Focusing on three of Eliot's most influential and widely read novels, this guide traces recent critical interpretations of her work as well as revisiting some of the perspectives offered by original reviewers and early critics.

Selby (American studies, U. of Wales, Swansea) considers the critical history of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land . Selby contends that the poem is a crucial document that marks and produces a change in sensibility from unity of thought to a modern even postmodern apprehension of the plurality of exper

The Waste Land (1922) is widely recognized as a central text of modernism and is often described as the most important poem of the twentieth century. This guide begins with early reviews and discussions from the 1920s and '30s, considered alongside Eliot's own critical essays, showing how he set the critical terms by which his poem has been read. Examining the ways in which the poem became accepted as a literary classic, the guide then looks at New Critical and Formalist readings. The final chapters examine deconstructive readings that challenge The Waste Land's assumed cultural power by...

This collection of reviews of the writing of Sylvia Plath is arranged in sections on reviews of The Colossus and Ariel, unifying strategies and early feminist readings of the 1970s, cultural and historical readings, feminist and psychoanalytic strategies, and new directions. Brief excerpts by nume

Sylvia Plath's second volume of poetry, Ariel, published posthumously in 1965, shocked and provoked reviewers with its unexpected intensity and power, and the publication of her Collected Poems in 1981 confirmed her as a poet of stature and maturity. Beginning with reviews of her initial collection, The Colossus, the reader is clearly guided through the profusion of critical material that has variously described Plath as feminine and feminist, personal and political, an American modernist and an English Romantic. The guide includes critical assessments from Robert Lowell, Sandra M. Gilbert,...

"Othello" is perhaps Shakespeare's most troublesome tragedy. While it has retained its popularity on the stage, many critics have struggled to come to terms with it. The Romantics warmed to the figure of Othello himself and wrung their hands over the plight of Desdemona; the Modernists looked down on the play as an achievement of Shakespeare's stagecraft rather than of his imagination.

Excerpting and discussing the critical history of the play from the earliest pronouncements to present-day criticism, this guide does justice to the variety of opinion and points out significant themes and...

"Othello" is perhaps Shakespeare's most troublesome tragedy. While it has retained its popularity on the stage, many critics have struggled to come to terms with it. The Romantics warmed to the figure of Othello himself and wrung their hands over the plight of Desdemona; the Modernists looked down on the play as an achievement of Shakespeare's stagecraft rather than of his imagination.

Excerpting and discussing the critical history of the play from the earliest pronouncements to present-day criticism, this guide does justice to the variety of opinion and points out significant themes and...