| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
books tagged “criticism”
books tagged “criticism”
›› Find signed collectible books by ''
99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939by Anthony BurgessISBN 0671524070 (0-671-52407-0)
Hardcover, Daedalus Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: '99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939'Book summary:In this book Anthony Burgess internationally acclaimed novelist and critic offers his list of the 99 best novels published in English since 1939. [via]
More editions of 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939:
The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyceby Umberto Eco, Ellen Esrock, David RobeyISBN 0674006356 (0-674-00635-6)
Softcover, Harvard University Press
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce'More editions of The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce:
-
The Arcades Projectby Walter Benjamin, Kevin McLaughlin, Howard EilandISBN 0674008022 (0-674-00802-2)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Arcades Project'Book summary:You could spend years trying to read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project--after all, he spent much of the last 13 years of his life doing the research. When he committed suicide in 1940, he destroyed his copy of the manuscript, and so for decades the work was believed lost. But another copy turned up, and Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin have translated it into English. It is a complex, fragmentary work--more a series of notes for a book than a book itself--which probes the culture of the Paris arcades (a cross between covered streets and shopping malls) of the mid-19th century and the flaneur ("the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets" in an "anamnestic intoxication [that] ... feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge--indeed, of dead facts--as something experienced and lived through"). The Arcades Project is, frankly, so dense a work that one hardly has enough time to glimpse fleetingly at its sections--over 100 pages of notes on Baudelaire alone!--before mentioning it to you, though one certainly looks forward to the opportunity to peruse it at leisure. [via]
-
Aristotle Art of Rhetoricby Aristotle, J.H. FreeseISBN 0674992121 (0-674-99212-1)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Aristotle Art of Rhetoric'Book summary:Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias's relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 3432 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip's death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of 'Peripatetics'), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander's death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.
Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices. II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica. III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc. IV Metaphysics: on being as being. V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics. VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship. VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.
[via]More editions of Aristotle Art of Rhetoric:
-
Blake : A Biographyby Peter AckroydISBN 067940967X (0-679-40967-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Blake : A Biography'Book summary:William Blake, a London hosier's son, began having mystical visions at the age of eight and came to see his life as a revelation of eternity. While eking out a living as an engraver, he offered, quite unsuccessfully, his great series of prophetic books, Songs of Innocence and Experience. For Ackroyd, biographer of both Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot, Blake was a visionary, who long before Freud saw warfare as a form of repressed sexuality and believed there were eternal states of rage, desire and selfhood through which a man passes, keeping his soul intact. The tragedy was that he had the capacity to become a great public and religious poet, but instead turned in upon himself, gaining neither reputation nor influence in his lifetime. [via]
More editions of Blake : A Biography:
-
Canterbury Talesby Geoffrey Chaucer, H. Lawrence Hoffman, David Williams, R.M. LumianskyISBN 0671727699 (0-671-72769-9)
Softcover, Pocket Classics
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Canterbury Tales'Book summary:On a spring day in April--sometime in the waning years of the 14th century--29 travelers set out for Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Among them is a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Travel is arduous and wearing; to maintain their spirits, this band of pilgrims entertains each other with a series of tall tales that span the spectrum of literary genres. Five hundred years later, people are still reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of the Franklin, the Pardoner, or the Squire because you never learned Middle English, take heart: this edition of the Tales has been translated into modern idiom.
From the heroic romance of "The Knight's Tale" to the low farce embodied in the stories of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Merchant, Chaucer treated such universal subjects as love, sex, and death in poetry that is simultaneously witty, insightful, and poignant. The Canterbury Tales is a grand tour of 14th-century English mores and morals--one that modern-day readers will enjoy. [via]
-
Canterbury Talesby LumianskyISBN 0671491288 (0-671-49128-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Canterbury Tales'Book summary:On a spring day in April--sometime in the waning years of the 14th century--29 travelers set out for Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Among them is a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Travel is arduous and wearing; to maintain their spirits, this band of pilgrims entertains each other with a series of tall tales that span the spectrum of literary genres. Five hundred years later, people are still reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of the Franklin, the Pardoner, or the Squire because you never learned Middle English, take heart: this edition of the Tales has been translated into modern idiom.
