Literary theory Books

This innovative collection explores the life stories of Chinese women and men between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on both biographical and autobiographical narratives and on perspectives taken from life writing theory to ask how...

How is Hardy's development of thematics and characters matched by that of narrative techniques and his handling of time? This book uses narratological methods to stress the interdependence of content and expression in a key transitional writer between...

Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism offers a typology of alien encounters and addresses a range of texts including classic novels of alien encounter by H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein; recent blockbusters by Greg Bear,...

Scholarly interest in 'the Irish Gothic' has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, but the debate over exactly what constitutes this body of literature remains far from settled. This collection of essays explores the rich complexities of the literary...

Through a professional story-teller's sometimes humorous commentary on culture and literature from The Odyssey on , the book suggests that literature is not an artifact to be studied but a living process. Often irreverent, crossing literary and scholarly...

Here, Björklund shows that Swedish literary discourses on lesbianism provocatively contrast with a widely accepted view that attitudes toward homosexuality have gradually become more tolerant. The lasting power of negative discourses upends the...

This international collection focuses on the phallic character of classic and contemporary literary and visual cultures and their invasive nature. It focuses on thrillers, horror cinema, sexual art and photography, erotic literature, female and male body...

New Formalist Criticism defines and theorizes a mode of formalist criticism that is theoretically compatible with current thinking about literature and theory. New formalism anticipates a move in literary studies back towards the text and, in so doing,...

This book takes a fresh look at childhood in Dickens' works and in Victorian science and culture more generally. It offers a new way of understanding Dickens' interest in childhood by showing how his fascination with new scientific ideas about childhood...

Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence proposes a striking approach for reading the influences that interlace twentieth-century gay British writers. Focusing on the role of the textual image in literary influence, this book moves toward a new...

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.

A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, José David Saldívar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and "outernational"...

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.

The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction examines the critically acclaimed, popular novels that were labeled "middlebrow" in the US during the Cold War. This period saw a vogue for the term 'middlebrow,' with articles on the topic in magazines like Harper's a

This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss...

Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris...

Poetics of the Iconotext makes available for the first time in English the theories of the respected French text/image specialist, Professor Liliane Louvel. A consolidation of the most significant theoretical materials of Louvel's two acclaimed books,...

Les articles de cette anthologie ont en commun d'interroger la notion d'autofiction. Leur diversité offre un large déploiement temporel et spatial au contenu. Los artículos de esta antología tienen el objetivo común de interrogar la noción de...

Le travail d'écriture qu'Henry Bauchau a contribué à voir émerger un champ de recherche en plein essor. Au regard des principaux travaux et de propres recherches, ces critères permettent de saisir la réalité de l'ouvre de cet écrivain et ne sont pas...

Mittelalterliche Imaginationen und Diskurse zum Jenseits einerseits und neue interdisziplinäre Interpretationsansätze und Methoden der Mediävistik andererseits stehen im Fokus des Sammelbandes.

Ein Abgleich des Bildes vom Ritter und Rittertum (1000-1200) zwischen historischer Fachwissenschaft und den historisierenden Comics Prinz Eisenherz und Die Türme von Bois-Maury ist das Thema dieses Buches, in dem auch unter komparatistischen...

Refuting prophecies of an unstoppable increase in secularization, the fascination of religious rituals proofs to be unbroken in the late modern world. This book contests classical paradigms that reduce the rationale of rituals to normativity (Durkheim),...

Diese Gesamtdarstellung ist als eine wechselseitige Erhellung wichtiger Funktionen und Implikationen der Gattung Märchen konzipiert. Sie stellt nämlich die Verwendung von Märchen bzw. Märchenförmigkeit als Narrativ im literarischen Werk zweier sehr...

Modernism and Coherence is an attempt to develop a negative aesthetics conceived as determinate resistance of artworks against the meaning assigned to them by criticism. From the accumulation of arguments on great texts of modernism, the book describes...

This book is an attempt to re-evaluate some basic assumptions about language, communication, and cognition in the light of the new epistemology of autopoiesis as the theory of the living. Starting with a critique of common myths about language and...

The articles in this book share a dedication to broadening and stretching the scholarly field of feminist citizenship studies and invite the reader to reflect on the many different ways citizenship is formed in contemporary Europe. They do so by...

Die Nibelungensage hat sich in Deutschland und in Skandinavien seit Jahrhunderten großer Beliebtheit erfreut. Während einige Bearbeitungen als Meisterwerke gelten, hat die Hvenische Chronik keine Beachtung gefunden. In der dänischen Prosaerzählung von...

Die Arbeit untersucht die Darstellungen Asiens bzw. das Asienmotiv in Thomas Manns Der Tod in Venedig, Der Zauberberg und Die vertauschten Köpfe. Unter der methodischen Leitlinie der komparatistischen Imagologie zeigt die Analyse, dass 'Asien' in den...

Der baltische Erzähler und Dichter Werner Bergengruen (1892-1964), noch in den sechziger Jahren einer der meistgelesenen deutschen Schriftsteller, wurde bisher selten mit phantastischer Literatur in Verbindung gebracht. Diese literaturwissenschaftliche...

Untersucht wird die intermediale Produktionsästhetik an vier ausgewählten spanischsprachigen Texten, bei denen die Medien Musik und Film als Produktionsgeneratoren fungieren: El perseguidor von Julio Cortázar, El invierno en Lisboa von Antonio Muñoz...

Narratologie hat sich mit theoretischen Konzepten zum Erzählen und systematisch angelegten Verfahren zur Analyse von erzählenden Texten seit den 1960er Jahren im nationalen und internationalen Zusammenhang der Wissenschaftskulturen entwickelt. Solche...

In His Voice considers the idea of the neuter in Maurice Blanchot's work, and seeks to work out through an exercise of literary impersonation, or ventriloquism, how and why Blanchot relied on this form. Neither active nor passive, the neuter expresses a...

How are our lives meaningful? What is the relationship of loss to creativity? How can we best engage and overcome our suffering? From Socrates to Foucault, Western philosophers have sought to define "the art of living"-the complex craft of human...

Why is Shrek one of the greatest selling DVDs of all time? Why are shampoo advertisements based on Sleeping Beauty? Why is it that the same simple stories keep being told? This study attempts to explain why fairy tales keep popping up in the most...

Johann Paul Reinhards Einleitung Zu Den Weltlichen Geschichten Der Vornehmsten Staaten (1761) ist ein historisches Buch, das von Johann Paul Reinhard verfasst wurde. In diesem Buch f�����hrt der Autor den Leser in die weltliche Geschichte der wichtigsten...

Mit dieser Monografie wird die Autonomie des literarischen Textes sowohl gegenüber seinem Autor als auch gegenüber seinem Leser systematisch begründet --- mit dem Ziel, eine Literaturwissenschaft im strengen Sinne als eigenständige Disziplin zu...

War der Deutschunterricht 1871-1914 ein staatliches Instrument zur Erziehung nationalchauvinistischer Untertanen? Inszenierte er in diesem Zuge einen geistlosen „Klassiker-Kult"? Seit den 1970er Jahren verstellen solche Vorstellungen den Blick auf...