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Cambridge Companions are lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. All are collections of specially commissioned essays, shaped and introduced to appeal to student readers. Together the chapters add up to a systematic critical account of, for example Plato, Luther, Jane Austen, Tom Stoppard or Stravinsky, the French Novel or Jewish American Literature, and each book is supported by reference features such as a chronology and guide to further reading.Companions have colonised several fields within Humanities. The first two titles - Companions to Shakespeare and to Chaucer - were published in 1986. They were commissioned to meet a demand from students who wanted reasonably priced critical books that offered a variety of viewpoints rather than a single, idiosyncratic voice. From those beginnings we now have over 130 titles in Literature, over 60 in Philosophy and plenty more on musical, classical, religious and artistic topics. We have moved beyond single figures to offer Companions to literary and artistic genres and periods, musical instruments, and modern European cultures.Companions are designed not only to offer a comprehensive overview of their chosen topic, but to display and provoke lively and controversial debate.

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443 results in Cambridge Companions to Literature

Page 6 of 23

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability
  • Edited by Clare Barker, Stuart Murray
  • Published online:
    05 December 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • This Companion analyzes the representation of disability in literatures in English, including American and postcolonial writing, across all major time periods and through a variety of critical approaches. Through the alternative ideas of mind and embodiment generated by physiological and psychological impairments, an understanding of disability narrative changes the way we read literature. With contributions from major figures in literary disability studies, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability covers a wide range of impairments, including cognitive difference, neurobehavioral conditions, and mental and chronic illnesses. This book shows how disability demands innovation in literary form and aesthetics, challenges the notion of a human 'norm' in the writing of character, and redraws the ways in which writing makes meaning of the broad spectrum of humanity. It will be a key resource for students and teachers of disability and literary studies.

The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic
  • Edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
  • Published online:
    20 November 2017
    Print publication:
    23 November 2017
  • The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic offers an accessible overview to both the breadth and depth of the American Gothic tradition. This subgenre features works from many of America's best-known authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor. Authored by leading experts in the field, the introduction and sixteen chapters explore the American Gothic chronologically, in relation to different social groups, in connection with different geographic regions, and in different media, including children's literature, poetry, drama, film, television, and gaming. This Companion provides a rich and thorough analysis of the American Gothic tradition from a twenty-first-century standpoint, and will be a key resource undergraduates, graduate students, and professional researchers interested in this topic.

The Cambridge Companion to Dracula
  • Edited by Roger Luckhurst
  • Published online:
    15 November 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula is the most famous vampire in literature and film. This new collection of sixteen essays brings together a range of internationally renowned scholars to provide a series of pathways through this celebrated Gothic novel and its innumerable adaptations and translations. The volume illuminates the novel's various pre-histories, critical contexts and subsequent cultural transformations. Chapters explore literary history, Gothic revival scholarship, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sexology, philosophy, occultism, cultural history, critical race theory, theatre and film history, and the place of the vampire in Europe and beyond. These studies provide an accessible guide of cutting-edge scholarship to one of the most celebrated modern Gothic horror stories. This Companion will serve as a key resource for scholars, teachers and students interested in the enduring force of Dracula and the seemingly inexhaustible range of the contexts it requires and readings it might generate.

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets
  • Edited by Gerald Dawe
  • Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets offers a fascinating introduction to Irish poetry from the seventeenth century to the present. Aimed primarily at lovers of poetry, it examines a wide range of poets, including household names, such as Jonathan Swift, Thomas Moore, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. The book is comprised of thirty chapters written by critics, leading scholars and poets, who bring an authoritative and accessible understanding to their subjects. Each chapter gives an overview of a poet's work and guides the general reader through the wider cultural, historical and comparative contexts. Exploring the dual traditions of English and Irish-speaking poets, this Companion represents the very best of Irish poetry and highlights understanding that reveals, in clear and accessible prose, the achievement of Irish poetry in a global context. It is a book that will help and guide  general readers through the many achievements of Irish poets.

