Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Reference

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second...

Business and the businessman have had a fundamental place in American society since the inception of the nation. This tenet, the 'gospel of wealth', is a central concern in the novels of Theodore Dreiser and his contemporaries. First published in 1987, this study aims to set this group of writers in their historical context and to show how they elaborated the idea of wealth as an object of quasi-religious quest. What had previously been associated with disease and darkness, avarice and dishonour, now came to emblematise the virtues of thrift, prudence and diligence. The underlying argument...

This volume combines two classic works on Hamlet, first published in 1919 and 1922.

The first book's original description says that it contains a theory which attempts to explain an everlasting problem - it insists that Hamlet is neither a failure not an accident, but a very great work of art. In a final chapter, the play is examined as an aesthetic document. It is a profoundly interesting and not unprovocative work.

The second book reviews and attempts to resolve the most interesting debate of any Shakespeare play and presents proper method for investigating the genesis of...

Since the cinema first began to be taken seriously as an art form, there has been a constant debate on the question: who is the real creator of the film, the writer or the director? This study of a group of key film-makers in the sixties suggests that during this decade there was an emergence of a generation of film-makers who conceived a whole film in their minds just as an architect conceives a whole cathedral or a composer a whole symphony.

The book presents detailed critical studies of the work of six commanding figures in the international cinema: four who have made their major...

Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney.

Reviews of the original edition:

'...fills a gap in film studies...the study of...

Semiotics offers a systematic approach to analysing the stylistic structure of film. When this study was originally published in 1983 this was a recent addition to the methods of film study and it presents an explanation of film semiotics with direct application to comparative film research. It takes as its representative subject one trilogy of films and applies semiology, with careful textual analysis. The book begins with a basic introduction to semiotics and the ideas of Christian Metz on cinesemiotics. It then presents a syntagmatic analysis of each of the three Dollars films, with an...

Film is an important source of social history, as well as having been a popular art form from the early twentieth century. This study shows how a society, consciously or unconsciously, is mirrored in its cinema. It considers the role of the cinema in dramatizing popular beliefs and myths, and takes three case studies - American populism, British imperialism, German Nazism - to explain how a nation's pressures, tensions and hopes come through in its films. Examining the American cinema is accomplished by analysing the careers of three great directors, John Ford, Frank Capra and Leo McCarey,...

Bringing together the work of leading film historians, originally published in 1981, this book illustrates the breadth of methodological approaches adopted by the field and the variety of its interests. Dealing with a period from about 1924-1945, it considers feature films in particular, showing their potential as historical source material, and discussing how they provide a clearer understanding of the societies and intellectual trends they both reflected and affected. By using films as historical documents, the articles demonstrate how important new insights may be gained into the...

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and criticism. The...

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity,...

At the heart of criticism lies one question: What do you think of it? Every time we comment on an artefact, whether a poem, a play, a painting, a novel or a piano concerto, we are acting as critics, making our own judgements and interpretations. Among the most fundamental of human intellectual activities, criticism offers a starting point for many of our journeys towards understanding.

Focusing particularly on stories, plays and poems, Criticism traces the central concepts and controversies in criticism, from Plato to...

The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural practices of law and literature mutually negotiate each other and on the question after the ontological commensurability of the domains. This volume offers, for the first time, an attempt to provide an...

This book is the result of investiging whether Ode to a Nightingale could be interpreted as the record of an actual song that moved Keats so deeply as to involve, in Jung s terms, an experience of the Self. . It is in effect a biographical study of one aspect of Keats life of the imagination. It suggests why he became a poet, shows how his attitude to his poetry changed, how in Jungian terms he first met his shadow, rejected it, then came to accept it, and how this affected his poetry.

The meaning of the few psychological terms used in the book are clarified by illustration...

The secrecy in which the British Board of Film Censors enveloped itself until 1948 resulted in a glaring vacuum in British cinematic history. Originally published in 1985, this book filled this important gap, drawing on the detailed registers of films passed, cut and banned since 1913.

The book opens by tracing the events which led up to the creation of the BBFC and goes on to cover the Board s theoretical censorship principles concerning such matters as crime, religion and sex and to discuss how these principles were applied in practice to silent films. The advent of the talkies...