English Literature

What is comedy? Andrew Stott tackles this question through an investigation of comic forms, theories and techniques, tracing the historical definit...

This text explores the concept of these related terms and considers the complex relationship that exists between all three. This useful guidebook i...

Genre is a key means by which we categorize the many forms of literature and culture. But it is also much more than that: in talk and writing, in m...

Definitions of humanism have evolved throughout the centuries as the term has been adopted for a variety of purposes – literary, cultural and polit...

A clear, concise guide to the history and structure of irony from Socrates to the Derrida and Deleuze. Explores the philosophical, literary and pol...

Poetry criticism is a subject central to the study of literature. However, it is laden with technical terms that, to the beginning student, can be ...

This comprehensive, accessible guidebook traces the ways in which human beings have used narrative to make sense of time, space and identity over t...

With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considers deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and...

Beginning with the nature of literature, this also asks the questions of why we should read literature and why literature has such authority over u...

A powerful selection of essays by one of the most important critics in postcolonial studies, arguing for practices of reading and criticism fully a...

Introducing students to a range of key thinkers who have sought to question the contemporary situation, this guidebook enables readers to begin to ...

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn aw...

Often derided as an inferior form of literature, 'romance' as a literary mode or genre defies satisfactory definition, dividing critics, scholars a...

Romanticism was a revolutionary intellectual and artistic movement which generated some of the most popular and influential texts in British and Am...

The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory is an indispensable aid for anyone approaching this exciting field of study for the first time. By explo...

The past several decades have seen an explosion of interest in narrative, with this multifaceted object of inquiry becoming a central concern in a ...

This study explores the connections between a secular Indian nation and fiction in English by a number of postcolonial Indian writers of the 1980s ...

The historical novel is an enduringly popular genre that raises crucial questions about key literary concepts, fact and fiction, identity, history,...

This is a completely updated and expanded second edition of the wide-ranging and accessible Routledge History of Literature in English. It covers t...