The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature
  • Edited by Bradford K. Mudge
  • Published online:
    30 August 2017
    Print publication:
    07 September 2017
  • The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature offers an introduction to key debates in the study of erotic literature from antiquity to the present. It addresses one of the longest standing controversies in literary history: the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable treatments of human sexuality. Whether scurrilous Roman satire, irreverent Restoration drama, or bold Modernist novel, erotic literature pushes the boundaries of the acceptable and challenges the conventions of more mainstream literatures. In fifteen chapters that range from ancient Greece and Rome to twentieth-century American, English, French, and Dutch literature, experts in the field confront a variety of related topics, such as the definition and scope of erotic literature, the nature of textual pleasure, historical shifts in the understanding of the normal and the perverse, the relationship between gender and genre, sexual violence, homosexuality, sadomasochism, necrophilia, satire, pornography, etc. Students new to the scholarship are provided with a clear and useful introduction; those already familiar with the field are given an exciting glimpse into the most recent work.

The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel
  • Edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick
  • Published online:
    03 June 2017
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017
  • Since the graphic novel rose to prominence half a century ago, it has become one of the fastest growing literary/artistic genres, generating interest from readers globally. The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel examines the evolution of comic books into graphic novels and the distinct development of this art form both in America and around the world. This Companion also explores the diverse subgenres often associated with it, such as journalism, fiction, historical fiction, autobiography, biography, science fiction and fantasy. Leading scholars offer insights into graphic novel adaptations of prose works and the adaptation of graphic novels to films; analyses of outstanding graphic novels, like Maus and The Walking Man; an overview which distinguishes the international graphic novel from its American counterpart; and analyses of how the form works and what it teaches, making this book a key resource for scholars, graduate students and undergraduate students alike.

The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature
  • 2nd edition
  • Edited by Eva-Marie Kröller
  • Published online:
    26 May 2017
    Print publication:
    27 May 2017
  • This fully revised second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive introduction to major writers, genres and topics. For this edition several chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect major developments in Canadian literature since 2004. Surveys of fiction, drama and poetry are complemented by chapters on Aboriginal writing, autobiography, literary criticism, writing by women and the emergence of urban writing. Areas of research that have expanded since the first edition include environmental concerns and questions of sexuality which are freshly explored across several different chapters. A substantial chapter on francophone writing is included. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, noted for her experiments in multiple literary genres, are given full consideration, as is the work of authors who have achieved major recognition, such as Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction
  • Edited by Paula Geyh
  • Published online:
    18 May 2017
    Print publication:
    24 April 2017
  • Few previous periods in the history of American literature could rival the richness of the postmodern era - the diversity of its authors, the complexity of its ideas and visions, and the multiplicity of its subjects and forms. This volume offers an authoritative, comprehensive, and accessible guide to the American fiction of this remarkable period. It traces the development of postmodern American fiction over the past half-century and explores its key aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts. It examines its principal styles and genres, from the early experiments with metafiction to the most recent developments, such as the graphic novel and digital fiction, and offers concise, compelling readings of many of its major works. An indispensable resource for students, scholars, and the general reader, the Companion both highlights the extraordinary achievements of postmodern American fiction and provides illuminating critical frameworks for understanding it.

