Literary theory Books

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law -The Legacy of Modernism addresses the legacy of contemporary critiques of language for the concept of the rule of law. Between those who care about the rule of law and those who are interested in contemporary legal...

A logosophistic approach to the way in which Marshall McLuhan is to be read in the age of the posthuman.

In The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen examines how difficulty became central to our encounters with modern literature and culture. Literary modernism's first readers often complained that difficulty was running rampant in literature, that...

This volume argues that theory, far from being dead, has undergone major shifts in order to come to terms with the most urgent cultural and political questions of today. Offering an overview of theory's new directions, this groundbreaking collection...

'British Studies' and 'British Cultural Studies' cover a wide range of facets of contemporary Britain. Studying British Cultures: An Introduction is a unique collection of essays which examine the most significant aspects of this quickly developing area...

This book offers students in biblical studies an accessible but comprehensive introduction to modern genre theory, providing access to literary tools for understanding how genres work in texts, and on readers.

The study of semiotics underwent a gradual but radical paradigm shift during the past century, from a glottocentric (language-centered) enterprise to one that encompasses the whole terrestrial biosphere. In this collection of 17 essays, Thomas A. Sebeok,...

Existential semiotics involves an a priori state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. These essays define this new philosophical field.

Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is an introduction to the emerging field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis. It includes key papers that lay the foundations for this research, and worked examples from analysts...

Examining both the violent history and promising future of the plays, Shakespeare in French Theory is a timely reminder of the relevance of Shakespeare and the lasting value of French thinking.

The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism provides comprehensive and authoritative coverage of academic disciplines, critical terms and central figures relating to the vast field of postmodern studies. With three cross-referenced sections, the volume is easily...

The potential duality of human character and its capacity for dissembling was a source of fascination to the Elizabethan dramatists. Where many of them used the Machiavellian picture to draw one fair-faced scheming villain after another, Shakespeare...

In Look, a Negro! , political theorist Robert Gooding-Williams imaginatively and impressively unpacks fundamental questions around race and racism. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's famous description of the profound effect of being singled out by a white child...

At just the moment when many people are ready to throw Freud on to the ash-heap of intellectual history, Sex on the Couch rescues from Freud's theories a fascinating series of reflections on the nature of sexuality and gender. Richard Boothby...

This classic text remains one of the clearest and most incisive introductions to postmodernism. Perhaps more importantly, it is a compelling discussion of why postmodernism matters. Working through the issue of representation in art forms from fiction to...

Reading poetry and prose, images and art, literary and critical theory, science and cultural studies, Close Reading the Anthropocene explores the question of meaning, its importance and immanent potential for loss, in the new geological epoch of the...

The first book of its kind in the field, this timely introduction to post- colonial theory offers lucid and accessible summaries of the major work of key theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said.Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. The Guide also Explores...

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable...

This collection of essays is an important contribution to travel writing studies -- looking beyond the explicitly political questions of postcolonial and gender discourses, it considers the form, poetics, institutions and reception of travel writing in...

An assessment of the current state and future of literary studies in the United States, this text challenges the view that literary classics must be relevant to our immediate concerns. It also addresses the question of objectivity in humanistic study.

Oedipus presents ceaseless paradoxes that have fascinated readers for centuries. He is proud of his intellect, but he does not know himself and succumbs easily to self-deceptions. As a ruler he expresses the greatest good will toward his people, but as...

This study examines the unique cultural space of Victorian cathedral towns as they appear in the literary work of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, arguing that Dickens and Trollope use the cathedral town's enclosure, and its overt connections...

Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh,...

This is Volume 10 of a collection of ten of the selected works of I.A. This volume presents a selection of contemporary criticism discussing those of Richards' works published between 1919 and 1938.

Part of the Selected Works by I.A. Richards 1919-1938, Volume 8 out of ten, focuses on the interpretation in teaching from 1938. The earliest work towards Interpretation in Teaching dates from 1928. With Practical Criticism substantially completed...

This is Volume seven in a collection of ten of the Selected Works of I.A. Richards. Perhaps since his death the most widely known of all Richards' books, certainly the most read, The Philosophy of Rhetoric 1936 is a simplified treatment of the major...

First Published in 2001. This is Volume 3 of the Selected Works of I.A. Richards from 1919 to 1938 and concerns itself with the principles of literary criticism from 1924.

This is Volume 2 of ten the selected works of I.A. Richards from 1919 to 1938. This book is a study of the difficulties and the influence of language upon thought and the study of that influence, a new avenue of approach to traditional problems hitherto...

This is Volume Nine of Ten on the writings of I.A. Richards. This edition presents a collection of his shorter writings in books and articles from 1919 to 1938.

First Published in 2001. This is Volume five of the selected works of I.A. Richards from 1919 to 1938, and focuses on Mencius' thinking on the mind written in 1932.

Salman Rushdie once observed that William Faulkner was the writer most frequently cited by third world authors as their major influence. Inspired by the unexpected lines of influence and sympathy that Rushdie's statement implied, this book seeks to...

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly...

This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a...

Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire"...

Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More's Utopia and its many...

In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and Geocritical Explorations presents an array...

This ambitious and wide-ranging essay collection analyses how identity and form intersect in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It revises and deconstructs the binary oppositions identity-form, content-form and body-mind through discussions...

What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? What featuers turn a discourse into a narrative text? Now widely acknowledged as one of the most significant volumes in its field, Narrative Fiction turns...

Difference is one of the most influential critical concepts of recent decades. Mark Currie offers a comprehensive account of the history of the term and its place in some of the most influential schools of theory of the past four decades, including...

This collection explores the consequences of accentism-an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism-in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to...

Dante and the Other brings together noted and emerging Dante scholars with theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, bridging the Florentine's premodern world to today's postmodern context. Exploring how alterity has become a...

This incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical...

Cultural theory has often been criticized for covert Eurocentric and universalist tendencies. Its concepts and ideas are implicitly applicable to everyone, ironing over any individuality or cultural difference. Postcolonial theory has challenged these...

This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers' houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author's private and artistic persona; it also...

In this self-titled inaugural release, we`ve set out to explore the textobject and its relationship to ideations of concealment / surveillance / visibility.CLOAK is not intended to fully encompass these relationships, but instead to instigate new...