Connell publishing ltd jun 2012 (8 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Pride and Prejudice is the most satisfying and enjoyable of Jane Austen's six books - and has become probably the most successful novel in the English language. This brilliant guide tells you why.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A book which, drawing on the best critics of Hardy, explains and analyses his most controversial novel and the one which made him rich and famous.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Dr Johnson sums up the case against Milton: "the want of human interest is always felt." It is the apparent distance of Paradise Lost from ordinary humanity that has thrilled or repelled critics throughout the ages. While many readers are carried away by Milton's sublimity, others are daunted by his grandeur, scope and learning. Milton himself declared that he would not begin to write until he had "completed the full circle of my private studies". The Greek word for a circle of learning is the root of "encyclopaedia"; and Milton's erudition is encyclopaedic. Paradise Lost draws on both ancient learning and the scholarship of his day, displaying not only his deep knowledge of the Bible and Biblical scholarship, and his passionate assimilation of the classics, but also his absorption in astronomy, cosmology, geography, numerology and science. Yet many critics of Paradise Lost argue that all this circling lacks a human centre. Who, after all, is the hero Adam and Eve in their unfallen state are too remote from us; Christ is not yet incarnate; God cannot be a character. Which leaves us with the magnificently problematic figure of Satan. In this fascinating study of Milton's great poem, Caroline Moore suggests that, contrary to what these critics argue, the core of Paradise Lost is extraordinarily human. Milton himself believed that poetry excelled at describing "the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thought from within". This is precisely what Paradise Lost does. If, to a generation raised on the novel, Milton's methods of psychological exploration seem strange, this only intensifies the effect: Paradise Lost is a poem that explores the dark byways and infinite strangeness of the human heart.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Conrad finished Heart of Darkness on 9th February, 1899 and on publication it had an impact as powerful as any long short story, or short novel ever written it is only 38,000 words. It quickly became, and has remained, Conrad's most famous work and has been regarded by many in America, if not elsewhere, as his greatest work. Exciting and profound, lucid and bewildering, and written with an exuberance which sometimes seems at odds with its subject matter, it has influenced writers as diverse as T.S.Eliot, Graham Greene, William Golding, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. It has also inspired, among others, Orson Welles, who made two radio versions the second of which, in 1945, depicted Kurtz as a forerunner of Adolf Hitler, and Francis Ford Coppola who turned it into the film Apocalypse Now. More critical attention has probably been paid to it, per word, than to any other modern prose work. It has also become a text about which, as the late Frank Kermode once complained, interpreters feel licensed to say absolutely anything. Why What is it about Heart of Darkness that has captivated critics and readers for so long and caused so many millions of words to be written about it And why has its peculiarly dark and intense vision of life so frequently been misunderstood Graham Bradshaw provides the answers in this illuminating guide.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Great Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as popular with critics as it has with the public. In 1937, George Bernard Shaw called the novel Dickens's "most compactly perfect book". John Lucas describes it as "the most perfect and the most beautiful of all Dickens's novels", Angus Wilson as "the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced". Great Expectations has been so successful partly because it's an exciting story. Dickens always had a keen eye on the market and subscribed to Wilkie Collins's advice: "make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, above all make 'em wait." From the violent opening scene on the marshes to the climax of Magwitch's attempted escape on the Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and drama. But while these elements of Great Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also a novel which, as this guide will seek to show, raises profound questions not just about the nature of Victorian society but about the way human relationships work and the extent to which people are shaped by their childhoods and the circumstances in which they grow up. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Romeo and Juliet is routinely called "the world's greatest love story", as though it is all about romance. The play features some of the most lyrical passages in all of drama, and the lovers are young, beautiful, and ardent. But when we look at the play, the lyricism and the romance are not really what drive things along. It is true that Romeo, especially early on in the play, acts like a young man determined to take his place in an immortal tale of love. Everything he says is romantic but rather like an anniversary card is romantic. His words propel nothing, or nothing but sarcastic admonitions from his friends to forget about love and to treat women as they should be treated, with careless physical appetite. The world we have entered is rapacious more than romantic. Everyone knows something of this, from the film versions of the story if nothing else. Romeo and Juliet must fight for their love inside a culture of stupid hatreds. But it is not a simple case of love versus war, or the city against the couple. If it were, it would nicely reinforce clichés about true love, fighting against the odds. In this book Simon Palfrey suggests that the play Shakespeare actually wrote is more troubling than this. Juliet's passion for all her youth, for all its truth is at the very cusp of murderousness. Juliet is the world's scourge, in the sense that she will whip and punish and haunt it; she is also its triumph, in the sense of its best and truest thing. The deaths her love leads to are in no way avoidable, and in no way accidental. They are her inheritance, the thing she was born to. Of course she takes Romeo with her. But it is at heart her play.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Macbeth may well be the most terrifying play in the English language, but it hasn't always been seen that way. It has divided critics more deeply than any other Shakespearian tragedy and the argument, in essence, has been about just how terrifying the play really is and about how we should react, or do react, to Macbeth himself. No Shakespearian tragedy gives as much attention to its hero as Macbeth. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, there is much less emphasis on the figures round the hero than there is in Hamlet or Othello. Unlike King Lear, with its parallel story of Gloucester and his sons, Macbeth has no sub-plot. And its imagery of sharp contrasts of day and night, light and dark, innocent life and murder adds to the almost claustrophobic intensity of this most intense of plays. So why are critics so divided about Macbeth Why is it so disturbing Why do we feel compelled to admire its hero even as we condemn him How reassuring is the last scene, when Macbeth is killed and Malcolm becomes king Do we see this as the intervention of a divine providence, a restoration of goodness after all the evil Or do we see instead signs that the whole cycle of violence and murder could be about to begin all over again And what does the play really tell us about good and evil In this book Graham Bradshaw answers these questions, and shows how it is only in recent years that the extent of Shakespeare's achievement in Macbeth, and the nature of his vision in the play, has really been grasped.…

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - When The Great Gatsby was first published, in 1925, reviews were mixed. H.L. Mencken called it "no more than a glorified anecdote". L.P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between, thought Fitzgerald deserved "a good shaking": "The Great Gatsby is evidently not a satire; but one would like to think that Mr Fitzgerald's heart is not in it, that it is a piece of mere naughtiness." Yet, gradually the book came to be seen as one of the greatest if not the greatest of American novels. Why What is it that makes this story of a petty hoodlum so compelling Why has a novel so intimately rooted in its own time "lasted" into ours What is it that posterity, eight decades later, finds so fascinating in this chronicle of the long-gone "Jazz Age", flappers, speakeasies and wild parties It is, after all, scarcely a novel at all, more a long short story. But it has a power out of all proportion to its length. It is beautifully written, making it feel even shorter than it is, and is full of haunting imagery. It is also, perhaps, the most vivid literary evocation of the "Great American Dream", about which it is profoundly sceptical, as it is about dreams generally. In the end, however, as D.H. Lawrence would put it, it is "on the side of life". Gatsby's dream may be impossible, so much so that the book can end in no other way than with his death, but up to a point he is redeemed by it and by the tenacity with which he clings to it. It is this that makes the novel so moving and so haunting. …