From the heroic romance of "The Knight's Tale" to the low farce embodied in the stories of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Merchant, Chaucer treated such universal subjects as love, sex, and death in poetry that is simultaneously witty, insightful, and poignant. The Canterbury Tales is a grand tour of 14th-century English mores and morals--one that modern-day readers will enjoy. [via]
More editions of Canterbury Tales:
-
The Communist Manifestoby Friedrich Engels, K. MarxISBN 0671678817 (0-671-67881-7)
Softcover, Pocket Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Communist Manifesto'Book summary:Check out ngims Publishing's other illustrated literary classics. The vast majority of our books have original illustrations, free audiobook download link at the end of the book, navigable Table of Contents, and are fully formatted. Browse our library collection by typing in ngims or ngims plus the title you're looking for, e.g. ngims Gulliver's Travels. Free ebooks on the web are not organized for easy reading, littered with text errors and often have missing contents. You will not find another beautifully formatted classic literature ebook that is well-designed with amazing artworks and illustrations and a link to download free audiobook for a very low price like this one. The nominal price of this ebook covers the time and effort in formatting the materials and putting everything together in one place for your convenience. As a reader, you would want everything readily available at your fingertips because you many not have the time, interest or know where to look for your favorite book. The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) is a short 1848 book written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms. The book contains Marx and Engels' Marxist theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism. FEATURES ? Includes beautiful artworks and illustrations [via]
More editions of The Communist Manifesto:
The Communist Manifestoby K. MarxISBN 0671443879 (0-671-44387-9)
Softcover, Pocket Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Communist Manifesto'More editions of The Communist Manifesto:
-
Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novelby Malcolm BradburyISBN 0670866253 (0-670-86625-3)
Hardcover, Viking Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel'Book summary:This history of Britain and the United States focuses on the misleading beliefs that each country had about the other and how these ideas impacted literary tradition. As Bradbury examines the political and social interrelations of both countries during the 19th and 20th centuries, he illustrates how the fantasies each country had about the other shaped such literary classics as "The Red Badge of Courage" and "The Loved One." He also argues that imagination and the mythologizing of history have done more to shape what one country believes about the other than concrete fact. [via]
More editions of Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel:
Danteby R. W. B. LewisISBN 0670899097 (0-670-89909-7)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dante'More editions of Dante:
Dante: The Poetics of Conversionby John FrecceroISBN 0674192265 (0-674-19226-5)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dante: The Poetics of Conversion'More editions of Dante: The Poetics of Conversion:
Derridaby Christopher NorrisISBN 0674198247 (0-674-19824-7)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Derrida'-
Dublinersby James JoyceISBN 0679405747 (0-679-40574-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dubliners'Book summary:"When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years," James Joyce once wrote to his brother, "that it is the 'second city' of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world."
Dubliners, completed when James Joyce was only twenty-five, is the first of his works to demonstrate the unique, innovative style that would make him one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. Joyce turns his discerning eye to Dublin's lower middle class -- to the petit-bourgeois world of shopkeepers, tradesmen, functionaries, and clerks. The result is a portrait of Dublin life in the early 1900s, an undisputed masterpiece of human experience played out against a defeated city.
Washington Square Press' Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. This edition of Dubliners has been prepared by Dr. Stephen Watt, a notable Joyce scholar and professor of English at Indiana University. It includes his introduction, a selection of critical excerpts, and a unique visual essay of period illustrations and photographs. [via]
Eminent Victoriansby Lytton StracheyISBN 0676591477 (0-676-59147-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Eminent Victorians'More editions of Eminent Victorians:
-
Fairy Talesby Wilhelm Grimm, Brothers Grimm, Arthur RackhamISBN 0679417966 (0-679-41796-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fairy Tales'Book summary:Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Snow White are among the jewels we owe to the German brothers Grimm, who began in the first decade of the 19th century to seek out and listen to village storytellers. The best-loved of the tales they discovered are now brought together with the marvelous pictures that in 1900 first established the reputation of one of the greatest children's illustrators of all time, Arthur Rackham. [via]
Fame and Folly : Essaysby Cynthia OzickISBN 0679446907 (0-679-44690-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fame and Folly : Essays'More editions of Fame and Folly : Essays:
Finding a Formby William H. GassISBN 0679446621 (0-679-44662-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Finding a Form'More editions of Finding a Form:
Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conductby Shirley LetwinISBN 0674347552 (0-674-34755-2)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct'More editions of Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct:
-
The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Ideaby Arthur Oncken LovejoyISBN 0674361539 (0-674-36153-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea'Book summary:From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world.
In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principlesplenitude, continuity, and graduationwhich were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought, in metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.
