Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2nd Edition
With the exception of the first chapter, which is an enlightening but pretty dry history of book publishing, the author writes with an enganging and personable style that's highly unusual for an "academic" book. I picked it up thinking that I'd browse through it and found myself reading it cover to cover. There's a bit of the usual feminist/critical studies rhetoric but it's neither bombastic enough nor pervasive enough to dampen the book's accessibility nor its credibility.
Volumes of the Children's Literature Review present full-text literary criticism on writers and illustrators for children and young adults. Critical essays are selected from leading sources, including published journals, magazines, books, monographs, reviews, and scholarly papers.
This four-volume set covers world authors from many periods and genres, building a broad understanding of the various contexts -- from the biographical to the literary to the historical -- in which literature can be viewed. The Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature allows a reader to analyze an author's work as a reflection of the heritage, traditions and experiences of the author's personal life and the beliefs, events, and lifestyles of the world at the time.
Scribner launches a new literature reference source with this volume, accompaniment to its well-established British Writers series. While that series focus on writers, the new one concentrates on works. The first volume contains extensive essays on 20 literary classics in various genres, selected after researching the curriculum and consulting with professors. Although many of the choices are unsurprising, others are not typically given to beginning students of literature, reflecting the fact that the new series is intended for a somewhat advanced audience.
BRITISH WRITERS, Supplement XIBritish Writers, Volume 1-8 (vol.8 is an index to volumes 1-7), is a collection of critical essays covering writers who have made significant contributions to British, Irish, and Commonwealth literature from the 14th century to the present day.
The goal of the supplements has been consistent with the original idea of the series: to provide clear, informative essays aimed at the general reader. These essays are meant to introduce a writer of some importance in the history of British or Anglophone literature.
