Shakespeare
10 best books like Shakespeare (Mark Van Doren): Shakespeare After All, Shakespearean Tragedy, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Language, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1, Shakespeare the Thinker, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, Selected Writings, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
| Author | Marjorie Garber |
| ISBN | 0385722141 |
A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country's foremost authorities on his life and work. Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie...
"A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become 'real' at all" writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.
Approaching...
| Author | René Girard |
| ISBN | 0195053397 |
In this groundbreaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Rene Girard's novel reinterpretation of "mimesis."...
| Author | Frank Kermode |
| ISBN | 0374527741 |
A magnum opus from our finest interpreter of The Bard
The true biography of Shakespeare--and the only one we need to care about--is in his plays. Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished scholar of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature, has been thinking about Shakespeare's...
| Author | Harold Clarke Goddard |
| ISBN | 0226300412 |
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.
Shakespeare Downheartedness:"The Meaning of Shakespeare" by Harold C. Goddard (2 volumes)
"Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.”
In "The Meaning...
| Author | A.D. Nuttall |
| ISBN | 0300119283 |
A. D. Nuttall’s study of Shakespeare’s intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0393312569 |
Patriotic Gore (1962) is the big book of Wilson’s final decade and in the dust jacket photo he looks just the toothless, growling old cuss one meets in “The Critic in Winter,” Updike’s worthwhile review of the late journals. Wilson spent his last summers in a decaying corner of Upstate New York,...
| Author | A.J.A. Symons |
| ISBN | 0940322617 |
One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel -- "a masterpiece"-- and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking...
| Author | William Hazlitt |
| ISBN | 0192838008 |
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) developed a variety of identities as a writer: essayist, philosopher, critic of literature, drama and art, biographer, political commentator, and polemicist. Praised for his eloquence, he was also reviled by conservatives for his radical politics. This edition,...
| Author | Northrop Frye |
| ISBN | 0156027801 |
An examination of the influence of the Bible on Western art and literature and on the Western creative imagination in general. Frye persuasively presents the Bible as a unique text distinct from all other epics and sacred writings. “No one has set forth so clearly, so subtly, or with such cogent energy...
| Author | Ron Rosenbaum |
| ISBN | 0375503390 |
“[Ron Rosenbaum] is one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.”
–David Remnick
In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum gives readers an unforgettable way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination. As he did in his groundbreaking Explaining Hitler,...
| Author | Gilbert Highet |
| ISBN | 1853753017 |
Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some...
| Author | Harold Bloom |
| ISBN | 1594481385 |
A critical novel about the ways in which we absorb various forms of wisdom from the literature we consume, from the author The New York Times calls "the most influential critic of the last quarter-century."
In one of his most inspiring books yet, Harold Bloom, our preeminent literary critic,...
An NYRB Classics Original
The Prank is Chekhov’s own selection of the best of his early work, the first book he put together and the first book he hoped to publish. Assembled in 1882, with illustrations by Nikolay Chekhov, the book was then presented to the censor for approval—which was...
| Author | Vivant Denon |
| ISBN | 1590173260 |
A Bilingual New York Review Books Original
Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century French libertine literature, a book to set beside Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that where Laclos' icy novel tells of hellish depravity, Denon's ravishing...
| Author | Elizabeth Hardwick |
| ISBN | 0940322781 |
The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work...
| Author | Erich Auerbach |
| ISBN | 1590172191 |
Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the...
| Author | Lionel Trilling |
| ISBN | 0151511977 |
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays...
| Author | W.H. Auden |
| ISBN | 0691102821 |
"W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden has announced that in his course . . . he proposes to read all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order." The New York Times reported this item on September 27, 1946,...
| Author | Simone Weil |
| ISBN | 1590171454 |
War and the Iliad is a perfect introduction to the range of Homer’s art as well as a provocative and rewarding demonstration of the links between literature, philosophy, and questions of life and death.
Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is one of her most celebrated works—an...
| Author | Thomas Browne |
| ISBN | 1590174887 |
Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald,...
| Author | Simon Leys |
| ISBN | 1863955321 |
An essential collection of essays from an eminent critic.
Simon Leys’ cultural and political commentary has spanned four decades, with no corner of the arts escaping his sharp eye and acerbic wit. The Hall of Uselessness forms the most complete collection yet of Leys’ fascinating essays,...
Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography
| Author | Alberto Manguel |
| ISBN | 0871139766 |
No one knows if there was a man named Homer, but there is no little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature. The Iliad and The Odyssey, with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, brace Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Cyclops, the beautiful...
| Author | Søren Kierkegaard |
| ISBN | 0940322137 |
Translated from the Danish by Walter Lowrie, David Swenson, and Alexander Dru
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is one of the master thinkers of the modern age, a defining influence on existentialism and on twentieth-century theology, and this brilliantly tailored selection from his...