[via]More editions of The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea:
-
Great Expectationsby Charles DickensISBN 0679405798 (0-679-40579-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'Book summary:An absorbing mystery as well as a morality tale, the story of Pip, a poor village lad, and his expectations of wealth is Dickens at his most deliciously readable. The cast of characters includes kindly Joe Gargery, the loyal convict Abel Magwitch and the haunting Miss Havisham. If you have heartstrings, count on them being tugged. [via]
-
Guide for the Film Fanaticby Danny PearyISBN 0671610813 (0-671-61081-3)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Guide for the Film Fanatic'More editions of Guide for the Film Fanatic:
-
A History of English Literatureby Alastair FowlerISBN 0674396642 (0-674-39664-2)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of English Literature'Book summary:This delightful introduction to English literature, engaging, readable, and wise, is enlivened by the opinions and pleasures of a fine scholar-critic. Historically, it ranges from the Middle Ages to the present, concentrating on British writing but glancing also at selected American and Commonwealth authors, and lingering over the works of key figures such as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dickens. [via]
More editions of A History of English Literature:
In the Country of Country : People and Places in American Musicby Nicholas DawidoffISBN 067941567X (0-679-41567-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Country of Country : People and Places in American Music'More editions of In the Country of Country : People and Places in American Music:
-
Into the Looking-Glass Woodby Alberto ManguelISBN 067697242X (0-676-97242-X)
Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Into the Looking-Glass Wood'Book summary:Pondering the way tastes, prejudices, and experiences change over time the very meaning of the words we read, Alberto Manguel adapts a phrase from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus about the deceptive permanence of flowing water: "You never dip into the same book twice," he says. The essays in his collection Into the Looking-Glass Wood are mostly about the pleasures and responsibilities of reading, and Manguel himself--critic, editor, and novelist--might be described as a reader's reader. A university dropout, born in Argentina and expatriated to Canada, Manguel has the erudition and insight of a scholar, but it is his almost childlike exuberance and curiosity that distinguish him from your average literary critic. In lieu of the "systematic reading" set forth in university courses and lists of recommended reading, Manguel insists that "the best guides are the reader's whim--trust in pleasure and faith in haphazardness." Looking-Glass Wood is whimsical in this sense, containing 22 essays, many previously published, on diverse subjects. Manguel celebrates erotic fiction ("I believe that, like the erotic act, the act of reading should ultimately be anonymous."); reflects upon "The Death of Che Guavara" ("Epic literature requires an iconography. Zorro and Robin Hood ... lent the live Che their features."); argues that the Old Testament prophet Jonah was an artist at heart ("Nadine Gordimer, of whom Jonah had never heard, said that there could be no worse fate for a writer than not being execrated in a corrupt society. Jonah did not wish to suffer that annihilating fate."); and angrily dismisses Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho as merely a "novel of pornographic horror." In "Borges in Love" Manguel paints a poignant portrait of the unhappy love life of his literary mentor, Jorges Luis Borges, drawing from his experience of having read books aloud to the blind storyteller as a teenager while growing up in Buenos Aires. The experience adds resonance to a claim Manguel makes in yet another essay: "Reading helps us maintain coherence in the chaos, not to eliminate it; not to enclose experience within verbal structures but to allow it to progress on its own vertiginous way; not to trust the glittering surface of words, but to burrow into the darkness." --Russell Prather [via]
More editions of Into the Looking-Glass Wood:
Introduction to Poetryby X. J. Kennedy, Dana GioiaISBN 0673522792 (0-673-52279-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins College Div
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'An Introduction to Poetry/Instructor's Guide'Book summary:While embracing the canon, An Introduction to Poetry, Tenth Edition includes an impressive collection of contemporary poems for a culturally diverse representation of authorship and a richness in range of style. Writer's Perspectives sections give commentary on the craft of writing and revising from authors, which provide insight and a more human perspective on literature and the writing process. Writing Critically sections expand overage of composition with accessible and pragmatic suggestions on writing. Critical Approaches to Literature section provides three essays on every major school of criticism with sections on gender criticism and cultural studies. New poems have been added to the Tenth Edition, along with a new Glossary of Literary Terms and an expanded chapter on translations. Casebooks on Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes present both poets in depth. For anyone interested in poetry. [via]
More editions of Introduction to Poetry:
- Introduction to Poetry: ISBN 0673498603 (0-673-49860-3)
Softcover, Scott, Foresman/Little Brown Higher Education - An Introduction to Poetry/Student Edition: ISBN 0673520250 (0-673-52025-0)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley - Introduction to Poetry: ISBN 0673522784 (0-673-52278-4)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley - Introduction to Poetry: ISBN 0673525074 (0-673-52507-4)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley - An Introduction to Poetry/Instructor's Guide: ISBN 0673522792 (0-673-52279-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins College Div
- Introduction to Poetry: ISBN 0673498603 (0-673-49860-3)
-
Is There a Text in This Class?by Stanley FishISBN 0674467264 (0-674-46726-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Is There a Text in This Class?'Book summary:Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers a stunning proposal for a new way of thinking about the way we read.
