William Shakespeare

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Illinois

Designed for “teaching the conflicts,” this critical edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest reprints the Bevington text of the play along with critical essays representing major critical and cultural controversies surrounding the work. The play and essays are supported by distinctive editorial material — including introductions to Shakespeare's life and work, to critical conflicts in literary studies, and to each controversy that helps students grapple not only with the play’s critical issues but also with cultural debates about literature itself.

The Tempest

894f3a9c-4d3c-49b6-ba46-0265a13a7d5a-1

New York

The Poetry of Engagement 

Marianne Moore

3f6b6c19-c2e5-4ff4-89fc-902f2cd6e8dc-0

#paperback #flanneryoconnor #literarycriticism 

California

Flannery O'Connor was only the second twentieth-century writer (after William Faulkner) to have her work collected for the Library of America, the definitive edition of American authors. Fifty years after her death, O'Connor's fiction still retains its original power and pertinence. For those who know nothing of O'Connor and her work, this study by Ralph C. Wood offers one of the finest introductions available. For those looking to deepen their appreciation of this literary icon, it breaks important new ground.

Unique to Wood's approach is his concern to show how O'Connor's stories, novels, and essays impinge on America's cultural and ecclesial condition. He uses O'Connor's work as a window onto its own regional and religious ethos. Indeed, he argues here that O'Connor's fiction has lasting, even universal, significance precisely because it is rooted in the confessional witness of her Roman Catholicism and in the Christ-haunted character of the American South.

According to Wood, it is this O'Connor -- the believer and the Southerner -- who helps us at once to confront the hardest cultural questions and to propose the profoundest religious answers to them. His book is thus far more than a critical analysis of O'Connor's writing; in fact, it is principally devoted to cultural and theological criticism by way of O'Connor's searing insights into our time and place.

These are some of the engaging moral and religious questions that Wood explores: the role of religious fundamentalism in American culture and in relation to both Protestant liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the practice of racial slavery and its continuing legacy in the literature and religion of the South; the debate over Southern identity, especially whether it is a culture rooted in ancient or modern values; the place of preaching and the sacraments in secular society and dying Christendom; and the lure of nihilism in contemporary American culture.

Splendidly illuminating both O'Connor herself and the American mind, Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South will inform and fascinate a wide range of readers, from lovers of literature to those seriously engaged with religious history, cultural analysis, or the American South.

Flannery o'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South

7d91cb54-c71e-4449-b21e-0e493df9caee-1

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Connecticut

Answers to the Questions Everybody's Asking

A critique of the bestselling novel "The da Vinci Code" examines various elements of the story to separate fictitious literary creations from historical facts of Christianity.

Breaking the Da Vinci Code

6003293d-6198-4028-b7b9-c59ce8725739-1

Thomas C. Foster

**How to Read Literature Like a Professor** by Thomas C. Foster is in like new condition. This revised edition of the New York Times bestseller provides a lively and entertaining guide to reading between the lines, ideal for literature enthusiasts and students. Feel free to request more photos or details.

Michigan

A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster's classic guide—a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes, and contexts—that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable. While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes—and the literary codes—of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor. What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower—and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun. This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface, and a new epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

1672e7e2-fd95-4319-94cd-44f239bb8c58-1

Diana Gabaldon

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

Florida

The creator of the Outlander series gives fans the skinny on her epic saga of time travel, adventure, and love everlasting, offering a complete listing of the characters and their genealogy; a glossary of Gaelic terms; and more. Tour.

The Outlandish Companion

e152671d-bb8e-4c48-88f1-9dcf090e03de-1

Carrie Mullins

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Wisconsin

How Literature Can Help Us Reinvent Modern Motherhood

This treasure trove for book lovers explores fifteen classic novels with memorable maternal figures, and examines how our cultural notions of motherhood have been shaped by literature. Sweet, supportive, dependable, selfless. Long before she had children of her own, journalist Carrie Mullins knew how mothers should behave. But how? Where did these expectations come from—and, more importantly, are they serving the mothers whose lives they shape? Carrie's suspicion, later crystallized while raising two small children, was that our culture’s idealization of motherhood was not only painfully limiting but harmful, leaving women to cope with impossible standards––standards rarely created by mothers themselves. To discover how we might talk about motherhood in a more realistic, nuanced, and inclusive way, Carrie turned to literature with memorable maternal figures for answers. Moving through the literary canon––from Pride and Prejudice and Little Women to The Great Gatsby, Beloved, Heartburn, and The Joy Luck Club—Carrie traces the origins of our modern mothering experience. By interrogating the influences of politics, economics, feminism, pop culture, and family life in each text, she identifies the factors that have shaped our prevailing views of motherhood, and puts these classics into conversation with the most urgent issues of the day. Who were these literary mothers, beyond their domestic responsibilities and familial demands? And what lessons do they have for us today—if we choose to listen?

The Book of Mothers

9e7d5b58-e7ef-419c-af6e-0ec38a97517f-0

Pennsylvania

Some highlights inside, slight wear to cover. #reading #teaching #english #highschool #literarycriticism #paperback 

North Dakota

A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Of all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed . . . and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today's masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history. Thomas C. Foster—the sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor—now examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors' choices about structure—point of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuity—create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.

