Wicked stepmothers and beautiful princesses ...magic forests and enchanted towers ...little pigs and big bad wolves ...Fairy tales have been an integral part of childhood for hundreds of years. But what do they really mean? This book presents an exploration of the best-known fairy stories.

In this title, Paul Kocher focuses on The Lord of the Rings but also considers Tolkien's fiction as a whole, showing the relationship of the short prose and verse narratives to the major work.

An account of Greek tragedy, it demonstrates how the elements of plot, character and spectacle combine to produce 'pity and fear' - and why we derive pleasure from this painful process. It introduces the crucial concepts of mimesis ('imitation'), hamartia ('error') and katharsis, which have informed serious thinking about drama ever since.

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With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle.

Contains essays that reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) - known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky - as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. This work features four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki , published in Moscow in 1975.

C. S. Lewis's classic analysis springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite.

This collection of reviews from the New Yorker critic brings together a selection of Anthony Lane's film criticisms, profiles, book reviews and essays on art and culture. Lane embraces high and low with equal gusto, whether writing about T.S. Eliot, Judith Krantz, Alfred Hitchcock or Andre Gide.

This reference for Neil Gaiman's Sandman series covers each of the ten volumes, with plot summary, character analysis and interviews with the creators. It also contains story details, and lists of relevant CDs, articles, books and websites.

In this study, Ian Watts traces the genesis and development of the literary form, the novel. He investigates the reasons why the three main 18th-century novelists (Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding) wrote in the way they did.

Using classic works such as To His Coy Mistress , Hamlet , Huckleberry Finn , Young Goodman Brown, Everyday Use, and Frankenstein as tools to introduce students to various critical theories, this book demonstrates how different approaches to an array of readings enrich the total response to and understanding of the individual work.

A study of the Romantic poets and the relation between tradition and the individual artist. For this second edition Bloom offers a new introduction which explains the genesis of his thinking and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism.

Combining literary analysis, biography and history, this is a cultural portrait of the first half of the 20th century. As well as discussing Pound's poetry and his sources, it includes a biography of Pound and a series of essays on the parallel developments of Eliot, Joyce, Lewis and Williams.

A collection of pieces on modernism, autobiography, style, and painting, arguing the importance of art in our lives. The essays also discuss intimately the author's relationship to her own work and the books that she loves.

An indispensable guide for anyone reading Joyce's masterpiece for the first time, provding a crystal clear, page-by-page, line-by-line running commentary on the plot of Ulysses.

The linguistic distillation of Barthes' system of semiology in which the Balzac novella Sarrasine is dissected to uncover layers of meanings and interpretations. Barthes' interpretation of language and meaning lies within the 20th-century structuralist mode, similar to that of Levi-Strauss.

Presents annotations to Joyce's classic that can inform any reading of Ulysses . This volume includes annotations that gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, and explain religious nomenclature and practices.

The true biography of Shakespeare is in the plays. The great English tragedies were all written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. They are often in language that is difficult to us, and must have been hard even for contemporaries. How and why did Shakespeare's language develop as it did?

Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. This title features more than 150 of Borges' pieces.