Does the prospect of reading Milton's "Areopagitica" fill you with dread? Or does the fire and brimstone imagery of Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" make you retch? Well, fear no more. Now "The Smart Student's Guide to Really Hard Classic Essays" will enable you to comprehend fully and completely thirty three classic British and American essayists and their timeless essays. Each chapter includes the following: a context that places the essayist in a historical/literary perspective; a summary for selected essays that clearly highlights the main points of each paragraph;...

Understanding modern literary theory is a challenge even for the erudite individual. The Smart Student's Guide to Modern Literary Theory will clear away most of the jargon and convoluted prose found in essays and texts on theory. If you need detailed help on theories like deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, Russian Formalism, structuralism, archetypal criticism, postmodernism, New Criticism, phenomenology, and Reader-Response criticism, this book will prove invaluable to literature majors (especially those taking a course in Literary Theory), and students of history and philosophy. More than...