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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 22 of 23

The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel
  • Edited by Graham Bartram
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    05 April 2004
  • The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, first published in 2004, provides a broad ranging introduction to the major trends in the development of the German novel from the 1890s to the present. Written by an international team of experts, it encompasses both modernist and realist traditions, and also includes a look back to the roots of the modern novel in the Bildungsroman of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The structure is broadly chronological, but thematically-focused chapters examine topics such as gender anxiety, images of the city, war, and women's writing; within each chapter, key works are selected for close attention. Unique in its combination of breadth of coverage and detailed analysis of individual works, and featuring a chronology and guides to further reading, this Companion will be indispensable to students and teachers.

The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing
  • Edited by Peter Hulme, Tim Youngs
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    21 November 2002
  • The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing brings together specialists from anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies to offer a broad and vibrant introduction to travel writing in English between 1500 and the present. This comprehensive introduction to the subject features specially commissioned contributions, including six essays surveying the period's travel writing; a further six focusing on geographical areas of particular interest - Arabia, the Amazon, Tahiti, Ireland, Calcutta, the Congo and California; and three final chapters analysing some of the theoretical and cultural dimensions to this enigmatic and influential genre of writing. Several invaluable tools are also provided, including an extensive list of further reading, and a detailed five-hundred year chronology listing important events and publications. This volume will be of interest to teachers and students alike.

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism
  • Edited by Stuart Curran
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    30 January 1993
  • This Companion offers a unique introduction, guide, and reference work for students and readers of Romantic literature. The age of British Romanticism was a period of turbulent transition between the professed stability of the Enlightenment before it and the Victorian middle-class culture which succeeded it. Against a background of international warfare, the Romantic age embodied in its greatest literature a sense of competing values and ideals explored sceptically in the creative process, rather than dogmatic certainties fulfilled in its completion. Recent scholarship has led to the rejection of the easy categories once used to label Romanticism, but until now there has been no concerted attempt to represent to students of the period the full range of conflicting forces responsible for its dynamic literature. The eleven original essays which make up this volume make a significant contribution to our understanding of the period, providing readers with clear and coherent access to the historical roots, intellectual ferment, and cultural range of British Romanticism. It includes a chronology of major publications and events, and an extensive guide to further reading.

The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison
  • Edited by Ross Posnock
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    05 May 2005
  • Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides an introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features essays by leading scholars, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays reveal alternative dimensions of Ellison's art radiating out from Invisible Man into other domains - technology, political theory, law, photography, music, religion - and recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Since Ellison's death his published oeuvre has been expanded by several major volumes - his collected essays, the fragment of a novel, Juneteenth (1999), letters and short stories - examined here in the context of his life and work. Students and scholars of Ellison and of American and African-American literature will find this an invaluable and accessible guide.

The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Edited by Claudia L. Johnson
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    30 May 2002
  • Once viewed solely in relation to the history of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft is now recognised as a writer of formidable talent across a range of genres, including journalism, letters and travel writing, and is increasingly understood as an heir to eighteenth-century literary and political traditions as well as a forebear of romanticism. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft addresses all aspects of Wollstonecraft's momentous and tragically brief career. The diverse and searching essays commissioned for this volume do justice to Wollstonecraft's pivotal importance in her own time and since, paying attention not only to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also to the full range of her work across disciplinary boundaries separating philosophy, letters, education, advice, politics, history, religion, sexuality, and feminism itself. A chronology and bibliography offer further essential information for scholars and students of this remarkable writer.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War
  • Edited by Vincent Sherry
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    03 January 2005
  • The Great War of 1914–1918 marks a turning point in modern history and culture. This Companion offers critical overviews of the major literary genres and social contexts that define the study of the literatures produced by the First World War. The volume comprises original essays by distinguished scholars of international reputation, who examine the impact of the war on various national literatures, principally Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States, before addressing the way the war affected Modernism, the European avant-garde, film, women's writing, memoirs, and of course the war poets. It concludes by addressing the legacy of the war for twentieth-century literature. The Companion offers readers a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the years leading up to and including the war, and ends with a current bibliography of further reading organised by chapter topics.

