An extensive investigation of the forms and functions of the comic, this lively and engaging English critical edition will be welcomed by those interested in laughter, comedy, folklore, Russian literature, and specific authors such as Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov, Rabelais, Molière, and Shakespeare. The direct, humorous, and provocative style of this work, which tackles the subject of humour with a vast array of vivid examples encountered on every page, will certainly appeal to the contemporary...

Nearly seven decades after the English translation of Morphology of the Folktale, one of the most influential scholarly books on folklore, its sequel is finally available in an official English translation, completing the enterprise that occupied much of Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp's life.In Morphology of the Folktale, Propp approached these narratives synchronically, using structural analysis to identify the wondertale's minimal units and deep structure. In H...

Translates and contextualizes Vladimir Propp's later work The Russian Folktale.Vladimir Propp is the Russian folklore specialist most widely known outside Russia thanks to the impact of his 1928 book Morphology of the Folktale-but Morphology is only the first of Propp's contributions to scholarship. This volume translates into English for the first time his book The Russian Folktale, which was based on a seminar on Russian folkta...

International folkloristics is a worldwide discipline in which scholars study various forms of folklore ranging from myth, folktale, and legend to custom and belief. Twenty classic essays, beginning with a piece by Jacob Grimm, reveal the evolving theoretical underpinnings of folkloristics from its nineteenth century origins to its academic coming-of-age in the twentieth century. Each piece is prefaced by extensive editorial introductions placing them in a historical and intellectual conte...

In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, James Wood's How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power.Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional c...

"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an ESSAY by George Orwell criticising "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English.Orwell said that political prose was formed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Orwell believed that, because this writing was intended to hide the truth rather than express it, the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless. This unclear prose was...

The Plummeting Old Women by Daniil Kharms is a collection of stories, incidents, dialogues and fragments that forms an important part of the buried literature of Russian modernism now revealed under glasnost. These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism – years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. The...

The School of Life offers radical ways to help us raid the treasure trove of human knowledge' Independent on SundaySigmund Freud is best known as the father of psychoanalysis. Born in 1856, he was a physiologist, medical doctor and psychologist who spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria. He developed revolutionary ideas about the unconscious mind, repression and the meaning of dreams and the clinical method of treatment through dialogue. Here you will find insights from...

A literary master’s entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasureWhat makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. How to Read Literature

The first book of criticism from the acclaimed author of After Babel—a "provocative and probing" look at Russian literature's most influential writers ( The New York Times)."Literary criticism," writes Steiner, "should arise out of a debt of love." Abiding by his own rule, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is an impassioned work, inspired by Steiner's conviction that the legacies of these two Russian masters loom over Western literature. By explaining...

This groundbreaking study of the work and legacy of Virginia Woolf is also an account of the intertwined lives of two extraordinary women.In 1932, Ruth Gruber earned her PhD—the youngest person ever to do so—with a stunning doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Published in 1935, the paper was the first-ever feminist critique of Woolf's work and inspired a series of correspondences between the two writers. It also led to Gruber's eventual meeting with Woolf, whi...

'I am not a man, I am dynamite.' Ecce Homo is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in 1888, a few weeks before his descent into madness, the book sub-titled 'How To Become What You Are' passes under review all Nietzsche's previous works so that w...