Larousse Dictionary of Literary Characters

Larousse Dictionary of Literary Characters Review

A natural companion to the Larousse Dictionary of Writers, this reference is a guide to the literary characters created by the greatest writers of literature in English, including authors from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Scotland, Ireland, as well as the United States and England. Sixty-five hundred entries detail all the favorite characters of the English-speaking literary canon from novels, plays and poems, as well as thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction. The book is fully cross-referenced and includes an author/title index.

Hamlet (Bloom's Major Literary Characters)

Hamlet (Bloom's Major Literary Characters) Review

William Shakespeare's Hamlet, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Bloom's Guides collection, presents concise critical excerpts from Hamlet to provide a scholarly overview of the work. This comprehensive study guide also features "The Story Behind the Story," which details the conditions under which Hamlet was written. This title also includes a short biography on William Shakespeare and a descriptive list of characters.

Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen

Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen Review

Irish literature in English commands world-wide respect, but it is rarely discussed in a comparative light. This study of the making and unmaking of character commences with Balzac's impact on nineteenth-century Irish fiction. Sheridan Le Fanu links Balzac and Swedenborg to Yeats, and anticipates Elizabeth Bowen's deployment of ghost story conventions in the 1940s.
 
Through painterly imagery, biblical quotation and the distortion of proper names, Le Fanu shows character to be a self-consuming project. Yeats' Parnell emerges as a modernist gothic hero of the 1930s. Bowen's The heat of the day anatomizes the problems of identity, bequeathed by Yeats.
 
Radically revising the idea of a gothic tradition and traversing two centuries of Irish literary history, Dissolute Characters gives a fluent and detailed account of the emerging relation between Irish culture, modernism and politics.