A major, groundbreaking intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about SF. It effects a series of vital shifts in SF theory and criticism, away from prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement and towards the empirically grounded understanding of an amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts.

Postcolonialism as a critical approach and pedagogic practice has informed literary and cultural studies since the late 1980s. This book addresses the many concerns, forms and 'specializations' of postcolonialism, including gender and sexuality studies, the nations and nationalism, space and place, and history and politics.

A detailed and lively discussion and analysis of the novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and other works of one of the most important and popular writers in Spain today.

Featuring fourteen essays from international experts, this Companion provides an accessible overview of English-language short fiction outside of North America. It discusses the development and impact of the short story - including a variety of subgenres such as detective fiction and flash fiction - from the early nineteenth century to the present.

An original collection providing an accessible overview of the history of English melodrama, an introduction to its formal features, and a wide-ranging assessment of its ongoing influence today - addressing issues of social analysis (gender, class, race), psychoanalysis, other art forms (film, television, musical theatre), and contemporary culture.

A copiously illustrated global history of magic books, from ancient papyri to pulp paperbacks

A collection of 366 witty and fascinating facts, events and stories about language, for every day of the year (with one extra for leap years).

The essays in Folk Horror: New Global Pathways explore the cultural and political significance of the darker and more violent manifestations of folkloric stories, from Britain to Ukraine and Italy, and from Thailand to Mexico and the Appalachian US.

This book, originally published in 2013 and richly illustrated with photographs and artwork , was the first to connect all the threads of influence on Tolkien that infused his creation of Middle-earth-from the languages, poetry, and mythology of medieval Europe and ancient Greece and Rome to the halls of Oxford and the battlefields of World War I.

He then uses the perspective of ergodic aesthetics to reexamine literary theories of narrative, semiotics, and rhetoric and to explore the implications of applying these theories to materials for which they were not intended.

A ground-breaking biography of Agatha Christie from acclaimed historian Lucy Worsley

A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden's early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.

A ground-breaking biography of one of the greatest writers in history, and the masterpiece that changed our world.

Explores how the publication of women's life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century -- .

The magnificent final book from the bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy

Explores Sylvia Plath's enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963

A fascinating insight into the life of one of our best-loved authors through the biographies of objects that crossed her path in life and afterward.

The definitive biography of Lawrence Durrell by the world's foremost expert, covering his time in London, Paris, Corfu and Alexandria

The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.