The romance novel has the strange distinction of being the most popular but least respected of literary genres. While it remains consistently dominant in bookstores and on best-seller lists, it is also widely dismissed by the critical community. Scholars have alleged that romance novels help create subservient readers, who are largely women, by confining heroines to stories tha...(展开全部)

An Arthurian romance completed by Wolfran von Eschenbach in the first of the thirteenth century.

Northrop Frye's thinking has had a pervasive impact on contemporary interpretations of our literary and cultural heritage. In his "Anatomy of Criticism," a landmark in the history of modern critical theory, he demonstrated his genius for mapping out the realm of imaginative creation. In "The Secular Scripture" he turns again to the task of establishing a broad theoretical frame...(展开全部)

'If any man or woman should ask what I wish this romance...to be called, it is the Romance of the Rose, in which the whole art of love is contained'. Guillaume de Lorris's own introduction to his allegorical account of the progress of a courtly love affair gives no indication of the eventual scale and scope of the work, which became the most popular and influential of all medie...(展开全部)

A historical romance, Sontag's book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Passionately examining the shape of Western civilization since the Age of Enlightenment, Sontag's novel is an exquisitely detailed picture of revolution, the fate of nature, art and love.

'Upward, yet not Northward.' How would a creature limited to two dimensions be able to grasp the possibility of a third? Edwin A. Abbott's droll and delightful 'romance of many dimensions' explores this conundrum in the experiences of his protagonist, A Square, whose linear world is invaded by an emissary Sphere bringing the gospel of the third dimension on the eve of the n...(展开全部)

'Upward, yet not Northward.' How would a creature limited to two dimensions be able to grasp the possibility of a third? Edwin A. Abbott's droll and delightful 'romance of many dimensions' explores this conundrum in the experiences of his protagonist, A Square, whose linear world is invaded by an emissary Sphere bringing the gospel of the third dimension on the eve of the n...(展开全部)