Tag: Introductions

Free Download Kevin J. Hayes, "The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)"
English | 2007 | pages: 154 | ISBN: 0521854806, 0521671043 | PDF | 1,0 mb
Despite its indifferent reception when it was first published in 1851, Moby Dick is now a central work in the American literary canon. This introduction offers readings of Melville’s masterpiece, but it also sets out the key themes, contexts, and critical reception of his entire oeuvre. The first chapters cover Melville’s life and the historical and cultural contexts. Melville’s individual works each receive full attention in the third chapter, including Typee, Moby Dick, Billy Budd and the short stories. Elsewhere in the chapter different themes in Melville are explained with reference to several works: Melville’s writing process, Melville as letter writer, Melville and the past, Melville and modernity, Melville’s late writings. The final chapter analyses Melville scholarship from his day to ours. Kevin J. Hayes provides comprehensive information about Melville’s life and works in an accessible and engaging book that will be essential for students beginning to read this important author.

Free Download Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction (Complete Introductions) By Sara Upstone
2017 | 400 Pages | ISBN: 147361192X | PDF | 2 MB
Literary theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create new interpretations of the text that would not otherwise be possible. In your own reading and writing, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. It allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of literature, but also about the core themes – concepts such as gender, sexuality, the self, race, and class – which a text might explore.Literary theory gives you an almost limitless number of texts to work into your own response, ensuring that your interpretation is truly original. This is why, although literary theory can initially appear alienating and difficult, it is something to get really excited about. Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circular room, with a whole set of doors laid out around you. Each doorway opens on to a new and illuminating field of knowledge that can change how you think about what you have read: perhaps in just a small way, but also perhaps dramatically and irrevocably. You can open one door, or many of them. The choice is yours. Put the knowledge you gain together with your own interpretation, however, and you have a unique and potentially fascinating response. Each chapter in Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction covers a key school of thought, progressing to a point at which you’ll have a full understanding of the range of responses and approaches available for textual interpretation. As well as focusing on such core areas as Marxism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, this introduction brings in recent developments such as Eco and Ethical Criticism and Humanisms.

Free Download Trigonometry: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Glen Van Brummelen
English | March 2, 2020 | ISBN: 0198814313 | 192 pages | PDF | 5.38 Mb
Born of the desire to understand the workings of motions of the heavenly bodies, trigonometry gave the ancient Greeks the ability to predict their futures. Most of what we see of the subject in school comes from these heavenly origins; 15th century astronomer Regiomontanus called it "the foot of the ladder to the stars."

Free Download Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Naomi Zack
English | December 28th, 2023 | ISBN: 0192845063 | 192 pages | True PDF | 0.86 MB
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

Free Download David Holdeman, "The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)"
English | 2010 | pages: 164 | ISBN: 0521547377, 052183855X | PDF | 1,1 mb
This introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most important writers examines Yeats’s poems, plays and stories in relation to biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Yeats wrote with passion and eloquence about personal disappointments, his obsession with Ireland, and the modern era’s loss of faith in traditional beliefs about art, religion, empire, social class, gender and sex. His works uniquely reflect the gradual transition from Victorian aestheticism to the modernism of Pound, Eliot and Joyce. This is the first introductory study to consider his work in all genres in light of the latest biographies, new editions of his letters and manuscripts, and recent accounts by feminist and postcolonial critics. While using this introduction, students will have instant access to the world of current Yeats scholarship as well as being provided with the essential facts about his life and literary career and suggestions for further reading.

Free Download Pakistan: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Pippa Virdee
English | February 1, 2022 | ISBN: 0198847076 | 174 pages | PDF | 3.43 Mb
What is Pakistan? The name refers to a seventy-year-old post-colonial product of the bloodiest partition of territory and population that accompanied the end of British empire in South Asia. But the region of the Indus Valley has a four-thousand-year-old history, and was the site of one of the earliest and greatest riverine civilisations in the world. Although the modern nation of Pakistan as we know it was created as a homeland for the Muslims of British India, it is impossible to understand the complex tapestry of linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identities and tensions of the region without tracing its deep past.

Free Download Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Dylan Evans
English | December 1, 2019 | ISBN: 0198834403 | 144 pages | EPUB | 2.84 Mb
Was love invented by European poets in the Middle Ages or is it part of human nature? Will winning the lottery really make you happy? Is it possible to build robots that have feelings?

Free Download Bohemians: A Very Short Introduction (VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS) by David Weir
English | May 30, 2023 | ISBN: 0197538290 | 160 pages | PDF | 2.89 Mb
The Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the patron system, the artist was free to move around, to seek an audience wherever fortune beckoned. This marketing model likening the artist’s vagabond career to the "gypsy" life helps to explain part of the bohemian myth, but not all of it. Most bohemians have scant interest in commercial gain and are not so itinerant after all, confining their movements to down-market urban neighbourhoods where the rent is cheap and the morals are loose.

Free Download Amphibians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by T. S. Kemp
English | October 1, 2021 | ISBN: 0198842988 | 160 pages | PDF | 2.81 Mb
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring