Literary theory Books

Notoriety struck the Belgian-born literary critic Paul de Man more than once. First came his fame as one of the principal-and most controversial-theorists of deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s. After his death in 1983, notoriety struck a second...

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in...

How did academic and literary writers living in rural Britain in the 1680s establish their careers and find audiences for their work? What factors influenced the choices of essayists and dramatists who lived outside London and the university cities? Who...

Jacques Lacan's commentaries on Freud had revolutionary implications not only for the analytic movement but also for contemporary philosophy and literary criticism. Lacan held that if the unconscious, as Freud described it, exists, it functions...

Tourniers novel is a love story that uses the theme of twinship to explore a near infinity of dualities. Jean and Paul are identical twins. Outsiders, even their parents, cannot tell them apart, and call them Jean-Paul. The mysterious bond between them...

First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences–especially Shakespearean ones–on Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the...

A major literary event, the publication of this masterful translation makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is...

This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing...

Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation...

Explores how modernist fiction interrogated the many promises of ubiquitous media connectivity as key to collective life. In Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life, Aleksandr Prigozhin explores how modernist fiction responded to its changing...

Cathy Caruth juxtaposes the writings of psychoanalysts, literary and political theorists, and literary authors who write in a century faced by a new kind of history, one that is made up of events that seem to undo, rather than produce, their own...

Cathy Caruth juxtaposes the writings of psychoanalysts, literary and political theorists, and literary authors who write in a century faced by a new kind of history, one that is made up of events that seem to undo, rather than produce, their own...

My Silver Planet (borrowing its title from John Keats) contends that the insoluble problem of elite poetrys relation to popular culture bears the indelible stamp of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetrya legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt,...

Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of...

Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of...

Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience,...

Representing years of critical reflection, The Theory of Criticism attempts to construct a poetics of ""presence."" Within a wide range of critical terminology, Murray Krieger has sought to create a new vision. In language that is passionate and often...

In Words about Words about Words, Murray Krieger advances his ongoing dialogue with the rich diversity of contemporary literary theory and elaborates on his own position as it grows out of an opposing relation to much of current criticism. Krieger...

In The Institution of Theory, Murray Krieger examines, at once sympathetically and critically, the process by which theory has become institutionalized in the American academy and the consequences of theory as an academic institution. He traces the...

What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words represent? Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? Murray Krieger develops a systematic theoretical statement out of answers to such questions. Ekphrasis is his account of the continuing debates...

Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative definition of tragic and to flesh...

In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his ""contextualist"" position. In...

An accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These...

In the eighteenth century, antiquaries - wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians'used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently...

In the eighteenth century, antiquaries'wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians'used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently...

Originally publihsed in 1977. This book presents a theory for the metaphoric construal of deviant sentences. The theory has two aspects. The first relates to metaphor considered as a productive process of language and describes the mechanisms that...

Stef+ín Einarsson covers almost a thousand years of Icelandic literature in tracing the influence of the sagas and eddic poems. The book begins with background on Icelandic literature, outlining its literary roots in Scandinavia. Following this,...

The meaning and objectives of literature, argues David Bleich, are created by the reader, who depends on community consensus to validate his or her judgements. Bleich proposes that the study of English be consciously reoriented from a knowledge-finding...

Originally published in 1962. The rise of ""metaphoric"" criticism is a reaction against a previous critical preoccupation with psychology and time. Milton spatialized time, thoroughly mastering a metaphoric technique. Professor Cope, after discussing...

This is a very interesting collection of topics that centers on critical methodologies and the central problems of medieval alterity.

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Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the ""possible articulation"" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan examines that multifaceted...

If the objective of the Romantic movement was nothing less than to redefine the meaning of life itself, what role did experiments play in this movement? While earlier scholarship has established both the importance of science generally and vitalism...

Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth...

It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded...

In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expressionthe art collection, the anthology, and the archiveand their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States.Using...

In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk.The term 'Gesamtkunstwerk'...

Dame Muriel Spark - the highly acclaimed Scottish writer - published over twenty novels and more than a dozen short—story collections from the late 1950s until her death in 2006. Two of her novels, The Public Image and Loitering with Intent, were...

Dame Muriel Spark -- the highly acclaimed Scottish writer -- published over twenty novels and more than a dozen short-story collections from the late 1950s until her death in 2006. Two of her novels, The Public Image and Loitering with Intent, were...

Renowned as one of the most brilliant satirists ever, Jonathan Swift has long fascinated Hibernophiles beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sean Moore's examination of Swift's writings and the economics behind the distribution of his work elucidates...

Drawing on the explosion of academic and public interest in cognitive science in the past two decades, this volume features articles that combine literary and cultural analysis with insights from neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and...

Writing and teaching across cultures and disciplines makes the act of comparison inevitable. Comparative theory and methods of comparative literature and cultural anthropology have permeated the humanities as they engage more centrally with the cultural...

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Since the publication of his groundbreaking monograph, Metahistory, in 1973, White's work has been crucial to disciplines where narrative is of primary concern, including history,...

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Though perhaps best known for his tropological theory of discourse, White's theory of historical writing as narrativization is no less influential. Since the publication of his...

Begin or refine your journey to master Spanish language literature with this revised and expanded edition of Guia Basica de la Critica Literaria y el Trabajo de Investigacion. This focused and comprehensible guide empowers students to become better...

With Possible Worlds of Fiction and History, Lubomír Doležel reexamines the claim -- made first by Roland Barthes and then popularized by Hayden White -- that ''there is no fundamental distinction between fiction and history.'' Doležel rejects this...