What is the meaning of a word? Most readers turn to the dictionary for authoritative meanings and correct usage. But what is the source of authority in dictionaries? Some dictionaries employ panels of experts to fix meaning and prescribe usage, others...

In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from rhetorical, social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today.Writing Genres does...

Contributors to this first critical anthology devoted exclusively to the Henrician era show how contemporary theoretical approaches can enrich, complicate, and sometimes entirely revise our understanding of that period.

Pope's complex 1713 poem has been widely wielded in contemporary debate about colonialism and the nature of crime and society in Britain. Rogers' detailed analysis takes another tack, looking at the way the poem recalls earlier forms of royal panegyric...

Why melancholia is a vital form of social critique and a catalyst for political renewalMelancholia is wrongly condemned as a condition of withdrawal and despair that alienates its sufferer from community. Countering that misconception, A Politics of...

A captivating portrait of the poet and the scientist who shared an enchanted view of natureEmily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets,...

A fresh and original introduction to the Odyssey—and how it continues to shape literature, film, art and even the ways we make sense of our livesReading the Odyssey is an introduction to Homer’s masterpiece like no other. It combines a cultural and...

The New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 "The gift book of the year, a volume that should have broad appeal and deliver many hours of pleasure to the recipient. The Work of Art is a gorgeous book.” —John Warner, The...

A biography of Native Son's Bigger Thomas that examines his continued relevance in debates over Black men and the violence of racism Bigger Thomas, the central figure in Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940), eludes easy categorization. A violent and...

Radical universalism vs postcolonial theoryThe World in a Grain of Sand offers a framework for reading literature from the global South that goes against the grain of dominant theories in cultural studies, especially, postcolonial theory. It critiques...

The radical history of space exploration from the Russian Cosmists to Elon MuskMany societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there - whether conquering the unknown, establishing space "colonies," privatising...

A USA Today Must Read New BookFrom the bestselling author of Women Rowing North and Reviving Ophelia-a memoir in essays reflecting on radiance, resilience, and the constantly changing nature of reality.In her luminous new memoir in essays, Mary Pipher-as...

A defense and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading. Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of...

A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around "The American...

Long recognized as the outstanding reference on world literature, Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia is the one against which all others are measured, and is the single-most complete one-volume encyclopedia available for those with a serious interest in the...

Justus George Lawler's critically acclaimed study of the work of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is, once again, available.

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka's work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther;...