What Is a Classic?", Coetzee asks, "What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is ... More »
14. Axel's Castle - A Study in Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. More »
15. How to Read and Why
By Harold Bloom | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with ... More »
16. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
By Zadie Smith | Used Price: 70% Off
"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." -Los Angeles Times Split into five sections-Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an ... More »
17. The Liberal Imagination
By Lionel Trilling | Used Price: 60% Off
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the ... More »
18. Lectures on Literature
By Vladimir Nabokov | Used Price: 70% Off
For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John ... More »
19. Against Interpretation
By Susan Sontag | Used Price: 50% Off
Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well ... More »
20. The Country and the City
By Raymond Williams | Used Price: 70% Off
As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture. More »
21. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
By Elif Batuman | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED--ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!--TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICSNo one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human ... More »
22. A Literature of Their Own
By Elaine Showalter | Used Price: 70% Off
When first published in 1977, A Literature of Their Own quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers ... More »
23. Professor Borges: A Course On English Literature
By Jorge Luis Borges | Used Price: 50% Off
In English at last, Borges’s erudite and entertaining lectures on English literature from Beowulf to Oscar WildeWriting for Harper’s Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges:“A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the ... More »
24. On Writing
By Stephen King | Used Price: 50% Off
“Long live the Kingâ€Â hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade ... More »
25. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
By Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari | 50% Off
Book annotation not available for this title.Title: KafkaAuthor: Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari, FelixPublisher: Univ of Minnesota PrPublication Date: 1986/10/31Number of Pages: Binding Type: PAPERBACKLibrary of Congress: 85031822 More »
26. The Great Tradition
By F.R. Leavis
The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad...' So begins what is arguably F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical and polemical survey of English fiction that was first published in 1948. He puts a powerful case ... More »
27. The Great Movies
By Roger Ebert | Used Price: 90% Off
America’s most trusted and best-known film critic Roger Ebert presents one hundred brilliant essays on some of the best movies ever made. For the past five years Roger Ebert, the famed film writer and critic, has been writing biweekly essays for a feature called ... More »
28. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
By William Zinsser | Used Price: 60% Off
On Writing Well has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It is a book for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does in ... More »
29. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
By Bruno Bettelheim | Used Price: 60% Off
Bruno Bettelheim was one of the great child psychologists of the twentieth century and perhaps none of his books has been more influential than this revelatory study of fairy tales and their universal importance in understanding childhood development.Analyzing a wide range of traditional stories, from the tales of ... More »
30. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
By Fredric Jameson | Used Price: 60% Off
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement ... More »
31. Aspects of the Novel
By E. M. Forster | Used Price: 80% Off
E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel" is an innovative and effusive treatise on a literary form that, at the time of publication, had only recently begun to enjoy serious academic consideration. This "Penguin Classics" edition is edited with an introduction by Oliver Stallybrass, and features a new preface ... More »
32. Fowler's Modern English Usage
By Henry Watson Fowler; Robert Burchfield
Why literally shouldn't be taken literally.Why Americans think home in on something is a mistake and Brits think hone in is.Is it OK to spell OK okay?What's wrong with hence why?Was Alanis Morrisette ever ironic?Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the world-famous guide to English usage, loved ... More »
33. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
By M. H. Abrams | Used Price: 70% Off
This highly acclaimed study analyzes the various trends in English criticism during the first four decades of this century. More »
34. Theory of Literature
By Paul Fry | Used Price: 60% Off
Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book's discussion is a series of underlying questions: What is literature, how is it ... More »
35. The Rhetoric of Fiction
By Wayne C. Booth | Used Price: 90% Off
The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make ... More »
36. The Great War and Modern Memory
By Paul Fussell | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
The Great War and Modern Memory is a book that describes the literary works by English participants in World War I to their experiences in trench warfare. Fussell describes how the futility and insanity of war defined the thinking of a generation and led England away from Romantacism. The book won the ... More »
37. American Sympathy
By Caleb Crain | Used Price: 90% Off
"A friend in history," Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "looks like some premature soul." And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation's literature. In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the ... More »
38. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism
Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "eclectic, exciting, convincing, provocative" and in The Washington Post Book World as "brilliantly original," Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey is a groundbreaking work that illuminates the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature. ... More »
39. How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
By Stanley Fish | Used Price: 60% Off
“Like a long periodic sentence, this book rumbles along, gathers steam, shifts gears, and packs a wallop.â€Â —Roy Blount Jr.  “Language lovers will flock to this homage to great writing.â€Â—Booklist Outspoken New York Times columnist Stanley Fish offers an entertaining, erudite analysis of language and ... More »
40. Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork
By Maria Bustillos | Used Price: 50% Off
The dorks are saving the nation, and this book proves it. Maria Bustillos takes the reader on a thrill ride featuring $3 million Patek Philippe watches, the late David Foster Wallace, Woody Allen, Star Wars, Akihabara Electric Town, and much more. These serio-comic essays bear a message, lightly ... More »
41. World Elsewhere
By Richard Poirier | Used Price: 70% Off
Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere, originally published in 1966 by the Oxford University Press, is a signal book in American literature and literary history. Widely acclaimed upon publication, it has since taken its place among a handful of books considered mandatory reading for all ... More »
42. The Poetics of Space
By Gaston Bachelard | Used Price: 70% Off
Thirty years since its first publication in English, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space one of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home. Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our ... More »
43. The Madwoman in the Attic
By Sandra M. Gilbert; Susan Gubar | 80% Off
In this work of feminist literary criticism the authors explore the works of many major 19th-century women writers. They chart a tangible desire expressed for freedom from the restraints of a confining patriarchal society and trace a distinctive female literary tradition. More »
44. Studies in Classic American Literature
By D. H. Lawrence | Used Price: 90% Off
Lawrence asserted that 'the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it'. In these highly individual, penetrating essays he has exposed 'the American whole soul' within some of that continent's major works of literature. In seeking to establish the status ... More »
45. United States: Essays 1952-1992
By Gore Vidal | Used Price: 90% Off
From the age of Eisenhower to the dawning of the Clinton era, Gore Vidal’s United States offers an incomparably rich tapestry of American intellectual and political life in a tumultuous period. It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original ... More »
46. The Case for Literature
By Gao Xingjian | Under $1.00
When Gao Xingjian was crowned Nobel Laureate in 2000, it was the first time in the hundred-year history of the Nobel Prize that this honor had been awarded to an author for a body of work written in Chinese. The same year, American readers embraced Mabel Lee’s translation of ... More »
47. Principles of Literary Criticism
By I.A. Richards | Used Price: 70% Off
Ivor Armstrong Richards was one of the founders of modern literary criticism. He enthused a generation of writers and readers and was an influential supporter of the young T.S. Eliot. Principles of Literary Criticism was the text that first established his reputation and pioneered the movement that became ... More »
48. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
By Cleanth Brooks | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
A classic that has been widely used by several generations, this book consists of detailed commentaries on ten famous English poems from the Elizabethan period to the present. Index. More »
49. Moral Imagination: Essays
By David Bromwich | Used Price: 50% Off
Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These ... More »
50. A Rulebook for Arguments
A Rulebook for Arguments is a succinct introduction to the art of writing and assessing arguments, organized around specific rules, each illustrated and explained soundly but briefly. This widely popular primer--translated into eight languages--remains the first choice in all disciplines for writers who seek straightforward guidance about ... More »
51. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion
By Jack Zipes | Used Price: 50% Off
The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional ... More »
52. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
By Ngugi wa Thiong'o | Used Price: 50% Off
Ngugi describes this book as 'a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism and in teaching of literature.' East Africa [Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda]: EAEP More »
53. Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays
By Michel de Montaigne | Used Price: 60% Off
Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French and edited with an introduction and notes by M.A. Screech. ... More »
54. The New Oxford Guide to Writing
By Thomas S. Kane | Under $1.00
Many books on writing tell you how to think more creatively, how to conjure up an idea from scratch. Many, once you have an idea, show you how to express it clearly and elegantly. And many handbooks offer reliable advice on the use of commas, semicolons, and ... More »
55. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
By Margaret Atwood | Used Price: 90% Off
What do we mean when we say that someone is a writer? Is he or she an entertainer? A high priest of the god Art? An improver of readers’ minds and morals? And who, for that matter, are these mysterious readers? In this wise and irresistibly quotable book, ... More »
56. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
By Dwight Macdonald | Used Price: 50% Off
A New York Review Books OriginalAn uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, ... More »
