Books in the Approaching Literature series

This critical anthology introduces students to reading literature through gender. Themes covered include the conflict between "femininity" and creativity in women's lives and writing, the construction of female characters, and the gendering of language.

This volume aims to guide the student through the fundamentals of the realist novel genre. Focusing on two aspects, the formal and historical, it shows how writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens used the realist novel to tell profoundly moral tales in a popular way.

This aim of this text is to explore the concept of the literary canon and the process by which works achieve a high cultural status. It seeks to do this by analyzing three of Shakespeare's major works and comparing them with one by the less renowned Aphra Behn.

This volume aims to guide the student through the fundamentals of the realist novel genre. Focusing on two aspects, the formal and historical, it shows how writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens used the realist novel to tell profoundly moral tales in a popular way.

A selection of key critical texts are included, with extracts from the work of Ian Watt, Georg Lukacs, Marilyn Butler, Edward Said and Mikhail Bakhtin. This volume is designed to develop the reader's understanding of the issues raised, and to show the origins of current debates about the novel.