Books : Poetry, Drama & Criticism : History & Criticism : Key Critics

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Books : Poetry, Drama & Criticism : History & Criticism : Key Critics

• Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage classics)

  Roland Barthes

  
  
   

• The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts

  David Lodge

  
  
   

• Mythologies (Vintage classics)

  Roland Barthes

  
  
   

• The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

  Malcolm Bradbury

  
  
   

• Shakespeare's Wife

  Germaine Greer

  
  
   

• Image-Music-Text

  Roland Barthes

  
  
   

• A Room of One's Own (Penguin Modern Classics)

  Virginia Woolf

  
  
   

• Howards End (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

  E.M. Forster, David Lodge

  
  
   

• On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics)

  Susan Sontag

  
  
   

• Curiosities of Literature: A Book-lover's Anthology of Literary Erudition

  John Sutherland

  
  
   

• Literary Theory: An Introduction

  Terry Eagleton

  
  
   

• Regarding the Pain of Others

  Susan Sontag

  
  
   

• Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Modern Classics)

  Virginia Woolf

  
  
   

• Jacob's Room (Oxford World's Classics)

  Virginia Woolf

  
  
   

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Classics)

  Laurence Sterne

  
  
   

• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (Penguin Modern Classics)

  George Orwell

  
  Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has been recognized as a classic of modern political satire. Fuelled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing--both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. The animals' Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn. All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy. Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. "We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples." While this swinish brotherhood sells out the revolution, cynically editing the Seven Commandments to excuse their violence and greed, the common animals are once again left hungry and exhausted, no better off than in the days when humans ran the farm. Satire Animal Farm may be, but it's a stony reader who remains unmoved when the stalwart workhorse, Boxer, having given his all to his comrades, is sold to the glue factory to buy booze for the pigs. Orwell's view of Communism is bleak indeed, but given the history of the Russian people since 1917, his pessimism has an air of prophecy. --Joyce Thompson
  
   

• Modern Criticism and Theory

  David Lodge, Nigel Wood

  
  
   

• Bleak House (Penguin Classics)

  Charles Dickens

  
  
   

• The Waste Land and Other Poems (Penguin Classics)

  T. S. Eliot

  
  
   

• Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

  Catherine Belsey