57. What Ever Happened to Modernism?
By Gabriel Josipovici | Used Price: 70% Off
The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing - a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction ... More »
58. Forensic Shakespeare
Shakespeare and Judicial Rhetoric illustrates Shakespeare's creative processes by revealing some of the intellectual materials out of which some of his most famous works were composed. Focusing on the narrative poem Lucrece, on four of his late Elizabethan plays -- Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, ... More »
59. The English Language
By Charles Barber; Joan Beal; Philip Shaw
This bestselling text by Charles Barber, with updating contributions from Joan C. Beal and Philip A. Shaw, recounts the history of the English language from its remote ancestry to the present day. Using dozens of familiar texts, including the English of King Alfred, Shakespeare and Chaucer, the English ... More »
60. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
By Stephen Greenblatt | Used Price: 60% Off
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period ... More »
61. Stein On Writing
By Sol Stein | Used Price: 70% Off
Stein on Writing provides immediately useful advice for all writers of fiction and nonfiction, whether they are newcomers or old hands, students or instructors, amateurs or professionals. As the always clear and direct Stein explains here, "This is not a book of theory. It is a book of ... More »
62. Why Read the Classics?
By Italo Calvino | Under $1.00
"Why Read the Classics?" is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say they are ... More »
63. Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy
By Dave Hickey | Used Price: 80% Off
The 23 essays (or "love songs") that make up the now classic volume Air Guitar trawl a "vast, invisible underground empire" of pleasure, through record stores, honky-tonks, art galleries, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops and hot-rod stores, as restlessly on the move as the America they depict. ... More »
64. The World of Odysseus
By Moses Finley | Used Price: 80% Off
The World of Odysseus is a concise and penetrating account of the society that gave birth to the Iliad and the Odyssey--a book that provides a vivid picture of the Greek Dark Ages, its men and women, works and days, morals and values. Long celebrated as a pathbreaking ... More »
65. Politics and the Novel
By Irving Howe | Used Price: 90% Off
Irving Howe’s classic investigation of the role of revolutionary ideas in fiction is here reprinted in a new paperback edition. In establishing the role of the political novel and tracing its growth into the twentieth century, Mr. Howe draws his examples from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, ... More »
66. Death of a Discipline
By Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | 80% Off
For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been ignoring the standardized "rules" of the academy and trespassing across disciplinary boundaries. Today she remains one of the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this new book she declares the death of ... More »
67. What Is Art?
By Leo Tolstoy | Used Price: 90% Off
During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These works culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Impassioned and iconoclastic, this powerfully influential work both criticizes the ... More »
68. Violence and the Sacred
By Rene Girard | Used Price: 80% Off
His fascinating and ambitious book provides a fully developed theory of violence as the 'heart and secret soul' of the sacred. Girard's fertile, combative mind links myth to prophetic writing, primitive religions to classical tragedy. More »
69. The Art of Fiction
By David Lodge | Used Price: 80% Off
The articles with which David Lodge entertained and enlightened readers of the Independent on Sunday and The Washington Post are now revised, expanded and collected together in book form.The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary ... More »
70. The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell
Few philosophers have had a more profound influence on the course of modern philosophy than Bertrand Russell. The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell is a comprehensive anthology of Russell’s most definitive essays written between 1903 and 1959. First published in 1961, this remarkable collection is a testament to ... More »
71. The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing
By David Morley | Used Price: 80% Off
This pioneering book introduces students to the practice and art of creative writing and creative reading. It offers a fresh, distinctive and beautifully written synthesis of the discipline. David Morley discusses where creative writing comes from, the various forms and camouflages it has taken, and why we teach ... More »
72. An Experiment in Criticism
By C. S. Lewis
Why do we read literature and how do we judge it? C. S. Lewis's classic An Experiment in Criticism springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He argues that ... More »