The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain
  • Edited by Forrest G. Robinson
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    26 May 1995
  • The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain offers new and thought provoking essays on an author of enduring pre-eminence in the American canon. The book is a collaborative project, assembled by scholars who have played crucial roles in the recent explosion of Twain criticism. Accessible enough to interest both experienced specialists and students new to Twain criticism, the essays examine Twain from a wide variety of critical perspectives, and include timely reflections by major critics on the hotly debated dynamics of race and slavery perceptible throughout his writing.The volume includes a chronology of Twain's life and a list of suggestions for further reading, to provide the students or general reader with sources for background as well as additional information.

The Cambridge Companion to Lacan
  • Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    31 July 2003
  • This collection of specially commissioned essays by academics and practising psychoanalysts, first published in 2003, explores key dimensions of Jacques Lacan's life and works. Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at the time when it underwent a certain intellectual decline. Advocating a 'return to Freud', by which he meant a close reading in the original of Freud's works, he stressed the idea that the unconscious functions 'like a language'. All essays in this Companion focus on key terms in Lacan's often difficult and idiosyncratic developments of psychoanalysis. This volume will bring fresh, accessible perspectives to the work of this formidable and influential thinker. These essays, supported by a useful chronology and guide to further reading will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Edited by Ruth Prigozy
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    25 October 2001
  • Eleven specially commissioned essays by major Fitzgerald scholars present a clearly written and comprehensive assessment of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a writer and as a public and private figure. No aspect of his career is overlooked, from his first novel published in 1920, through his more than 170 short stories, to his last unfinished Hollywood novel. Contributions present the reader with a full and accessible picture of the background of American social and cultural change in the early decades of the twentieth century. The introduction traces Fitzgerald's career as a literary and public figure, and examines the extent to which public recognition has affected his reputation among scholars, critics, and general readers over the past sixty years. This volume offers undergraduates, graduates and general readers a full account of Fitzgerald's work as well as suggestions for further exploration of his work.

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
  • Edited by John Richetti
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    05 September 1996
  • In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
  • Edited by Shaun Richards
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    29 January 2004
  • The essays in this collection cover the whole range of Irish drama from the late nineteenth-century melodramas which anticipated the rise of the Abbey Theatre to the contemporary Dublin of theatre festivals. A team of international experts from Ireland, the UK, the USA and Europe provide individual studies of internationally known playwrights of the period of the Literary Revival - Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Wilde, O'Casey - and contemporary playwrights Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Frank McGuiness and Sebastian Barry, in addition to emerging playwrights such as Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr. Further to studies of individual playwrights the collection also includes examination of the relationship between the theatre and its political context as this is inflected through its ideology, staging and programming. With a full chronology and bibliography, this collection is an indispensable introduction to one of the world's most vibrant theatre cultures.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens
  • Edited by John O. Jordan
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    18 June 2001
  • The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen specially-commissioned chapters by leading international scholars, who together provide diverse but complementary approaches to the full span of Dickens's work, with particular focus on his major fiction. The essays cover the whole range of Dickens's writing, from Sketches by Boz through The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Separate chapters address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider formal features of the novels, including their serial publication and Dickens's distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. Each essay provides guidance to further reading. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory, that will be of interest to scholars and teachers of the novels.

