Shakespeare's Books - A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources
This encyclopaedia-style Dictionary is a comprehensive reference guide to Shakespeare's literary knowledge and recent scholarship on it. Nearly 200 entries cover the full range of literary writing Shakespeare was acquainted with, and which influenced his own work, including classical, historical, religious and contemporary works. It provides an overview of his use of authors such as Virgil, Chaucer, Erasmus, Marlowe and Samuel Daniel, whose influence is across the canon. Other entries cover anonymous or collective works such as the Bible, Emblems, Homilies, Chronicle History plays and the Morality tradition in drama.
Student Companion to Herman Melville provides a critical introduction to the life and literary works of Herman Melville, the nineteenth-century American author of Moby-Dick, as well as nine other novels and numerous short stories and poems. In addition to providing an overview of Melville's life in relation to his literary works, the book places his writings within their historical and cultural contexts, and then examines each of his major works fully, at the level of the nonspecialist and generalist reader.
Dictionary of Literary Characters is a stunning, five-volume set containing descriptions of more than 40,000 characters in great literary works from the United States, Britain, and around the world. The wide assortment of characters featured in this comprehensive work are compiled from novels, short stories, and plays—ranging from such ancient classics as Sophocles' Antigone to 21st-century prizewinners such as Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. No other reference work covers such an extensive assortment of characters from so many different works of literature.
