Content area
Full Text
RR 2017/219Literary Theory: The Complete Guide Mary Klages Bloomsbury Academic London and New York 2017 287 pp. ISBN 978 1 4725 9275 0 (hbck) ; ISBN 978 1 4725 9274 3 (pbck) ; ISBN 978 1 4725 9277 4 (ePDF); ISBN 978 1 4725 9276 7 (ePub) £70 $94 (hbck); £19.99 $26.95 (pbck); £19.99 $21.99 (e-formats)
Guides to terms have traditionally focused on literary forms (like poems and novels) and stylistic features (like sonnets and epistolary novels and metaphors), with some grammatical and linguistic features thrown in. This relative narrow compass has radically changed and now incorporates a wide range of philosophical and ideological, psychological and historical, cultural and racial and gender-based ideas. Students at school, college and university levels need all this critical apparatus to understand and interpret the literary and cultural material presented to them in the classroom, in personal investigation and in their general response to their environment.
Mary Klages offered an attractive and popular introduction to this frame of reference in her 2006 guide Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed (Klages, 2006), following it up with her Key Terms in Literary Theory (Klages, 2011). This Complete Guide is an amalgamation of the two earlier works, with expanded and updated material (on such topics as deconstruction and post colonialism), updated...