Readers beware. The brilliant, breathtaking conclusion to J.K. Rowling's spellbinding series is not for the faint of heart--such revelations, battles, and betrayals await in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that no fan will make it to the end unscathed. Luckily, Rowling has prepped loyal readers for the end of her series by doling out increasin...more
Reissued with a new preface and a new essay on Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Coriolanius, Hamlet and The Winter's Tale, this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers the plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism.
The word "like" occurs some 2,400 times in the writings ascribed to Shakespeare. So many occurrences of the word suggest that Shakespeare's is a theater of likeness, "as you like it." This book demonstrates that part of the enduring value of Shakespeare's art is his poetry of likeness here, in the "land of unlikeness," where human beings invent the...more
Despite Critical misunderstanding and neglect both in his time and in ours, Hart Crane remains one of our greatest poets. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Crane's work now available to us. In this Centennial Edition, Harold Bloom's introduction provides a keen critical analysis of Crane's work.
Seamus Heaney defines the title of this work of criticism as follows: "To redress poetry is to know and celebrate it for its forcibleness as itself . . . not only as a matter of profferd argument and edifying content but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul." Throughout this collection, Heaney's insight and eloquence are themselve...more
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero's triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw p...more
Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, employing examples of wo...more
Milton's Grand Style has been vigorously attacked in the twentieth century, and this book is an attempt to refute Milton's detractors by showing the delicacy and subtlety which is to be found in the verse of `Paradise Lost'.