Bernard Shaw was a prolific author of book reviews, novels, plays, criticism, essays, and correspondence. Throughout his voluminous writings, proverbs occur repeatedly. This book is a comprehensive index to proverbs in Shaw's writings. An introductory chapter discusses the importance of proverbs in Shaw's works and analyzes his use of them. The bulk of the volume is a key-word index to the proverbs, along with a list of editions of Shaw's writings that were consulted.

Proverbs in the key-word index are arranged alphabetically according to the most significant word in the text. ...
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In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called the Casanova of reading, argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything, writes Manguel, landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create. Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of "A Reader on Reading."

The thirty-nine ...
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Focusing on Shakespeare's Hamlet as foremost a study of grief, Alexander Welsh offers a powerful analysis of its protagonist as the archetype of the modern hero. For over two centuries writers and critics have viewed Hamlet's persona as a fascinating blend of self-consciousness, guilt, and wit. Yet in order to understand more deeply the modernity of this Shakespearean hero, Welsh first situates Hamlet within the context of family and mourning as it was presented in other revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's time. Revenge, he maintains, appears as a function of mourning rather th...
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"The novel, Brink argues, is not about representation but the self-conscious play of language. From its inception, he suggests, the genre has been about the act of writing and self-reflection. This thesis is not new but is part of the currency of postmodern literary theory. Brink, himself a noted South African novelist, the author of some 12 books, including A Dry White Season (1984), and a university professor, brings the insight of an insider. He surveys 15 celebrated novels, historically arranged from Don Quixote and La Princesse de Cleves to A.S. Byatt's Possessi...
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