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats
  • Edited by Steven Belletto
  • Published online:
    09 March 2017
    Print publication:
    06 February 2017
  • The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators, the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature, but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement, asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry
  • Edited by Jahan Ramazani
  • Published online:
    24 March 2017
    Print publication:
    27 February 2017
  • The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry is the first collection of essays to explore postcolonial poetry through regional, historical, political, formal, textual, gender, and comparative approaches. The essays encompass a broad range of English-speakers from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands; the former settler colonies, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, especially non-Europeans; Ireland, Britain's oldest colony; and postcolonial Britain itself, particularly black and Asian immigrants and their descendants. The comparative essays analyze poetry from across the postcolonial anglophone world in relation to postcolonialism and modernism, fixed and free forms, experimentation, oral performance and creole languages, protest poetry, the poetic mapping of urban and rural spaces, poetic embodiments of sexuality and gender, poetry and publishing history, and poetry's response to, and reimagining of, globalization. Strengthening the place of poetry in postcolonial studies, this Companion also contributes to the globalization of poetry studies.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin
  • Edited by Andrew J. Webber
  • Published online:
    23 February 2017
    Print publication:
    27 February 2017
  • This collection of essays by international specialists in the literature of Berlin provides a lively and stimulating account of writing in and about the city in the modern period. The first eight chapters chart key chronological developments from 1750 to the present day, while subsequent chapters focus on Berlin drama and poetry in the twentieth century and explore a set of key identity questions: ethnicity/migration, gender (writing by women), and sexuality (queer writing). Each chapter provides an informative overview along with closer readings of exemplary texts. The volume is designed to be accessible for readers seeking an introduction to the literature of Berlin, while also providing new perspectives for those already familiar with the topic. With a particular focus on the turbulent twentieth century, the account of Berlin's literary production is set against broader cultural and political developments in one of the most fascinating of global cities.

The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal
  • Published online:
    25 March 2017
    Print publication:
    13 February 2017
  • For two decades, the 'transnational turn' in literary studies has generated enormous comment and controversy. This Companion provides a comprehensive account of the scope, impact, and critical possibilities of the transnational turn in American literary studies. It situates the study of American literature in relation to ethnic, postcolonial, and hemispheric studies. Leading scholars open up wide-ranging examinations of transnationalism in American literature - through form and aesthetics, theories of nation, gender, sexuality, religion, and race, as well as through conventional forms of historical periodization. Offering a new map of American literature in the global era, this volume provides a history of the field, key debates, and instances of literary readings that convey the way in which transnationalism may be seen as a method, not just a description of literary work that engages more than one nation. Contributors identify the key modes by which writers have responded to major historical, political, and ethical issues prompted by the globalization of literary studies.

The Cambridge Companion to Balzac
  • Edited by Owen Heathcote, Andrew Watts
  • Published online:
    09 February 2017
    Print publication:
    16 January 2017
  • One of the founders of literary realism and the serial novel, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a prolific writer who produced more than a hundred novels, plays and short stories during his career. With its dramatic plots and memorable characters, Balzac's fiction has enthralled generations of readers. 'La Comédie humaine', the vast collection of works in which he strove to document every aspect of nineteenth-century French society, has influenced writers from Flaubert, Zola and Proust to Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. This Companion provides a critical reappraisal of Balzac, combining studies of his major novels with guidance on the key narrative and thematic features of his writing. Twelve chapters by world-leading specialists encompass a wide spectrum of topics such as the representation of history, philosophy and religion, the plight of the struggling artist, gender and sexuality, and Balzac's depiction of the creative process itself.

The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow
  • Edited by Victoria Aarons
  • Published online:
    27 January 2017
    Print publication:
    28 November 2016
  • Saul Bellow is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American literature. Bellow's work explores the most important cultural and social experiences of his era: the impact of the Holocaust, the urban experience of European immigrants from a Jewish perspective, the fraught failures of the Vietnam War, the ideological seductions of Marxism and Modernism, and the changing attitudes concerning gender and race. This Companion demonstrates the complexity of this formative writer by emphasizing the ways in which Bellow's works speak to the changing conditions of American identity and culture from the post-war period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Individual chapters address the major themes of Bellow's work over more than a half-century of masterfully crafted fiction, articulating some of the most significant cultural experiences of the American twentieth century. It provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of a key figure in American literature.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman
  • Edited by Bruce Clarke, Manuela Rossini
  • Published online:
    07 January 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2016
  • The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman is the first work of its kind to gather diverse critical treatments of the posthuman and posthumanism together in a single volume. Fifteen scholars from six different countries address the historical and aesthetic dimensions of posthuman figures alongside posthumanism as a new paradigm in the critical humanities. The three parts and their chapters trace the history of the posthuman in literature and other media, including film and video games, and identify major political, philosophical, and techno-scientific issues raised in the literary and cinematic narratives of the posthuman and posthumanist discourses. The volume surveys the key works, primary modes, and critical theories engaged by depictions of the posthuman and discussions about posthumanism.

