With excerpts from interviews and reviews, an exploration of the historical documents and slave narrative traditions on which Morrison drew, and an insightful juxtaposition of psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches to the novel, this guide places Beloved in the contexts of Morrison's oeuvre and other works of African American literature. Chapters focus on the supernatural elements of the work, as well as the author's treatment of the physical self.

This Critical Guide helps students sift through and make sense of nearly three centuries of Lear criticism, providing insight into different assessments of the play's merit and its place within Shakespeare's work and the canon of English literature. Highlights include excerpts from the neoclassical and Romantic receptions of King Lear -- material from John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Victor Hugo -- and a discussion of recent and current trends in criticism of the play.

This Columbia Critical Guide offers a thorough overview of the incredible wealth of criticism about these two masterpieces, as well as insights into Joyce's writing process and his literary sources--revealed by critics and artists who knew him personally. The volume explores the relationship between Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and also examines how Joyce's successors have explained and venerated his work.

Two of Virginia Woolf's most influential works, To the Lighthouse and The Waves reveal the quintessence of her experimentation with narrative technique in depicting the passage of time and the nature of human consciousness. This guide includes an outline of the critical reception of Woolf's work -- placing these two texts in the context of her oeuvre -- as well as extracts from her own writing on these novels and an exploration of the birth of Woolf studies in the mid-twentieth century.

More critical writing exists on The Great Gatsby than on any other work of American fiction. This Columbia Critical Guide introduces and contextualizes the key critical debates surrounding Fitzgerald's novel. The extracts and essays included here reflect The Great Gatsby's place as one of the first American novels to make significant use of modernist techniques and explore the influence of this "Lost Generation" work on later American writings. In considering secondary sources from the twenties to the present, this smart and sophisticated study guide offers readers an...

This Columbia Critical Guide steers a clear path through the huge body of critical material on Richard II that has accrued over the past three centuries, elucidating the play's reception by audiences, critics, and scholars since its first production. Beginning with a discussion of early commentaries, the book presents and addresses the most significant critical arguments to give the reader a clear understanding of the ways in which each generation has sought to invest Richard II with new meaning. The final section considers the radical new reading of Shakespeare's work provided...

In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain presented for the first time the vernacular of the Mississippi River region, explored the myths and fables of the nation's past, and looked to the choices facing a rapidly changing society. Moving from a discussion of the novels' early receptions, this Columbia Critical Guide explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism by William Dean Howells, T. S. Eliot, Leslie Fiedler, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison. In its final section, the book provides students with important material on the contemporary...

Charting a careful course through the bewildering profusion of material on "Wuthering Heights," this "Guide" offers synopses of and excerpts from critical responses to the novel from the time of publication to the present day, supplemented by the most comprehensive bibliography currently available. Opening with a chapter on how Emily BrontA's masterpiece was received in the nineteenth century, the "Guide" links together a selection of extracts that demonstrate the major critical developments of the twentieth century -- from humanism through formalism to deconstruction. Within this general...

Spanning an impressive range of interpretations, the critical works in this collection analyze the complex narrative technique of Heart Of Darkness while exploring its evocation of myth, philosophy, and politics, its attitudes to empire, its images of Africa, and its representations of women. Examining secondary sources from the 1900s to the 1990s, this Guide is an indispensable resource for the study of one of Conrad's most potent works.