First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (formerly the Concise dictionary) provides clear, concise, and often witty definitions of the most troublesome literary terms from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. It is now available in a new and expanded edition and includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, and schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction. It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this edition are recommended entry-level web links updated via the Dictionary of Literary Terms companion website.

Comprising some 4000 terms, defined and illustrated, "Gradus" calls upon the resources of linguistics, poetics, semiotics, socio-criticism, rhetoric, pragmatics, combining them in ways which enable readers quickly to comprehend the codes and conventions which together make up 'literarity.'

This dictionary is a guide to the key authors, concepts, and terms used in the study of literature written in English. Each entry begins with a straightforward definition, and is followed by explanation and examples. Each writer is defined by type, significant preoccupation and/or style, and a selection of notable works. There are a number of entries on writers in a foreign language who have had a major influence on literature in English. One of the most important uses of this book is as a cross-referencing tool. Italicized cross-referenced entries form an interrelated web, presenting a unified overall picture of particular areas of interest.

Covering both established terminology as well as the specialist vocabulary of modern theoretical schools, this is an indispensable guide to the principal terms and concepts encountered in debates over literary studies in the twenty-first century.

A darkly comic, satirical reference book about writers who never made it into the literary canon A signal event of literary scholarship, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure compiles the biographies of history’s most notable cases of a complete lack of literary success. As such, it is the world’s leading authority on the subject. Compiled in one volume by C. D. Rose, a well-educated person universally acknowledged in parts of England as the world’s pre-eminent expert on inexpert writers, the book culls its information from lost or otherwise ignored archives scattered around the globe, as well as the occasional dustbin. The dictionary amounts to a monumental accomplishment: the definitive appreciation of history’s least accomplished writers. Thus immortalized beyond deserving and rescued from hard-earned obscurity, the authors presented in this historic volume comprise a who’s who of the talentless and deluded, their stories timeless litanies of abject psychosis, misapplication, and delinquency. It is, in short, a treasure.