Literary Criticism : Books & Reading

These are exciting times for African American children's literature. Never before have there been so many titles available. Now two of the mothers who founded Black Books Galore! - the nation's leading organizer of festivals of African American children's books - and the authors of the highly acclaimed Black Books Galore! Guide to Great African American Children's Books share their expert advice on how to find and choose the best African American books in two new fully annotated guides - one featuring boys, one featuring girls - opening the door to a wonderful world of reading for children. Discover hundreds of young black heroes, heroines, and positive role models of every age in every category, including board books, story and picture books, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, history, biography, fables, and more. more...

Price: $15.95

This collection of eight new essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th-century writings were designed and received by different audiences. Rivers explores the answers to certain crucial questions about the contemporary use of books. This new edition contains the results of important new research by well known specialists in the field of book and publishing history over the last two decades. more...

Price: $150.00

What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. This time was unique for British children - parental controls were often relaxed if not absent, and the radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future. Owen Dudley Edwards discusses reading, children's radio, comics, films and book-related play-activity in relation to value systems, the child's perspective versus the adult's perspective, the development of sophistication, retention and loss of pre-war attitudes and their post-war fate. British literature is placed in a wider context through a consideration of what British writing reached the USA, and vice versa, and also through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Questions of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban-rural division, ageism, class, race, and gender awareness are explored. In this incredibly broad-ranging book, covering over 100 writers, Owen Dudley Edwards looks at the literary inheritance when the war broke out and asks whether children's literary diet was altered in the war temporarily or permanently. Concerned with the effects of the war as a whole on what children could read during the war and what they made of it, he reveals the implications of this for the world they would come to inhabit. more...

Price: $299.99

This is a guide to help busy people find great reads in fiction and non-fiction. Filled with recommendations of popular, entertaining reading, this book covers mystery and suspense, romance, women’s fiction and chick lit, westerns, science fiction, such nonfiction topics as animals, art, biography, memoirs, business, true crime, and more. Plus, each entry includes a summary of the book, its significance, and a critique/observation/comment. more...

Price: $14.95

In the vein of Brunelleschi's Dome, Galileo's Daughter, and Wittgenstein's Poker, Dante in Love is a geographic and spiritual re-creation of the poet's travels and the burst of creativity that produced the greatest poem ever written. Dante in Love is the story of the most famous journey in literature. Rubin follows Dante's path as the poet, exiled from Florence, walked the old Jubilee routes that linked monasteries and all roads to Rome and Tuscany -- a path followed by generations of seekers from T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and Primo Levi to Bruce Springsteen. Following Dante's route, we, too, are inspired to undertake the journey of discovering ourselves. more...

Price: $13.00