Shakespeare's tragedies - the plays which represent human experience in its starkest and most terrifying dimensions - are crucial to the postmodern study of early modern subjectivity. In this collection of ground-breaking essays, eminent Shakespearean scholars examine ten of these tragedies through a variety of postmodern frameworks: historical, linguistic and psychoanalytical. Although each essay presents an original perspective on one of Shakespeare's tragedies, the collection taken as a whole reveals the interdependence of these new critical approaches. The editor's introduction discusses...

Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse have often been described as 'poetic' and 'difficult'. The essays in this book show how attentive readers can follow their stories and relate them directly to the 'real' world. Some work out 'who speaks'. Some explore the novels' debates about England in the 1920s: about power and imperialism and the War, about contemporary ideas of personal identity, and about women's lives. All demonstrate that new critical methods lead to active engagement with the texts.

Ever since Edmund Wilson's Dickens: the Two Scrooges, one of the hallmarks of Dickens criticism has been a disturbing kind of socio-psychological probing, with insights nowadays being drawn from poststructuralist and feminist thought. At the same time, however, some critics are beginning to rehabilitate 'old-fashioned' topics such as Dickens's characters, his comic plotting, and his relations with his readers - then and now. The New Casebook includes an extensive introduction which connects these trends to developments in literary theory. And of the hundreds of recent accounts of Great...

This collection of essays is aimed at students who are working on The Merchant of Venice and who are looking for new ways of thinking about the play and new ways of thinking about their own practice as critics. The collection offers a spectrum of the more recent writings on the play, that open up its historical, cultural and political significance and serve to demonstrate some of the ways in which contemporary criticism is not only based upon critical theory but is also about the practice of criticism. This is a strong collection of essays about Shakespeare's most controversial...

The interpretation of Paradise Lost has undergone remarkable changes in the last twenty years. This new collection of essays maps these changes, showing how they have been achieved by the combined discourses of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. The essays are by writers working at the forefront of current criticism, and not only provide an overview of contemporary readings of one of the seminal works of English literature, but also indicate the range and subtlety of the revolution in English studies that has taken place in the past two decades. Paradise...

This New Casebook provides an overview of the criticism of work by Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, and an introduction to the key works and issues in African-American literary scholarship. It is supported by the first annotated bibliography of the different critical approaches which have been taken to Morrison's fiction. The essays provide insights into the structure, themes, language and contexts of her novels which will prove invaluable for both new readers and those already familiar with her work.

The popular appeal of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, now over a hundred years old, shows little sign of waning. No other monster has endured, and proliferated, in quite the same way - even if we now seem to prefer interviewing, rather than staking, our vampires. It is only over the last twenty years, however, that Dracula has begun to receive much serious critical attention. This volume collects the most significant contemporary work on the novel from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Marxist, Psychoanalytical, Historicist and Feminist giving a unique...

A wide-ranging selection from the most recent criticism of Antony and Cleopatra, beginning with seminal work from the 1950s onwards, and culminating in a series of radical reappraisals of the play's content, form, and appeal to modern readers. Represented in this selection is material from the late John Danby, Terence Hawkes, Janet Adelman, Margot Heinemann, J.Neville Davies, Barbara Vincent, Ania Loomba, Phyllis Rackin, Jonathan Dollimore and Jyotsyna Singh. Together with a substantial Introduction they offer a radical reappraisal of one of Shakespeare's Major Tragedies.

This selection of eleven essays charts the most important aspects of the developing debate about Collins's fiction in the last twenty years. Employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches - including reader response theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural materialism and a range of feminisms - these essays examine Collins's fiction from several perspectives: historical, psychological, structural, generic and political (including gender politics). They focus on an author preoccupied with the production of social and psychological identity, and with issues...

The interpretation of Paradise Lost has undergone remarkable changes in the last twenty years. This new collection of essays maps these changes, showing how they have been achieved by the combined discourses of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. The essays are by writers working at the forefront of current criticism, and not only provide an overview of contemporary readings of one of the seminal works of English literature, but also indicate the range and subtlety of the revolution in English studies that has taken place in the past two decades. Paradise...