Literary Criticism

These two plays take place in the South and borrow heavily from Williams's life - they are marked by a struggle, often between family members or loved ones. His plays are literary and commercial successes. more...

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At once an allegory for both utopia and totalitarianism, George Orwell's Animal Farm expresses a dismal view of humans and their attempts to create a just society without compassion, history, and nonviolence. CliffsNotes on Animal Farm opens the door to help you appreciate Orwell's unforgettable morality tale. Count on CliffsNotes' plot summaries and detailed commentary to guide you through this anti-utopian novel that entertains as it teaches. more...

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In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives - a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today. more...

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Mid-nineteenth-century American literature teems with the energy and excitement characteristic of the nation’s era of expansion. It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial “others.”. Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or as dime novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the first-person narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both of whom claim in their pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering. Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today’s audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance. more...

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The first volume in Hackett's five-volume edition of The Faerie Queene. Each includes its own Introduction, annotation, notes on the text, bibliography, glossary, and index of characters; Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh” and a short Life of Edmund Spenser appear in every volume. more...

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