Fish begins by examining the relation between a reader and a text, arguing against the formalist belief that the text alone is the basic, knowable, neutral, and unchanging component of literary experience. But in arguing for the right of the reader to interpret and in effect create the literary work, he skillfully avoids the old trap of subjectivity. To claim that each reader essentially participates in the making of a poem or novel is not, he shows, an invitation to unchecked subjectivity and to the endless proliferation of competing interpretations. For each reader approaches a literary work not as an isolated individual but as part of a community of readers. 'Indeed," he writes, "it is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or reader, that produce meanings."
The book is developmental, not static. Fish at all times reveals the evolutionary aspect of his work--the manner in which he has assumed new positions, altered them, and then moved on. Previously published essays are introduced by headnotes which relate them to the central notion of interpretive communities as it emerges in the final chapters. In the course of refining his theory, Fish includes rather than excludes the thinking of other critics and shows how often they agree with him, even when he and they may appear to be most dramatically at odds. Engaging, lucid, provocative, this book will immediately find its place among the seminal works of modern literary criticism.
[via]More editions of Is There a Text in This Class?:
Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communitiesby Stanley Eugene FishISBN 0674467256 (0-674-46725-6)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities'More editions of Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities:
-
Jude the Obscureby Thomas HardyISBN 0679409939 (0-679-40993-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jude the Obscure'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Because of its frank treatment of human sexuality and its unflinching fatalism, Jude the Obscure aroused such a storm of controversy upon its publication in 1895 that, partly in response, Thomas Hardy abandoned the art of novel-writing altogether and devoted the rest of his life to poetry. Though we have come a long way in our social attitudes in the ensuing century, nothing about Hardy's masterpiece has lost its power to shock us and disturb our dreams. [via]More editions of Jude the Obscure:
-
Lolitaby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679410430 (0-679-41043-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lolita'Book summary:Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via] 
Lost Classicsby Michael OndaatjeISBN 0676972993 (0-676-97299-3)
Hardcover, A.A. Knopf Canada
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lost Classics'More editions of Lost Classics:
-
Macbethby William ShakespeareISBN 0671042874 (0-671-04287-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Macbeth'Book summary:An exciting new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare with these features: Illustrated with photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readable introductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, a lively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on the play in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-date annotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of key passages. [via]
Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinemaby David BordwellISBN 067454336X (0-674-54336-X)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema'More editions of Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema:
-
The Merry Heart : Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Booksby Robertson DaviesISBN 0670873667 (0-670-87366-7)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Merry Heart : Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books'Book summary:Robertson Davies always wanted to call a book of his "The Merry Heart." Now the wish is fulfilled, and fittingly by a selection of his writings, vintage Davies, full of the shrewd relish for life that was his hallmark. Although we shall not see another Davies novel, we can all rejoice that there is another new book that is pure distilled Davies. His utterly distinctive voice resounds here from every line. As close to an autobiography as we can ever expect, this collection of reminiscences, speeches, book reviews, parodies, and essays tells us much about the writer and the man. The introductions to each of the twenty-four chapters add further biographical details, followed by tantalizing fragments from Davies' own unpublished diary. But the strength of the book lies in its stimulating contents. Every chapter is an education for the reader, as it provides the pleasure of browsing through Davies' richly stocked mind. Whether he is discussing art fakery, his schooldays, the differences between Canadians and Americans, Thackeray, Ibsen, "The Little Red Hen," or "Ulysses," this collection gathers his reflections on books, on writing, on reading, on his own writing, on other authors and much else, into a fascinating whole. [via]
More editions of The Merry Heart : Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books:
-
Middlemarchby George EliotISBN 0679405674 (0-679-40567-4)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Middlemarch'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Introduction by E. S. Shaffer [via]More editions of Middlemarch:
-
Mikhail Bakhtinby Katerina Clark, Michael HolquistISBN 0674574176 (0-674-57417-6)
Softcover, Harvard University Press
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mikhail Bakhtin'Book summary:In such diverse fields as semiotics, literary theory, social theory, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, Mikhail Bakhtin's importance is increasingly recognized. His posthumous fame comes in striking contrast to his obscurity during his lifetime (1895-1975), much of it spent as a semi-invalid in a succession of provincial towns. He received no public recognition, in the Soviet Union or abroad, until the last dozen years of his long life--not surprisingly, given the historical circumstances. His books on Freudianism (1927), on Formalism (1928), and on Marxism and the philosophy of language (1929) were published as the work of others, as were a number of important essays. His study of Dostoevsky appeared under his own name but only after his arrest and sentence to exile, and it quickly disappeared from sight. Some manuscripts were never published; one was used by Bakhtin for cigarette paper. His book on Rabelais, completed in 1940, remained unpublished for twenty-five years--until, in a less repressive political climate, friends had succeeded in negotiating a reissue of the book on Dostoevsky.
