Literary theory Books

What exactly is a children's book? How is children's literature defined as a genre? A leading scholar presents close readings of six classic stories to answer these questions and offer a clear definition of children's writing as a distinct literary form...

Critical theory, computational science, and a new path of humanistic inquiry Can established humanities methods coexist with computational thinking? It is one of the major questions in humanities research today, as scholars increasingly adopt...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness...

The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness...

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last...

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last...

In recent years, the recognition of Gilles Deleuze as one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century has heightened attention to his brilliant and complex writings on film. What is the place of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 in the corpus of his...

Paris has always fascinated and welcomed writers. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, writers of American, Caribbean, and African descent were no exception. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic considers the travels made to...

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large? In recent years, debates about the role and direction of English departments have mushroomed into a broader...

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large? In recent years, debates about the role and direction of English departments have mushroomed into a broader...

Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018 Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of...