How to Read Novels Like a Professor

798a5581-a9f7-4838-906b-31c371fb45c0-1

Bend on front cover but everything else is in good condition.

Indiana

David Orr

A Guide to Modern Poetry

Contemporary poetry may seem like a foreign country you've barely visited and wouldn't dream of living in. Beautiful & Pointless, however, reveals how to accept the foreignness of poetry in the same way we accept the strange delights of a place we're traveling to for the first time. Expect a little confusion, many delightful surprises, and a few experiences that will change the way you think about language and life. Award-winning critic David Orr is what every reader hopes for: the guide who points the way, doesn't talk too much, and helps you see what you might have missed on your own. Stimulating, amusing, and utterly engrossing, Beautiful & Pointless empowers us to engage with poetry as individual readers, allowing each of us to appreciate it in our own way.

Beautiful and Pointless

94f86c25-13c3-4524-9fb7-bcf971791cf2-0

John Milton

David Hawkes

Iowa

Presents the epic poem about the Creation and the Fall, and includes explanatory notes and a timeline of important events in Milton's life.

Paradise Lost

2694bbd1-d803-475b-a10c-119f00384161-1

Brian Dillon

A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called “a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin,” has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—this new book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.

Suppose a Sentence

eb1684bb-cfca-4b89-ae2f-6fe87eef6ebb-0

Kansas

Reinventing the West African Epic

How can traditions be subversive? The kinship between African traditions and novels has been under debate for the better part of a century, but the conversation has stagnated because of a slowness to question the terms on which it is based: orality vs. writing, tradition vs. modernity, epic vs. novel. These rigid binaries were, in fact, invented by colonialism and cemented by postcolonial identity politics. Thanks to this entrenched paradigm, far too much ink has been poured into the so-called Great Divide between oral and writing societies, and to the long-lamented decline of the ways of old. Given advances in social science and humanities research--studies in folklore, performance, invented traditions, colonial and postcolonial ethnography, history, and pop culture--the moment is right to rewrite this calcified literary history. This book is not another story of subverted traditions, but of subversive ones. West African epics like Sunjata, Samori, and Lat-Dior offer a space from which to think about, and criticize, the issues of today, just as novels in European languages do. Through readings of documented performances and major writers like Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampâté Bâ of Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Aminata Sow Fall and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, this book conducts an entirely new analysis of West African oral epic and its relevance to contemporary world literature. 

Subversive Traditions

2a35a0dc-d2f9-4162-a5c7-983b4ac319ee-1

Dust cover intact little shelf wear no moisture exposure clean print spine tight

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Texas

The Outlandish Companion 86

Opinionated (and sometimes disgruntled) essays on the history of science fiction and the interplay between the genre and the broader culture. Analysis interspersed with passages of professional memoir reporting the writer's personal history with each subject. 

Library discard with various stickers on dust sleeve and inside cover pages. Faded stamp with marker line on top edge (pictured).

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

How Science Fiction Conquered the World

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

4ec67ce0-dd14-42d7-b1c9-d4ec090dff0b-0

#paperback #nonfiction #literarycriticism 

Oregon

Book Lust

e6610fe2-09a1-4871-ab0b-51c86dc7a584-1

John O'Neill

Interpretation in the Literary Arts and Sciences

Critical Conventions

f8f23fde-27fb-4ecb-9eaa-900f58558ac5-0

Clayton Koelb

Paperback with covers enclosed in protective tape. Spine appears to be sun faded. 

Essays on the Present and Future of Literary Theory

The Current in Criticism is meant to provide the reader with a wide spectrum of current thinking, a sampling of some of the arguments, attitudes, and perspectives, which participate in the swirl of intense speculative energy that is so characteristic of contemporary theory. The editors describe this collection of 14 essays as a tentative assessment of where we are and where we might be going in literary study, of what is current in criticism and of where the critical current might be tending.

The Current in Criticism

5780dd61-d789-4941-8958-847e17fb096e-0

The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism 

Creating Faulkner’s Reputation 

#nonfiction #literarycriticism #hardcover #classics #classic 

Browse by categories

Save this search

William Shakespeare

The Tempest

Grace Schulman

Marianne Moore

Ralph C. Wood

Flannery o'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South

Darrell L. Bock

Breaking the Da Vinci Code

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Diana Gabaldon

The Outlandish Companion

Carrie Mullins

The Book of Mothers

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Novels Like a Professor

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

David Orr

Beautiful and Pointless

John Milton; David Hawkes

Paradise Lost

Brian Dillon

Suppose a Sentence

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Jonathon Repinecz

Subversive Traditions

Diana Gabaldon

The Outlandish Companion 86

Thomas M. Disch

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Nancy Pearl

Book Lust

John O'Neill

Critical Conventions

Clayton Koelb and Virgil Lokke, Editors

The Current in Criticism

Lawrence H. Schwartz

Creating Faulkner’s Reputation

W. John Campbell

The Book of Great Books

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Novels Like a Professor