The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry
  • Edited by Matthew Campbell
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    28 August 2003
  • In the last fifty years Irish poets have produced some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature, writing about love and sexuality, violence and history, country and city. This book, first published in 2003, provides an introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, and also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon. Readers will find discussions of Irish poetry from the traditional to the modernist, written in Irish as well as English, from both North and South. This Companion provides cultural and historical background to contemporary Irish poetry in the contexts of modern Ireland but also in the broad currents of modern world literature. It includes a chronology and guide to further reading and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller
  • Edited by Christopher Bigsby
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    13 November 1997
  • Arthur Miller is regarded as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century. His work is performed and studied around the world and this Companion provides an introduction to this influential dramatist. In addition to analyses of Miller's plays, including All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, his work is also placed within the context of the social and political climate of the time. The impact of the Depression, the Holocaust, and McCarthyism are explored in light of the plays, and the contributors also discuss Miller's fiction and work in film. In the last twenty years, Miller has written a host of new plays and the Companion also examines these works, including The Ride Down Mount Morgan, The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass. The volume closes with a bibliographic essay which reviews the key studies of Miller. It also contains a detailed chronology of Miller's work and illustrations from important productions.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights
  • Edited by Elaine Aston, Janelle Reinelt
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    25 May 2000
  • This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theatre and examine the work of individual playwrights. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters which raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on non-mainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance. Each section is introduced by the editors, who provide a narrative overview of a century of women's drama and a thorough chronology of playwriting, set in political context. The collection includes essays on the individual writers Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems and Timberlake Wertenbaker as well as extensive documentation of contemporary playwriting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, including figures such as Liz Lochhead and Anne Devlin.

The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence
  • Edited by Anne Fernihough
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    28 May 2001
  • The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence contains fourteen chapters by leading international scholars. They offer a series of alternative perspectives on one of the most important and controversial writers of the twentieth century. These specially-commissioned essays offer diverse and stimulating readings of Lawrence's major novels, short stories, poetry and plays, and place Lawrence's writing in a variety of literary, cultural, and political contexts, such as modernism, sexual and ethnic identity, and psychoanalysis. The concluding chapter addresses the vexed history of Lawrence's critical reception throughout the twentieth century. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov
  • Edited by Vera Gottlieb, Paul Allain
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    04 November 2000
  • This volume of specially commissioned essays explores the world of Anton Chekhov - one of the most important dramatists in the repertoire - and the creation, performance and interpretation of his works. The Companion, first published in 2000, begins with an examination of Chekhov's life, his Russia, and the original productions of his plays at the Moscow Art Theatre. Later film versions and adaptations of Chekhov's works are analysed, with valuable insights also offered on acting Chekhov, by Ian McKellen, and directing Chekhov, by Trevor Nunn and Leonid Heifetz. The volume also provides essays on 'special topics' such as Chekhov as writer, Chekhov and women, and the Chekhov comedies and stories. Key plays, such as The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull, receive dedicated chapters while lesser-known works and genres are also brought to light. The volume concludes with appendices of primary sources, lists of works, and a select bibliography.

The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Edited by Richard H. Millington
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    23 September 2004
  • The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 2004, offers students and teachers an introduction to Hawthorne's fiction and the lively debates that shape Hawthorne studies. In commissioned essays, twelve eminent scholars of American literature introduce readers to key issues in Hawthorne scholarship and deepen our understanding of Hawthorne's writing. Each of the major novels is treated in a separate chapter, while other essays explore Hawthorne's art in relation to a stimulating array of issues and approaches. The essays reveal how Hawthorne's work explores understandings of gender relations and sexuality, of childhood and selfhood, of politics and ethics, of history and modernity. An Introduction and a selected bibliography will help students and teachers understand how Hawthorne has been a crucial figure for each generation of readers of American literature.

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–1740
  • Edited by Steven N. Zwicker
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    13 June 1998
  • This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol and bristling topicality of its satires as well as in the imaginative flight of its mock epics, fictions, and heroic verse. The volume's chronologies and select bibliographies will guide the reader through texts and events, while the fourteen essays commissioned for this Companion will allow us to read the period anew.

The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville
  • Edited by Robert S. Levine
  • Published online:
    28 May 2006
    Print publication:
    13 May 1998
  • The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville is intended to provide a critical introduction to Melville's work. The essays have been specially commissioned for this volume, and provide a comprehensive overview of Melville's career. All of Melville's key works, including Moby-Dick, Typee, White Jacket, The Tambourine in Glory and The Confidence Man, are examined, as well as most of his poetry and short fiction. Written at a level both challenging and accessible, the volume provides fresh perspectives on one of the most significant writers of nineteenth-century America whose work continues to fascinate readers and stimulate new study.

Page 22 of 23