The Rabelais book, when translated, caused a stir among folklorists, anthropologists, and social historians, with its theory of carnival and of ritual inversions of hierarchy. The book on Dostoevsky aroused intense interest among literary theorists in the concept of the "polyphonic novel" and the many authorial voices to be heard therein. Similarly, as Bakhtin's other writings have appeared in translation, he has been hailed in disparate circles for his contributions to linguistic, psychoanalytic, and social theory. But among all those who have studied various aspects of Bakhtin's work, few have been in a position, or even attempted, to assess his total achievement.
It is the great merit of Clark and Holquist's book that they have endeavored, insofar as possible, to give us the complete life and the complete works of this complex and multifaceted figure. The authors have had unique access to the Bakhtin archive in Moscow, have traced further material in other cities in Europe, and have interviewed many persons who knew Bakhtin. The phases of his life are placed in their physical and intellectual milieux, and accounts are given of the figures who made up the various "Bakhtin circles" over the years. All of the works, published and unpublished, are discussed, in the context of European philosophical movements and the currents of thought of the time. Underlying and informing Bakhtin's particular theories in various fields was, in the authors' view, his lifelong meditation on the relation between self and other. The philosophy he evolved has come to be called dialogism, since it conceives of the world in terms of communication and exchange. It is a world view with wide-ranging implications for the human sciences.
[via]More editions of Mikhail Bakhtin:
Mikhail Bakhtinby Michael Holquist, Katherina ClarkISBN 0674574168 (0-674-57416-8)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mikhail Bakhtin'More editions of Mikhail Bakhtin:
-
Moby Dickby Herman MelvilleISBN 0671028359 (0-671-02835-9)
Softcover, Pocket Classics
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Moby Dick'Book summary:Avec Moby Dick, Melville a donné naissance à un livre-culte et inscrit dans la mémoire des hommes un nouveau mythe : celui de la baleine blanche. Fort de son expérience de marin, qui a nourri ses romans précédents et lui a assuré le succès, l'écrivain américain, alors en pleine maturité, raconte la folle quête du capitaine Achab et sa dernière rencontre avec le grand cachalot. Véritable encyclopédie de la mer, nouvelle Bible aux accents prophétiques, parabole chargée de thèmes universels, Moby Dick n'en reste pas moins construit avec une savante maîtrise, maintenant un suspense lent, qui s'accélère peu à peu jusqu'à l'apocalypse finale. L'écriture de Melville, infiniment libre et audacieuse, tour à tour balancée, puis hachée au rythme des houles, des vents et des passions humaines, est d'une richesse exceptionnelle. Il faut remonter à Shakespeare pour trouver l'exemple d'une langue aussi inventive, d'une poésie aussi grandiose. --Scarbo [via]
Monstrous Imaginationby Marie-Helene HuetISBN 0674586492 (0-674-58649-2)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Monstrous Imagination'More editions of Monstrous Imagination:
-
The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Criticsby Helen VendlerISBN 0674591534 (0-674-59153-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics'Book summary:Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
Helen Vendler has become one of our most trusted companions in reading poetry. Among critics today she has an unrivaled ability to show--lucidly and invitingly--just what a poem does. Insight and wit distinguish these essays, in which Vendler elucidates the function of criticism as well as different critical methods and styles. Poets commented on range from Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz to Silvia Plath, James Merrill, and Amy Clampitt.
[via]More editions of The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics:
-
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bulliesby Naomi KleinISBN 067697130X (0-676-97130-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Canada
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies'Book summary:We live in an era where image is nearly everything, where the proliferation of brand-name culture has created, to take one hyperbolic example from Naomi Klein's No Logo, "walking, talking, life-sized Tommy [Hilfiger] dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds." Brand identities are even flourishing online, she notes--and for some retailers, perhaps best of all online: "Liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations."
In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. (The controversy over advertiser-sponsored Channel One may be old hat, but many readers will be surprised to learn about ads in school lavatories and exclusive concessions in school cafeterias.) The global companies claim to support diversity, but their version of "corporate multiculturalism" is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to "censor" the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster's policies, given that they're both divisions of Viacom?