73. What is Literature?
Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement ... More »
74. The Tradition Of The New
By Harold Rosenberg | Used Price: 70% Off
Harold Rosenberg was undoubtedly the most important American art critic of the twentieth century. It was he who first coined the term ”Action Painters” to refer to the American Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning. Rosenberg’s seminal writings on this movement, as well as on ... More »
75. Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times
By John Darnton; NYT | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Now in paperback, today's most celebrated writers explore literature and the literary life in an inspirational collection of original essays.By turns poignant, hilarious, and practical, Writers on Writing brings together more than forty of contemporary literature's finest voices. Pieces range from reflections on the daily craft of writing ... More »
76. The Art of the Novel
By Milan Kundera | Used Price: 80% Off
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe.Kundera's discussion of his ... More »
77. ABC of Reading
By Ezra Pound | Used Price: 50% Off
Ezra Pound’s classic book about the meaning of literature, with a new introduction by Michael Dirda. This important work, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of Pound’s aesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active, critical mind and become ... More »
78. A Student's Writing Guide: How to Plan and Write Successful Essays
By Gordon Taylor | Used Price: 80% Off
Are you struggling to meet your coursework deadlines? Finding it hard to get to grips with your essay topics? Does your writing sometimes lack structure and style? Would you like to improve your grades? This text covers everything a student needs to know about writing essays and papers ... More »
79. Mythologies
“No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis,â€Â Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book—one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers ... More »
80. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the ... More »
81. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
By Toni Morrison | Used Price: 80% Off
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of ... More »
82. Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Burke has been widely praised as one of the sharpest readers of Shakespeare, Freud, and Marx, among others. He was also well known for turning his many book reviews into essays and excursions of his own, in the interest of tracking down the implications of terminologies and ... More »
83. What Is World Literature?
By David Damrosch | Used Price: 50% Off
World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, ... More »
84. The Critical Tradition
This bestseller balances a comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory -- from Plato to the present -- with the most thorough editorial support for understanding these challenging readings. More »
85. Theory of Prose
By Viktor Shklovsky | Used Price: 60% Off
Theory of Prose is one of the twentieth century's most important works of literary theory. It not only anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Arguing that writers structure their materials according ... More »
86. Criticism in the Wilderness
By Geoffrey Hartman | Used Price: 90% Off
Originally published in 1980, this now classic work of literary theory explores the wilderness of positions that grew out of the collision between Anglo-American practical criticism and Continental philosophic criticism. This second edition includes a new preface by the author as well as a foreword by Hayden White.“A ... More »
87. The Devil Finds Work
By James Baldwin | Used Price: 50% Off
Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the ... More »
88. How to Write a Thesis
By Umberto Eco
By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a ... More »
89. How to Read a Book
By Mortimer J. Adler; Charles Van Doren
With half a million copies in print, How to Read a Book is the best and most successful guide to reading comprehension for the general reader, completely rewritten and updated with new material.Originally published in 1940, this book is a rare phenomenon, a living classic that introduces and ... More »
90. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
By Helene Cixous | Used Price: 80% Off
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: The School of the Dead -- ... More »
91. Art as Experience
By John Dewey | Used Price: 50% Off
Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: ... More »
92. Theory of the Lyric
What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric―the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate ... More »
93. The Force of Poetry
Christopher Ricks is one of the best-known living critics of English, and was described by W. H. Auden as "the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." Though published independently over many years, each of the essays in this collection asks how a poet's words reveal the ... More »
94. The Dialogic Imagination
By Mikhail Bakhtin | Used Price: 70% Off
These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky—as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of ... More »
95. The Essential Pritchett : Selected Writings
By V.S. Pritchett | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
V. S. Pritchett (1900-1997) was one of the most subtle, potent and best-loved of modern British writers, an unparalleled story-teller and biographer and essayist of unique humour and insight. This volume contains an engrossing and lively collection of his autobiographical, travel and critical writings and a selection of ... More »
96. The Associated Press Stylebook
 The style of the Associated Press is the gold standard for news writing. With The AP Stylebook in hand, you can learn how to write and edit with the clarity and professionalism for which they are famous. Fully revised and updated, this new edition contains more than 3,000 ... More »
97. Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing: More than 70 Years of Celebrated Journalism
By Adrienne Miller | Used Price: 90% Off
For seventy years, Esquire has established a reputation for publishing the most innovative nonfiction in the country, and this remarkable anthology of more than fifty articles is a testament to that quality. "This collection is an inspiration," writes Esquire editor in chief David Granger, "as much for the ... More »
98. This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright
By Emma Smith
A THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 'The best introduction to the plays I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop' Alex Preston, Observer 'It makes you impatient to see or re-read the plays at once' Hilary Mantel A genius and prophet ... More »
99. The Age of Movies
By Pauline Kael | Used Price: 70% Off
"Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply," Pauline Kael once observed, "just because you must use everything you are and everything you know." Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools ... More »
100. Notes to Literature
By Theodor W. Adorno | Used Price: 50% Off
Adorno's Notes to Literature, which begins with the high leap of his great essay 'The Essay as Form,' sets an inimitable, always exhilirating standard. A volume of Adorno's essays is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature. -- Susan Sontag More »
 |
 |
 |