"No other study of the American novel has such fascinating and on the whole right things to say."—Washington Post A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work." This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous—now increasingly accepted—judgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

Richard Gaskin offers an original defence of literary humanism, according to which works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of production and not subject to individual readers' responses. He shows that the appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity fully on a par with scientific investigation.

Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature

In this innovative study, Bernadette Andrea focuses on the contributions of women and their writings in the early modern cultural encounters between England and the Islamic world.

In the 1960s, Latin American literature became known worldwide as never before. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa all became part of the general culture of educated readers of English, French, German, and Italian. But few know about the literary tradition from which these writers emerged. Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction remedies this situation, providing an overview of Latin American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present.

• A Brief History of American Literature offers students and general readers a concise and up-to-date history of the full range of American writing from its origins until the present day. 
• Represents the only up-to-date concise history of American literature 
• Covers fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, as well as looking  at other forms of literature including folktales, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller and science fiction
• Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past twenty years