Showing results for "The Others" in Literary History & Criticism

William Cowper was an English poet and Anglican hymn writer. He was a forerunner of the Romantic movement in English poetry and strongly influenced the writing of nature poems. His work was admired by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Anne Bronte among others. Cowper was a strong supporter of the campaign for the abolition of slavery and wrote his most famous poem "The Negro's Complaint" to try to raise people's awareness of the horrors and injustices of the system.

Alfred Tennyson was Poet Laureate of Great Britain from 1850 until his death in 1892. Please enjoy this collection of selected poems by him. (Summary by Alan Mapstone)

Brought to you by Penguin. A new collection of literary criticism and brilliant insights from one of the giants of contemporary thinking Who owns language? In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngugi wa Thiong’o presents a series of essays that build on his vast wealth of...

In The Allure of the Multiverse, physicist Paul Halpern tells the epic story of how science became besotted with the multiverse, and the controversies that ensued. The questions that brought scientists to this point are big and deep: Is reality such that anything can happen, must happen? How does quantum mechanics "choose" the outcomes of its apparently random processes? And why is the universe habitable? Each question quickly leads to the multiverse. 

Available for the first time in audio, America’s most revered novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in County Durham, England in 1806. From the age of 15 she suffered a series of debilitating illnesses. Her book of "Poems" published in 1844 attracted the attention of Robert Browning, leading to their courtship, marriage and elopement to Italy where she lived for the rest of her life. She died in Florence in 1861. She was a campaigner for the abolition of slavery despite both her parents' families having financial interests in plantations in the West Indies. Her poem "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" was an attempt to make people in England and America...

Simon Russell Beale is one of Britain's most recognisable and well-loved actors. He has played many roles on stage, film, television and radio - ranging from Winston Churchill to Stalin, George Smiley to King Arthur. But ever since his appearance at school as a glamorous Desdemona, complete with false eyelashes that rendered him half-blind, he has been captivated by Shakespeare.

Nature Near Home is one of many books on natural history by John Burroughs. It is full of simple observations about rural scenes and charming stories about animals, plants, and even people! Burroughs loves the creatures around him and derives great pleasure from his walks and studies in nature’s scenes. (Summary by Edith Phern)

In these little sketches [1899] of a few out of the innumerable multitude of ways in which the sea has spoken to me during my long acquaintance with it, I have tried with ’prentice hand to reproduce for shore-dwellers some of the things it has told me. (Author’s Preface) His whales and sharks and other monsters of the deep are creatures with whom one is proud to be associated. These Idylls—little pictures—strike me as some of the most vivid things ever written about the sea. I take it that only a man who has used the sea as a common sailor, and before the mast, really knows it in all ...

George Herbert was an English poet, orator and cleric who was Public Orator at the University of Cambridge before becoming a rural Parish Minister. The Church Militant is the third part of George Herbert's large collection of religious poetry The Temple, the first two parts of which (The Church Porch and The Church) are available on Librivox: https://librivox.org/the-templ... (Summary by Alan Mapstone)

This is a collection of 27 poems, some seasonal to New Years and Christmas, but others on themes of religion, nature and home. (Summary by Larry Wilson)

Brought to you by Penguin. From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most...

Originally published in 1966, Susan Sontag's first collection of essays is a modern classic and includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation", as well as, her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the...

Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), professor of medicine and pathology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, published more than 2000 papers and dozens of books. His investigation of the 1847-1848 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia laid the foundations of public health in Germany. During the Revolution of 1848, Virchow helped found a journal promoting medicine as a social science. For physicians, his contributions to the understanding of the pathophysiology of disease and to the working vocabulary of medicine were fundamental, but Virchow also believed that social injustice and political oppression lay ...

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached.

An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be. The theory that Shakespeare may...

This publication, by English utopian socialist Edward Carpenter, describes civilisation as a sort of disease with which humanity is afflicted. Alongside this influential publication (originally published in 1889), are compiled other essays: Modern Science: A Criticism; The Science of the Future: A Forecast; Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality; Exfoliation: Lamarck versus Darwin; Custom; A Rational and Humane Science; and The New Morality, plus Appendices (notes on various "Pre-Civilised peoples"). - Summary by Jake Malizia

This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates his intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher is a slow-burning Gothic horror, describing the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past.

In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced...