📚 Explication

Books with explication on their catalogue record, first published between 1804 and 2021, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject explication in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 932 works the catalogue holds under that subject. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Xunzi	Xunzi	1804	23
	Explaining explanation	David-Hillel Ruben	1990	12
	How to read literature like a professor	Thomas C. Foster	2002	12
	Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers	James Michael Thomas	2012	11
	Studying plays	Mick Wallis	1998	9
	How to read a play	Damon Kiely	2016	9
	The criticism of poetry	S. H. Burton	1950	7
	How to read literature	Terry Eagleton	2013	6
	Pratique de l'explication littéraire par l'exemple	Paul Theveau	1968	5
	The Sanford Meisner approach	Larry Silverberg	1979	5
	The poetry handbook	John Lennard	1996	5
	How to Read a Poem	Thomas H. Ford	2021	5
	Nihon ryōiki	Keikai	1957	4
	Découverte du poème	Micheline Dufau	1967	4
	Explication de texte	Jean Sareil	1967	4
	A map of misreading	Harold Bloom	1975	4
	Script into performance	Richard Hornby	1977	4
	Languages of the stage	Patrice Pavis	1982	4
	L' explication de texte littéraire	Daniel Bergez	1989	4
	Making Theatre	Peter Mudford	2000	4
	Momentos Cumbres De Las Literaturas Hispanicas	Rodney T. Rodriguez	2003	4
	Poems about the Natural World	Evan T. Voboril	2014	4
	Script Analysis for Theatre	Robert Knopf	2017	4
	La littérature expliquée	Charles Marc Des Granges	1931	3
	Begegnung mit Gedichten	Walter Urbanek	1967	3
	Études de grammaire et de style	Jean Chaillet	1969	3
	Deutsche Gedichte von Andreas Gryphius bis Ingeborg Bachmann	Jörg Hienger	1969	3
	Interpretationen französischer Gedichte, hrsg. von Kurt Wais	Kurt Wais	1970	3
	Styles	Yves Le Hir	1972	3
	A map of misreading	Harold Bloom	1975	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.