From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, this title provides an account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.

The theatre for which Shakespeare wrote and acted was a cut-throat commercial entertainment industry. Yet his plays were also intensely alert to the social and political realities of their times.

Since its publication in1939, countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake, have given up after a few pages and dismissed it as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible. The authors break down Joyce's book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary.

Looks beyond the Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, to the tellers of tales and to the social and cultural contexts in which the tales are told. This volume considers tales through the centuries, from the ancient sibyl to 18th-century salonieres, from Disney to Angela Carter.

Walter Pater is increasingly seen as an important precursor of modernist aesthetic theory. This work was one of the most influential pieces of cultural criticism of its day, particularly on the work of Oscar Wilde, who described it as my golden book ... the very flower of decadence .

In seven independent, but closely related chapters, the author presents his personal conception of the European novel, which he describes as 'an art born of the laughter of God'.

To serve the growing number of college courses, often required now, on criticism and theory, and to incorporate recent writings, the reader has been expanded and updated from the 1971 and 1992 editions. The selections, many of them excerpts from longer works, are presented chronologically by author.

This, Lewis's last book, was hailed as 'the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind'.

Woolf attempts to see literature from the perspective of the common reader , someone whom she distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She invesigates medieval England, tsarist Russia, Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists.

The second edition of this guide has been expanded to cover the sixth and seventh - and final - seasons of Buffy and the third and fourth seasons of Angel . There are new chapters on the relationship between Buffy and the lovelorn vampire Spike and on the thematic structure of Angel .

The definitive guide to the origin of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, from The Hobbit to The History of Middle-earth series -- includes unpublished Tolkien extracts and poetry.

Discusses, among other things, guitar solos and losing your virginity to a Rod Stewart song and singers whose teeth whistle and the sort of music you hear in Body Shop. The author writes about 31 songs that either have some great significance in his life - or are just songs that he loves.

Covers the creators of modern comics and introduces a critical theory that explains where each fits into the pantheon of art. This work is suitable for people who want to know not just what comics are worth reading, but also the ways to think and talk and argue about them.

This expanded edition features six new chapters, each of which provides a concise history of a literary term, critically explores the issues and questions that the term raises, and then puts theory into practice by showing the reading strategies that the term permits.

Fontana Press. Roland Barthers reissue with new jacket.

A generous selection of forthright essays on art and artists. Hughes tackles the lives and works of over 80 artists, from the old masters to our contemporaries, exploring their achievement (or lack of it) and how they altered the history of art for better or worse.

Features various articles considering the art of fiction under a range of headings such as 'The Intrusive Author', 'Suspense', and 'Magic Realism'. This book illustrates several styles and techniques by passages from classic or modern fiction. It is suitable for writers, students and those who want to understand how literature works.

Explores what Proust had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive. This book also contains the author's own commentary on Proust.

From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. This is a brilliant analysis of our numbed response to the images of horror.