Klein also looks at the workers who keep these companies running, most of whom never share in any of the great rewards. The president of Borders, when asked whether the bookstore chain could pay its clerks a "living wage," wrote that "while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment." Those clerks should probably just be grateful they're not stuck in an Asian sweatshop, making pennies an hour to produce Nike sneakers or other must-have fashion items. Klein also discusses at some length the tactic of hiring "permatemps" who can do most of the work and receive few, if any, benefits like health care, paid vacations, or stock options. While many workers are glad to be part of the "Free Agent Nation," observers note that, particularly in the high-tech industry, such policies make it increasingly difficult to organize workers and advocate for change.
But resistance is growing, and the backlash against the brands has set in. Street-level education programs have taught kids in the inner cities, for example, not only about Nike's abusive labor practices but about the astronomical markup in their prices. Boycotts have commenced: as one urban teen put it, "Nike, we made you. We can break you." But there's more to the revolution, as Klein optimistically recounts: "Ethical shareholders, culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organizers, human-rights hacktivists, school-logo fighters and Internet corporate watchdogs are at the early stages of demanding a citizen-centered alternative to the international rule of the brands ... as global, and as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert." No Logo is a comprehensive account of what the global economy has wrought and the actions taking place to thwart it. --Ron Hogan [via]
More editions of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies:
-
Pale Fireby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679410775 (0-679-41077-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Pale Fire'Book summary:Like Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the mazelike head of a mad émigré. Yet Pale Fire is more outrageously hilarious, and its narrative convolutions make the earlier book seem as straightforward as a fairy tale. Here's the plot--listen carefully! John Shade is a homebody poet in New Wye, U.S.A. He writes a 999-line poem about his life, and what may lie beyond death. This novel (and seldom has the word seemed so woefully inadequate) consists of both that poem and an extensive commentary on it by the poet's crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote.
According to this deranged annotator, he had urged Shade to write about his own homeland--the northern kingdom of Zembla. It soon becomes clear that this fabulous locale may well be a figment of Kinbote's colorfully cracked, prismatic imagination. Meanwhile, he manages to twist the poem into an account of Zembla's King Charles--whom he believes himself to be--and the monarch's eventual assassination by the revolutionary Jakob Gradus.
In the course of this dizzying narrative, shots are indeed fired. But it's Shade who takes the hit, enabling Kinbote to steal the dead poet's manuscript and set about annotating it. Is that perfectly clear? By now it should be obvious that Pale Fire is not only a whodunit but a who-wrote-it. There isn't, of course, a single solution. But Nabokov's best biographer, Brian Boyd, has come up with an ingenious suggestion: he argues that Shade is actually guiding Kinbote's mad hand from beyond the grave, nudging him into completing what he'd intended to be a 1,000-line poem. Read this magical, melancholic mystery and see if you agree. --Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of Pale Fire:
-
Passions of the Mindby A. S. ByattISBN 0679405119 (0-679-40511-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Passions of the Mind'Book summary:Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]More editions of Passions of the Mind:
-
The Picture of Dorian Grayby Oscar Wilde, Tony RossISBN 067089494X (0-670-89494-X)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'Book summary:A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."
As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]
More editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray:
A Poeticsby Charles BernsteinISBN 0674678575 (0-674-67857-5)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Poetics'-
Preface to Platoby Eric HavelockISBN 0674699068 (0-674-69906-8)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Preface to Plato'Book summary:Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Mr. Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.
The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr. Havelock shows how the Illiad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.
The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.
[via]More editions of Preface to Plato:
Pride and Prejudiceby Jane Austen, Morris E. SpeareISBN 0671006010 (0-671-00601-0)
Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Pride and Prejudice'Book summary:"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Next to the exhortation at the beginning of Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael," the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground.
Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of Austen's best comedy comes from mixing and matching these representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." She may be joking, but there's more than a little truth to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree. --Alix Wilber [via]
Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmenby Charles RosenISBN 0674002024 (0-674-00202-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen'More editions of Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen:
-
The Ruin of Kaschby Roberto Calasso, William Weaver, Stephen SartarelliISBN 0674780299 (0-674-78029-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ruin of Kasch'Book summary:The Ruin of Kasch examines the rise of the modern state and the origins of romantic nationalism, whose sick fruit has been harvested in places such as Bosnia, Chechnya, and East Timor. Roberto Calasso locates the transformation in the French Revolution, when a frivolous monarchy evaporated before a government that valued order, bureaucracy, and above all secrecy. He also attributes it to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838), who was perhaps the first professional civil servant. Ever selfish, Talleyrand proved the perfect servant to the Napoleonic Era; as Napoleon said, "Principles are fine; they don't commit you to anything." The Ruin of Kasch is about Talleyrand, but also, Italo Calvino notes, "about everything else." It's a whirlwind of a book, sometimes maddeningly so. It is one to pick up, ponder, put down, argue with, and then resume reading until the next argument pops up a page or two later. [via]
More editions of The Ruin of Kasch:
The Ruin of Kaschby William Weaver, Stephen Sartarelli, Roberto CalassoISBN 0674780264 (0-674-78026-4)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ruin of Kasch'More editions of The Ruin of Kasch:
Russian Literature Since the Revolutionby Edward BrownISBN 0674782046 (0-674-78204-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Russian Literature Since the Revolution'More editions of Russian Literature Since the Revolution:
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writingsby Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Sutin, Sutin LawrenceISBN 0679426442 (0-679-42644-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings'More editions of The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings:
-
A Short History of the Moviesby Gerald MastISBN 0672615215 (0-672-61521-5)
Hardcover, Bobbs-Merrill Co
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Short History of the Movies'Book summary:With each chapter updated and containing new photographs, this is the revised edition of Professor Bruce Kawin's revised edition of Gerald Mast's text. This book offers students and fans a panoramic picture of the worldwide development of film - from the early Mack Sennet and Charlie Chaplin shorts, through the 1930s and '40s, through the "Hollywood Renaissance" of the 1960s and 1970s to the provocative pictures appearing in today's multiplexes. "A Short History of the Movies" presents a thorough, all-emcompassing examination of the evolution of this "new art" - through its various styles, periods, genres, and works. [via]
More editions of A Short History of the Movies:
Signs of the Times: Destruction and the Fall of Paul De Manby David LehmanISBN 0671775944 (0-671-77594-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Signs of the Times: Destruction and the Fall of Paul De Man'More editions of Signs of the Times: Destruction and the Fall of Paul De Man:
-
The Size of Thoughts : Essays and Other Lumberby Nicholson BakerISBN 0679439323 (0-679-43932-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Size of Thoughts : Essays and Other Lumber'Book summary:Novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker has had a small but well-deserved cult following since his first book, The Mezzanine, and the publication of the literary sex-bomb Vox saw his popularity mushroom. Baker's great gift is a precision of observational detail that has a peculiarly incisive effect on a reader's consciousness. Here is over a decade's worth of his essays and articles, including the much-praised card catalogue article first published in the New Yorker. The Size of Thoughts, through its varied forays into the realms of the overlooked, the underfunded, and the wrongfully scrapped, is a funny and thought-provoking book by one of the most distinctive stylists and thinkers of our time. [via]
More editions of The Size of Thoughts : Essays and Other Lumber:
-
Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999by J. M. CoetzeeISBN 0670899828 (0-670-89982-8)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999'Book summary:The only author ever to win the Booker Prize twice, J. M. Coetzee is, without question, one of the world's greatest novelists. Now his many admirers will have the pleasure of reading his significant body of literary criticism. This volume gathers together for the first time in book form, twenty-six pieces on books and writing, all but one previously published. Stranger Shores opens with "What is a Classic?" in which Coetzee explores the answer to his own question-"What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?"-by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach and Zbigniew Herbert. His subjects range from the great eighteenth and nineteenth century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Ivan Turgenev, to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, to the giants of late twentieth century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and Doris Lessing. [via]
More editions of Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999:
Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lostby Stanley Eugene FishISBN 067485747X (0-674-85747-X)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost'More editions of Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost:
-
Sylvia Plath: A Biographyby Linda Wagner-MartinISBN 067160404X (0-671-60404-X)
Hardcover, Smithmark Pub
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath: A Biography'Book summary:The first biography of Sylvia Plath to draw on unpublished journals and letters, Sylvia Plath provides a detailed, objective, and illuminating portrait of this talented and tortured woman who is widely recognized as one of America's foremost poets of the 20th century. 20 pages of photos. [via]
More editions of Sylvia Plath: A Biography:
-
The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflectionby Rodolphe GascheISBN 0674867017 (0-674-86701-7)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection'Book summary:Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. "The Tain of the Mirror" (tain names the tinfoil, or lusterless back of the mirror) explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible. Gasche does what no one has done before in many discussions of Derrida, namely to tie his work in an authoritative way to its origins in the history of the criticism of reflexivity. [via]
More editions of The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection:
-
Taking Rights Seriouslyby R. M. DworkinISBN 0674867114 (0-674-86711-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Taking Rights Seriously'Book summary:What is law? What is it for? How should judges decide novel cases when the statutes and earlier decisions provide no clear answer? Do judges make up new law in such cases, or is there some higher law in which they discover the correct answer? Must everyone always obey the law? If not, when is a citizen morally free to disobey?
