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7 books match the query 'Critical Guide'

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Boccaccio

Edited by Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Long celebrated as one of “the Three Crowns” of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) experimented widely with the forms of literature. His prolific and innovative writings—which range beyond the novella, from lyric to epic, from biography to mythography and geography, from pastoral and romance to invective—became powerful models for authors in Italy and across the Continent.

This collection of essays presents Boccaccio’s life and creative output in its encyclopedic diversity. Exploring a variety of genres, Latin as well as Italian, it provides short descriptions of all his works, situates them in his oeuvre, and features critical expositions of their most salient features and innovations. Designed for readers at all levels, it will appeal to scholars of literature, medieval and Renaissance studies, humanism, and the classical tradition; as well as European historians, art historians, and students of material culture and the history of the book. Anchored by an introduction and chronology, this volume contains contributions by prominent Boccaccio scholars in the United States, as well as essays by contributors from France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The year 2013, Boccaccio’s seven-hundredth birthday, will be an important one for the study of his work and will see an increase in academic interest in reassessing his legacy.

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Exploring Degrowth

A Critical Guide

Vincent Liegey

Pluto Press, 2020

A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement.

As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement demands that we must slow down the economy by transforming our economies, our politics and our cultures to live within the Earth's limits.

This book navigates the practice and strategies of the movement, looking at its strengths and weaknesses. Covering horizontal democracy, local economies and the reduction of work, it shows us why degrowth is a compelling and realistic project.

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Middle English Prose

A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres

EDWARDS, ANTHONY

Rutgers University Press, 1984

The purpose of this book is to provide an authoritative guide to a number of important authors and genres of Middle English prose. Although, distinguished work has been undertaken on particular authors or groups of works, no previous study has attempted a comprehensive overview of this highly diversified range of material.

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Petrarch

A Critical Guide to the Complete Works

Edited by Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Although Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) is best known today for cementing the sonnet’s place in literary history, he was also a philosopher, historian, orator, and one of the foremost classical scholars of his age. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works is the only comprehensive, single-volume source to which anyone—scholar, student, or general reader—can turn for information on each of Petrarch’s works, its place in the poet’s oeuvre, and a critical exposition of its defining features.

A sophisticated but accessible handbook that illuminates Petrarch’s love of classical culture, his devout Christianity, his public celebrity, and his struggle for inner peace, this encyclopedic volume covers both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings and the various genres in which he excelled: poem, tract, dialogue, oration, and letter. A biographical introduction and chronology anchor the book, making Petrarch an invaluable resource for specialists in Italian, comparative literature, history, classics, religious studies, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

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Spoiler Alert

A Critical Guide

Aaron Jaffe

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

All of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of it

Concurrent with the compulsory connectivity of the digital age is the rise of the spoiler. The inevitability of information has changed the critical quality of modernity, leaving us with acute vertigo—a feeling that nothing new is left out there. Encompassing memes and trigger warnings, Vilem Flusser and Thomas Pynchon, Spoiler Alert wrangles with the state of surprise in post-historical times. Aaron Jaffe delivers a timely corrective to post-critical modes of reading that demonstrates the dangers of forfeiting critical suspicion.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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Star Wars after Lucas

A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy

Dan Golding

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Politics, craft, and cultural nostalgia in the remaking of Star Wars for a new age

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—way back in the twenty-first century’s first decade—Star Wars seemed finished. Then in 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to what Wired magazine would call “the forever franchise,” with more films in the works than its first four decades had produced.

Focusing on The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One (2016), The Last Jedi (2017), and the television series Rebels (2014–18), Dan Golding explores the significance of pop culture nostalgia in overcoming the skepticism, if not downright hostility, that greeted the Star Wars relaunch. At the same time he shows how Disney, even as it tapped a backward-looking obsession, was nonetheless creating genuinely new and contemporary entries in the Star Wars universe.

A host of cultural factors and forces propelled the Disney-engineered Star Wars renaissance, and all figure in Golding’s deeply informed analysis: from John Williams’s music in The Force Awakens to Peter Cushing’s CGI face in Rogue One, to Carrie Fisher’s passing, to the rapidly changing audience demographic. Star Wars after Lucas delves into the various responses and political uses of the new Star Wars in a wider context, as in reaction videos on YouTube and hate-filled, misogynistic online rants. In its granular textual readings, broad cultural scope, and insights into the complexities of the multimedia galaxy, this book is as entertaining as it is enlightening, an apt reflection of the enduring power of the Star Wars franchise.

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