Offers a comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. This title explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love.

This title is the result of many years of research into the lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and two notable friends of his - Dr Budd and journalist, Bertram Robinson.

In ten succinct chapters, Marina Warner guides us through the rich world of fairy tale, from Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel to Snow White and Pan's Labyrinth. Exploring pervasive themes of folklore, myth, the supernatural, imagination, and fantasy, Warner highlights the impact of the genre on human understanding, history, and culture.

A carefully chosen selection from the correspondence of Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of the most gifted and famous historians of his generation and one of the finest letter-writers of the twentieth century

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This title brings together Benjamin's major works, including "Unpacking My Library"; "One-Way Street"; "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; and, "Brief History of Photography".

An important study, based on little known archival sources, of what happened to Catholic literature and culture after the Reformation.

This study investigates magical realism as the most important trend in contemporary international fiction. It defines its characteristics and narrative techniques and proposes a new theory to explain its significance. Works by Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and Ben Okri are discussed.

A wide-ranging and elegantly written study of how nineteenth-century culture thought about, and thought with, the idea of originality. It reveals how plagiarism was not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided a creative resource for many important writers including Eliot, Dickens, Pater, and Wilde.

In this wonderfully rich and diverse collection of essays, Amit Chaudhuri explores the way in which writers understand and promote their own work in antithesis to writers and movements that have gone before. The book particularly illuminates new ways of thinking about Western and non-Western traditions, prejudices, and preconceptions.

With the aim of examining the postcolonial applications of Aphra Behn's re-entry into the literary canon, the editor presents this edition as a collection representing the nexus of very specific articulations of literary, cultural, and political tropes produced by various writers and adapters from 1695 through 1999.

Considers George Orwell's writing about the East, and the presence of the East in his writing and argues that in thinking of Orwell as an 'Anglo-Indian writer', not just in upbringing and experience, but in many of his views, perceptions, and reactions, a different Orwell emerges.

John Sutherland's original and irreverent new account of the life and work of George Orwell, exploring the 'scent narratives' that abound in Orwell's fiction and non-fiction.

Roses, pleasure, and politics: a fresh take on Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.

Roses, pleasure, and politics: a fresh take on Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.

Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino's classic triptych of moral tales, now published in one volume and all displaying the exuberant talent of a master storyteller.

Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Nina Auerbach locates vampires at the heart of national experience and uses them as a lens for viewing the last 200 hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history.

An exciting and provocative look at the women who wrote the novels that changed the literary world - Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf - by the renowned biographer of Emily Dickinson

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.

This reference is for anyone concerned with children's books. Over 900 biographical entries deal with authors, illustrators, publishers, educationalists and others who have influenced the development of children's literature, providing plot summaries, character sketches and historical background.

This Companion is the first place to look for information on authors, illustrators, printers, publishers, and others involved in children's literature, and on the stories and characters at their centre. Written both to entertain and to instruct, it is a reference work that no-one interested in the world of children's books should be without

This Companion is the first place to look for information on authors, illustrators, printers, publishers, and others involved in children's literature, and on the stories and characters at their centre. Written both to entertain and to instruct, it is a reference work that no-one interested in the world of children's books should be without