Exploring how fiction works, this manual shows you how you can learn to understand it well enough to crack open any fictional narrative, and, if you like, start creating your own.
De vulgari eloquentia, written by Dante in the early years of the fourteenth century, is the only known work of medieval literary theory to have been produced by a practicing poet, and the first to assert the intrinsic superiority of living, vernacular languages over Latin.
This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print.
A breakout novel is one that rises out of its category - such as romance, mystery or thriller - and hits the bestseller lists. All aspiring novelists dream of achieving this success as do many published novelists who remain stuck in what author Donald Maass calls "midlist hell." In Writing the Breakout Novel, Maass explains the elements that all breakout novels share and shows readers how to use these elements to write a novel that has a good chance of succeeding within the crowded marketplace.
Following the appearance of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950, C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia have enchanted children and adults alike for over half a century. In The Lion's World, Rowan Williams explores the moral landscape of all seven novels in the series, and offers an astute guide to their spiritual subtext. He draws on significant aspects of their author's life and thought, and on key themes in his other novels, painting a richly textured picture of his aims and achievements. At the same time, Williams gently but firmly rebuts those critics who have charged Lewis with sexism, racial stereotyping and the glorification of violence.
