Finch: A Cultural History of French Literature

“Alison Finch's superbly written book brings the cultural dimension of French literature fully into focus. While revealing how the agenda of literary study has changed, she demonstrates that we can engage with the great canonical texts of French literature in new and exciting ways. The book is to be commended for its clarity, its shrewd analyses, and its sheer readability.”

Tim Unwin, Bristol University

This book is the first to offer a cultural history of French literature from its very beginnings, analysing the relationship between French literature and France’s evolving power structures from the Middle Ages through to the present day.

Crain: Reading the Bible as Literature

“Professor Crain's book offers undergraduates an invaluable means of studying the biblical texts, systematically demonstrating how applying a host of different literary techniques can help illuminate the biblical writers' message.  By analyzing the writers' use of such rhetorical devices as image, metaphor, archetype, narration, and character portrayal, Dr. Crain equips students to interpret the Bible responsibly and effectively.”

Stephen Harris, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Sacramento

This book provides the ideal entry-point to the process of reading, understanding, and assessing what many recognize to be the important and powerful literature of the Bible. The book introduces the tools of literary analysis, including: language and style, the formal structures of genre, character study, and thematic analysis.

Wachtel and Vinitsky: Russian Literature

“The authors accomplish a rare tour de force: in remarkably few pages readers are exposed to the entire sweep of Russian literary culture, not as a summary but as an intellectual commentary on a great world literature. A terrific book for students and general readers alike.”

Jeffrey Brooks, John Hopkins University

“To transmit the evolving spirit of a culture takes as much magic as chronology, and this mesmerizing volume delivers the best of all worlds. At flashpoints over a thousand years, select persons, artworks, and events are triangulated into miniature stories, each alive with human faces at thrilling creative risk.”

Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

In this engaging book, Andrew Baruch Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky provide a comprehensive, conceptually challenging history of Russian literature, including prose, poetry and drama. Although the focus is on literature, individual works, lives and events are placed in broad historical context as well as in the framework of parallel developments in Russian art and music.

Hallamore Caesar and Caesar: Modern Italian Literature

“A brilliant book that moves with agility through the centuries, authors, and historical events. It is a cultural and literary guide that any student of Italian should rely on.”

Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College

A synoptic overview at the beginning of the volume is designed to help the reader get her or his bearings in the detail of the nine chapters which follow. Using an essentially chronological framework, the book is divided into three major cultural time-spans: the long eighteenth century, the decades of national identity formation and the creation of modern', industrial Italy between 1816 and 1900, and the twentieth century with its constant renegotiation of national cultural identity. A final epilogue provides a snapshot of Italian literary culture in the near-present.

Dicker/Sun: African American Theater

“If I had possessed Professor Dicker/sun’s “Companion” forty-one years ago, it would have saved me hundreds of research hours. Her book answers all the questions my students asked about black theatre.”

James Hatch, City University New York

Written in a clear, accessible, storytelling style, this book shines a bright new light on the culture which has historically nurtured and inspired African American Theatre. It is rich with myths, history and first person accounts by ordinary people telling their extraordinary stories.

Smith: Terry Eagleton

“This is the first full treatment of Terry Eagleton's work. And, since Eagleton has written three careers' worth of work, the book is remarkable for its effortless coverage. It's also remarkable for digging up Eagleton's early work on religion. If you want to find out about Eagleton's work, this book will be a standard.”

Jeffrey Williams, Carnegie Mellon University

This book undertakes a lucid and detailed analysis of Terry Eagleton’s influential oeuvre. It gives close attention to the full range of Eagleton’s major publications, examining their arguments and implications, as well as how they have intervened in wider debates in cultural theory.

Watt: Medieval Women’s Writing

“I am delighted by the appearance of this book. Lucidly written for a general audience, Medieval Women’s Writing is by far the most interesting, balanced, and up-to-date study now in print. But it is more than this: it is also a collection of original readings of major women writers, which has new and often powerful things to say about how we think about women’s writing in the premodern period, and about what it means to describe this writing as a 'women’s literary tradition'. Flexible, passionate, ethically engaged, Medieval Women’s Writing will be a valuable and much-discussed resource for scholars, teachers, students, as well as general readers.”

Nicholas Watson, Harvard University

Trotter: Modern Irish Theatre

“Modern Irish Theatre is generous and thorough in its engagement with recent scholarship, provides succinct readings of key plays, and shows an eye for the detail or anecdote that will push the historical narrative forward.”

Times Literary Supplement

“Through a set of superbly constructed phases, Trotter situates twentieth-century Irish theatre in its evolving socio-political contexts. She covers theatrical activities from Belfast to Cork and from Dublin to Galway, analysing along the way a vast array of texts and performances from the high modernism of the early Abbey through to the community theatre of Charabanc.”

Brian Singleton, Trinity College Dublin

Through analysis of both major Irish dramas and the artists and companies that performed them, Modern Irish Theatre provides an engaging and accessible introduction to 20th century Irish theatre: its origins, dominant themes, relationship to politics and culture, and influence on theatre movements around the world.

Clark: Renaissance Drama

“Sandra Clark's long and distinguished career as a Shakespeare scholar illuminates every page of this magisterial study. Familiar with so many works of Renaissance drama, she draws on her extensive knowledge of early modern culture to demonstrate just how the theatre reflects the society. Clark’s study will be widely adopted for use in sixth-form and university classrooms.”

John W. Mahon, co-editor, Shakespeare Newsletter

Cartelli and Rowe: New Wave Shakespeare on the Screen

“In case anyone thought the tide was ebbing on Shakespeare and film, here are Cartelli and Rowe riding the "new wave" like pro surfers. As brilliant as film analysts as in their understanding of Shakespeare and his current cultural contexts, they are expert guides to a fascinating range of film adaptations and to subtle and provocative ways of thinking about the motive to adapt Shakespeare, about the strategies these films use, and about the theoretical models we can use to understand them.”

Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame

The past fifteen years have witnessed a diverse group of experiments in ‘staging' Shakespeare on film. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen introduces and applies the new analytic techniques and language that are required to make sense of this new wave.

Gupta: Globalization and Literature

“Gupta sheds a clear light on this little explored field through his comprehensive coverage of the scholarship, his multipronged approach to the topic, and his sure-footed negotiation of theoretical issues”

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University

This book presents a state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between globalization studies and literature and literary studies, and the bearing that they have on each other. It engages with the manner in which globalization is thematized in literary works, examines the relationship between globalization theory and literary theory, and discusses the impact of globalization processes on the production and reception of literary texts.

Armstrong: Modernism

The last 20 years has seen an explosion of work on literary modernism and its cultural and historical contexts. In this innovative study aimed at a general audience, Tim Armstrong seeks to define modernism not only by its aesthetics and literary genres but also by its links with broader cultural areas in which the ‘modern' is implicated and debated, and which inform its representational modes.

Whitmarsh: Ancient Greet Literature

This book will be important reading for undergraduates, in their first year and above, of ancient Greek literature and culture. All texts in the volume are translated, and no knowledge of ancient Greek literature is assumed.

Scott-Warren: Early Modern English Literature

‘Surveys and samplings of periods have a tendency to sacrifice subtlety for sweep, and clarity for coverage. When the period in question is arguably the richest in literary history then there's a real risk of summary and synthesis becoming superficial. Fortunately, Jason Scott-Warren's superb overview is as precise as it is panoramic. Clinically executed close readings of texts coupled with painstakingly elaborated cultural contexts make this a must-read volume for students and scholars alike.’

Willy Maley, University of Glasgow