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...

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.

Surveying the key debates about a novel which has provoked an immensely rich critical response, the extracts and essays included here examine Great Expectations in structural, symbolic, social, political, psychological, and sexual terms, relating the novel to its own time and to a range of twentieth-century theoretical perspectives. Exploring secondary sources, from initial reviews in the 1860s to the most up-to-date critiques of the 1990s, the Guide is an essential resource for the study of one of Dickens's most complex works.

Explores the critical material generated by The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. This guide follows the growth of interest in Faulkner's work across six decades. It discusses writings shaped by various critical theories, offering the reader a view of the place given to one of America's innovative and influential novelists.

Explores the critical material generated by The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. This guide follows the growth of interest in Faulkner's work across six decades. It discusses writings shaped by various critical theories, offering the reader a view of the place given to one of America's innovative and influential novelists.

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...

Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts.

The Great Gatsby (1925) is a classic of modern American literature and is often seen as the quintessential novel of 'the jazz age'. This is the ideal guide to the...

Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most established, and controversial, writers. This book introduces students to a range of critical approaches to McEwan's fiction.

This Reader's Guide focuses upon Gothic fiction produced predominantly in the Romantic era (1780-1820). Angela Wright assembles some of the most important critical writings about Romantic Gothic literature since its inception to the present day. The Guide begins by charting the moral and political panic provoked by Gothic's increasing popularity in the 1790s, and then examines the genre's recuperation as a serious area of literary study through aesthetic, political, psychoanalytic and gender criticism.