The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon
  • Edited by Michael A. Flower
  • Published online:
    12 January 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2016
  • This Companion, the first dedicated to the philosopher and historian Xenophon of Athens, gives readers a sense of why he has held such a prominent place in literary and political culture from antiquity to the present and has been a favourite author of individuals as diverse as Machiavelli, Thomas Jefferson, and Leo Tolstoy. It also sets out the major problems and issues that are at stake in the study of his writings, while simultaneously pointing the way forward to newer methodologies, issues, and questions. Although Xenophon's historical, philosophical, and technical works are usually studied in isolation because they belong to different modern genres, the emphasis here is on themes that cut across his large and varied body of writings. This volume is accessible to students and general readers, including those previously unfamiliar with Xenophon, and will also be of interest to scholars in various fields.

The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
  • Edited by Jason Harding
  • Published online:
    01 December 2016
    Print publication:
    14 November 2016
  • Drawing on the latest developments in scholarship and criticism, The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot opens up fresh avenues of appreciation and inquiry to a global twenty-first century readership. Emphasizing major works and critical issues, this collection of newly commissioned essays from leading international scholars provides seven full chapters reassessing Eliot's poetry and drama; explores important contemporary critical issues that were previously untreated, such as the significance of gender and sexuality; and challenges received accounts of his at times controversial critical reception. Complete with a chronology of Eliot's life and work and an up-to-date select bibliography, this authoritative and accessible introduction to Eliot's complete oeuvre will be an essential resource for students.

The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
  • Edited by Deirdre Osborne
  • Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    14 October 2016
  • This Companion offers a comprehensive account of the influence of contemporary British Black and Asian writing in British culture. While there are a number of anthologies covering Black and Asian literature, there is no volume that comparatively addresses fiction, poetry, plays and performance, and provides critical accounts of the qualities and impact within one book. It charts the distinctive Black and Asian voices within the body of British writing and examines the creative and cultural impact that African, Caribbean and South Asian writers have had on British literature. It analyzes literary works from a broad range of genres, while also covering performance writing and non-fiction. It offers pertinent historical context throughout, and new critical perspectives on such key themes as multiculturalism and evolving cultural identities in contemporary British literature. This Companion explores race, politics, gender, sexuality, identity, amongst other key literary themes in Black and Asian British literature. It will serve as a key resource for scholars, graduates, teachers and students alike.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion
  • Edited by Susan M. Felch
  • Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    12 September 2016
  • Each essay in this Companion examines one or more literary texts and a religious tradition to illustrate how we can understand both literature and religion better by looking at them in tandem. Unlike most literature and religion books, which tend to focus on Christianity and take a highly theoretical approach inappropriate for non-specialists, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion offers an accessible treatment of both Dharmic and Abrahamic traditions. It provides close readings of texts rather than surveys of large topics, making it an ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students of literature and religion.

The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein
  • Edited by Andrew Smith
  • Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    19 August 2016
  • The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein consists of sixteen original essays on Mary Shelley's novel by leading scholars, providing an invaluable introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this volume relates Frankenstein to various social, literary, scientific and historical contexts, and outlines how critical theories such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, and queer theory generate new and important discussion in illuminating ways. The volume also explores the cultural afterlife of the novel including its adaptations in various media such as drama, film, television, graphic novels, and literature aimed at children and young adults. Written by an international team of leading experts, the essays provide new insights into the novel and the various critical approaches which can be applied to it. The volume is an essential guide to students and academics who are interested in Frankenstein and who wish to know more about its complex literary history.

Page 6 of 23