A renowned philosopher enters the debate surrounding these questions. Clearly and forcefully, Ronald Dworkin argues against the ruling theory in Anglo-American lawlegal positivism and economic utilitarianismand asserts that individuals have legal rights beyond those explicitly laid down and that they have political and moral rights against the state that are prior to the welfare of the majority.
Mr. Dworkin criticizes in detail the legal positivists theory of legal rights, particularly H.L.A. Harts well-known version of it. He then develops a new theory of adjudication, and applies it to the central and politically important issue of cases in which the Supreme Court interprets and applies the Constitution. Through an analysis of John Rawlss theory of justice, he argues that fundamental among political rights is the right of each individual to the equal respect and concern of those who govern him. He offers a theory of compliance with the law designed not simply to answer theoretical questions about civil disobedience, but to function as a guide for citizens and officials. Finally, Professor Dworkin considers the right to liberty, often thought to rival and even pre-empt the fundamental right to equality. He argues that distinct individual liberties do exist, but that they derive, not from some abstract right to liberty as such, but from the right to equal concern and respect itself. He thus denies that liberty and equality are conflicting ideals.
Ronald Dworkins theory of law and the moral conception of individual rights that underlies it have already made him one of the most influential philosophers working in this area. This is the first publication of these ideas in book form.
[via]More editions of Taking Rights Seriously:
Theory of the Avant-Gardeby Renato PoggioliISBN 0674882164 (0-674-88216-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Theory of the Avant-Garde'More editions of Theory of the Avant-Garde:
-
This Craft of Verseby Jorge Luis Borges, Calin Andrei MihailescuISBN 0674008200 (0-674-00820-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'This Craft of Verse'Book summary:Available in cloth, paper, or audio CD
Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967-1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.
Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history, and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day, he draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese, speaking with characteristic eloquence on Plato, the Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Whether discussing metaphor, epic poetry, the origins of verse, poetic meaning, or his own "poetic creed," Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and in the making of a unique literary sensibility, this is a sustained encounter with one of the writers by whom the twentieth century will be long remembered.
[via] -
Tristram Shandyby Laurence SterneISBN 0679405607 (0-679-40560-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Tristram Shandy'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Introduction by Peter Conrad [via]More editions of Tristram Shandy:
-
Waldenby Henry David Thoreau, Verlyn KlinkenborgISBN 0679418962 (0-679-41896-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Walden'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
By virtue of its casual, off-handedly brilliant wisdom and the easy splendor of its nature writing, Thoreaus account of his adventure in self-reliance on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts is one of the signposts by which the modern mind has located itself in an increasingly bewildering world. Deeply sane, invigorating in its awareness of humanitys place in the moral and natural order, Walden represents the progressive spirit of nineteenth-century America at its eloquent best. [via] -
We Have Never Been Modernby Bruno Latour, Catherine PorterISBN 0674948394 (0-674-94839-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'We Have Never Been Modern'Book summary:With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.
What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour's analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming--and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture--and so, between our culture and others, past and present.
Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape. We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.
[via]More editions of We Have Never Been Modern:
-
Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjectsby Bertrand Russell RussellISBN 0671203231 (0-671-20323-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects'Book summary:Dedicated as few men have been to the life of reason, Bertrand Russell has always been concerned with the basic questions to which religion also addresses itself -- questions about man's place in the universe and the nature of the good life, questions that involve life after death, morality, freedom, education, and sexual ethics. He brings to his treatment of these questions the same courage, scrupulous logic, and lofty wisdom for which his other work as philosopher, writer, and teacher has been famous. These qualities make the essays included in this book perhaps the most graceful and moving presentation of the freethinker's position since the days of Hume and Voltaire.
"I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue," Russell declares in his Preface, and his reasoned opposition to any system or dogma which he feels may shackle man's mind runs through all the essays in this book, whether they were written as early as 1899 or as late as 1954.
The book has been edited, with Lord Russell's full approval and cooperation, by Professor Paul Edwards of the Philosophy Department of New York University. In an Appendix, Professor Edwards contributes a full account of the highly controversial "Bertrand Russell Case" of 1940, in which Russell was judicially declared "unfit" to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York.
Whether the reader shares or rejects Bertrand Russell's views, he will find this book an invigorating challenge to set notions, a masterly statement of a philosophical position, and a pure joy to read. [via]
More editions of Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects:
Windfallby Buckley, William F., Jr., Christopher LittleISBN 0679403973 (0-679-40397-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Windfall'More editions of Windfall:
Writing Homeby Alan BennettISBN 0679444890 (0-679-44489-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Writing Home'More editions of Writing Home:
Results page: PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101-146 NEXT
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}