• The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception - Titus Andronicus (Arden Shakespeare) by Jonathan Bate & William Shakespeare
  • The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception - Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present by Gary Taylor
  • The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception - Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson
  • The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception - Shakespeare on Film by Judith Buchanan
  • The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception - The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare by Alexa Alice Joubin (editor)

The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception, recommended by Emma Smith

In the years after William Shakespeare died, his plays took on a life of their own. They meant different things to different people at different times as they spread around the world, turning a glover’s son from a one-horse town in central England into one of the best-known authors of all time. Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford, recommends books to better understand ‘Shakespeare reception’—the study of Shakespeare since his death.

  • The Best Postcolonial Literature - Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire
  • The Best Postcolonial Literature - A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon
  • The Best Postcolonial Literature - I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé
  • The Best Postcolonial Literature - Maps: A Novel by Nuruddin Farah
  • The Best Postcolonial Literature - Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea ed. Rosalind Morris, original essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The Best Postcolonial Literature, recommended by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Postcolonial literature brings together writings from formerly colonised territories, allowing commonalities across disparate cultures to be identified and examined. Here, the University of Toronto academic Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb recommends five key works that explore philosophical and political questions through allegory, personal reflection and powerful polemic.

  • The best books on Deconstruction - Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida & translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
  • The best books on Deconstruction - The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin & translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson
  • The best books on Deconstruction - Jacques Derrida Circumfession by Geoffrey Bennington & Jacques Derrida
  • The best books on Deconstruction - The Newly Born Woman by Catherine Clément, Hélène Cixous & translated by Betsy Wing
  • The best books on Deconstruction - "53 Days" by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos

The best books on Deconstruction, recommended by Peter Salmon

For the general reader deconstruction has a bad reputation. It is seen as over-complicating, arcane and wilfully obscure—but as its founding genius Jacques Derrida pointed out, “If things were simple, word would have gotten around.” Here Peter Salmon, author of an excellent new biography of Derrida, chooses five books to get you started on the text and everything inside it.

  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Selected Prose by Charles Lamb
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings by Matthew Arnold
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings by George Eliot
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Studies in the History of the Renaissance by Walter Pater
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment by Marion Milner

David Russell on The Victorian Essay

With the advent of the Victorian age, polite maxims of eighteenth-century essays in the Spectator were replaced by a new generation of writers who thought deeply—and playfully—about social relationships, moral responsibility, education and culture. Here, Oxford literary critic David Russell explores the distinct qualities that define the Victorian essay and recommends five of its greatest practitioners.

  • The best books on D H Lawrence - Twilight in Italy by D. H. Lawrence
  • The best books on D H Lawrence - Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
  • The best books on D H Lawrence - Mr Noon by D. H. Lawrence
  • The best books on D H Lawrence - Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine by D. H. Lawrence
  • The best books on D H Lawrence - Birds, Beasts and Flowers by D. H. Lawrence

The best books on D H Lawrence, recommended by Catherine Brown

Although less flamboyantly experimental than his contemporaries Joyce and Woolf, D H Lawrence was a modernist, says literary scholar Catherine Brown. Here, she selects five books that make the case for this most contradictory, and often divisive, of writers—a man whose fictions and ‘philosophicalish’ works were by turns brilliant and bewildering, sublime and ridiculous