What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment and aggression? This book addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others.

This book provides a clear method of study which encourages students to construct their own interpretation of any of Dicken's novels. This in turn provides students with a way of identifying the distinctiveness of Dickens's fiction and with a way of structuring an intelligent critical response to any of his novels.

However much students enjoy their reading of a Jane Austen novel, many find it difficult to know how to organise their critical responses.

This thoroughly revised and expanded Second Edition has three new chapters taking this process one step further, showing how to make use of the new critical thinking that has swept through literary criticism in recent years.

This practical reference for university and senior high school students shows how to read, understand and analyze poetry. Included are sections on narrative poetry and writing essays.

In this new guide, Chris Coles shows you how to approach the plays of these three major playwrights and how you can build your own critical response to their complex and demanding plays. If you are studying any of these three dramatists, then this is likely to prove the one critical book you will need.

Forster's novels have always given great pleasure to the general reader but they do present particular problems for those who wish to study them in a more systematic way.

In this fresh edition of his tried-and-tested guide, Rob Pope continues to help students get to grips with Chaucer - all the way through from the first tentative encounters with the language to sophisticated critical and historical engagement with Chaucer's narrative art in context.

This guide to James Joyce's major novels presents a refreshing approach to understanding the work of this challenging and enigmatic giant of twentieth-century literature. Taking the student through a careful, step-by-step analysis of each text, John Blades demonstrates a practical and lively method of critical analysis.

In this book Tony Curtis, himself an award-winning poet, offers clear and positive help to students who are faced by a modern poem which puzzles and frightens them.

Romantic poetry deals with the tensions, hopes and fears of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as felt by a disparate group of men and women. This revised and expanded second edition shows how to use some developments in literary theory to think and write about Romantic poetry.

Contends that in this age of infinite publication, the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture. This work challenges those who ever felt guilty about missing some of the Great Books to consider what reading means, and how we absorb books as part of ourselves.

Whether you are a student or an experienced author, this book will teach you how to write short stories - and reflect on the creative processes involved.

Charts the journey of the author as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past.

Maya Angelou's phenomenal seven volume autobiography is now available on the Virago Modern Classics list.

A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie Ernaux's attempts to help her mother recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent.

'Brilliantly written, compulsively readable and insightful' Pat Barker 'A first-class life and a rollicking read ... Close to a masterpiece' Sunday Times An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Based on his Radio 4 series, the author brings his sharp and witty attention to a group of people who spent time with legendary figures. Each interview gives the individual's account of their association and offers an intimate portrait that humanises the artist.

Providing an introduction to the whole range of Ian McEwan's work, examining his novels, short stories and screenplays, this title draws on McEwan's obsessions with childhood and the body, with regression and abjection, showing how these are deployed to raise disturbing political questions about gender, power, pleasure and narrative.