2 Barnes &amp; Noble Classics paperbacks. ISBN: 1593083106 ISBN:159308059X

The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar, Wilde

Angus Fletcher

Kenneth Krauss

Barnes Noble Classics

Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Cornell University Press

Anyone who has ever said one thing and meant another has spoken in the mode of allegory. The allegorical expression of ideas pervades literature, art, music, religion, politics, business, and advertising. But how does allegory really work and how should we understand it? For more than forty years, Angus Fletcher's classic book has provided an answer that is still unsurpassed for its comprehensiveness, brilliance, and eloquence. With a preface by Harold Bloom and a substantial new afterword by the author, this edition reintroduces this essential text to a new generation of students and scholars of literature and art. 
Allegory puts forward a basic theory of allegory as a symbolic mode, shows how it expresses basic emotional and cognitive drives, and relates it to a wide variety of aesthetic devices. Revealing the immense richness of the allegorical tradition, the book demonstrates how allegory works in literature and art, as well as everyday speech, sales pitches, and religious and political appeals. 
In his new afterword, Fletcher documents the rise of a disturbing new type of allegory--allegory without ideas.

Wonderworks: Literary invention and the science of stories

A brilliant examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, that shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs - rivalling any scientific inventions - and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.\nLiterature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere - from Homer through to Shakespeare and Austen - each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature's great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.\nWonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most powerful developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism and ennui - all while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope and joy. They can be found all throughout literature - from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare's plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.\nBased on author Angus Fletcher's own research, Wonderworks is an eye-opening and thought-provoking work.

Swift Press

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Books by Angus Fletcher