Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media" in Literary History & Criticism

Harry Potter lives in a world that is both magical and historical. Hogwarts pupils ride an old-fashioned steam train to school, notes are taken on parchment with quill pens, and Muggle legends come to life in the form of werewolves, witches, and magical spells. This book is the first to explore the real history in which Harry's world is rooted. Did you know that bezoars and mandrakes were fashionable luxury items for centuries? Find out how Europeans first developed the potions, spells, and charms taught at Hogwarts, from Avada Kedavra to love charms.

Batman is one of the most compelling and enduring characters to come from the Golden Age of Comics, and interest in his story has only increased through countless incarnations since his first appearance in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Why does this superhero without superpowers fascinate us? What does that fascination say about us? Batman and Psychology explores these and other intriguing questions about the masked vigilante.

Since its publication nearly 70 years ago, George Orwell’s 1984 has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politicians have testified to its influence on their intellectual identities, rock musicians have made records about it, TV viewers watch a reality show named for it, and a White House spokesperson tells of “alternative facts”.

Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, This Dark Night constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s parsonage: writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors.

Librarians spend their lives weeding - not weeds, but books - books that have reached the end of their shelf life both literally and figuratively. They remove books that patrons no longer check out, and they put back books they treasure. Annie Spence, who has a decade of experience as a Midwestern librarian, does this not only at her Michigan library but also at home, for her neighbors, at cocktail parties - everywhere. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, she addresses those books directly.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC-Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans. The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing?

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay, originally delivered in 1928 as two lectures at two of Cambridge University's women's colleges—Newnham College and Girton College. Through the use of several metaphors, lauded author Virginia Woolf explores the social injustices and structures that prevent women from engaging in free expression and contributing to literature.

Japanese myths present a significant barrier to entry for Westerners. The primary sources are arcane, and their translations are not accessible to the non-specialist. Japanese deities (kami) have multiple, long names, and the myths exist in different and conflicting versions. Finally, the sheer...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A sensational celebration of Annie Ernaux's work—featuring collected writing by critics, journalists, and 24 previously unpublished pieces by the Nobel Prize winner herself—offering a full view of the author's life, writing style, reception by...

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained...

Alice Walker made history in 1982 when she became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, both for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan Era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the jazz-age novel tells the story of an African American woman haunted by domestic and sexual violence. Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel, showing how it has influenced and been informed by the zeitgeist of the time.

In this startling group memoir, four friends - Black and White, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born - use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

Sit around, leave sh*t all over the place, drink, forget about deadlines...being lazy is pretty easy. But the real art to being chill is when someone without any real ambition can fly under the radar and live unscathed by the never-ending reams of self-help and inspiration rained upon anyone who just wants to watch Netflix. Find that magical place where doing what comes naturally keeps the do-ers at arm's length. Rather than doing less, do just enough.

Although humankind today can peer far deeper into the universe than ever before, we still find ourselves surrounded by the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. All great science fiction has used the human imagination to explore that realm beyond the known, just as theistic religions have done since long before the genre existed. As Hugo Award-winning author Robert Charles Wilson argues, the genre’s freewheeling speculation and systematic world-building make it a unique lens for understanding, examining, and assessing the truth claims of religions in general and Christianity in particular.

12 Years a Slave is the harrowing account of a Black man, born free in New York State, who was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in 1841. Having no way to contact his family, and fearing for his life if he told the truth, Solomon Northup was sold from plantation to plantation in Louisiana, toiling under cruel masters for twelve years before meeting Samuel Bass, a Canadian who finally put him in touch with his family, and helped start the process to regain his freedom.

It's the summer of 1936, and writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his home in Austria has been seized. He's been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town. So he journeys there with his new lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with his semiestranged fellow writer and close friend, Joseph Roth. For a moment they create a fragile paradise. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn.

Number-one New York Times best-selling author Laurie Notaro isn't exactly a domestic goddess - unless that means she fully embraces her genetic hoarding predisposition, sneaks peeks at her husband's daily journal, or has made a list of the people she wants on her Apocalypse Survival team (her husband's not on it). Notaro chronicles her chronic misfortune in the domestic arts, including cooking, cleaning, and putting on Spanx while sweaty (which should technically qualify as an Olympic sport).