Semiotics & Theory

Assessing the dawn of the Anthropocene era, a poet and philosopher asks: How do we live at the end of the world? The end of the Holocene era is marked not just by melting glaciers or epic droughts, but by the near universal disappearance of shared...

Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2017 Emoji have gone from being virtually unknown to being a central topic in internet communication. What is behind the rise and rise of these winky faces, clinking glasses and smiling poos? Given the sheer...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating...

Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474481977Author Peter AdkinsFormat PaperbackPage Count 252Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University PressWeight(grams)...

In this volume we witness Wittgenstein in the act of composing and experimenting with his new visions in philosophy. The book includes key explanations of the origin and background of these previously unknown manuscripts. It investigates how...

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking-nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among...

In Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity, Janine Barchas makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen's novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and...

How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become? How can we maintain professsional and personal integrity in today's university? In a series of traditional and experimental writings, a...

Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of "women" in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the...

"Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd...

Christian Gauss Award ShortlistWinner of the ASAP Book PrizeA Literary Hub Book of the Year"Makes the case that the gimmick...is of tremendous critical value...Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag's best work."-Los Angeles Review of...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often...

"A unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history." - Publisher's Weekly "A book that sticks with you long after you've read it." Volume 1 Brooklyn "Hoke's writing is blunt and honest, and Sticker is a collection worth...

This seminal book, Eliot's first collection of literary criticism, appeared in London in 1920, two years before The Waste Land. It contains some of his most influential early essays and reviews, among them 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 'Hamlet...

Jacqueline Rose is a world-renowned critic and one of the most influential and provocative scholars working in the humanities today. She is also among the most wide ranging, with books on Zionism, feminism, Sylvia Plath, children's fiction, and...

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem-and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies"I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter...

Why think? Not, according to Gilles Deleuze, in order to be clever, but because thinking transforms life. Why read literature? Not for pure entertainment, Deleuze tells us, but because literature can recreate the boundaries of life. With his emphasis on...

"The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gies a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to...

What stands out about racism is its ability to withstand efforts to legislate or educate it away. In The Racist Fantasy, Todd McGowan argues that its persistence is due to a massive unconscious investment in a fundamental racist fantasy. As long as this...

Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante's intense depiction of female friendship and women's intellectual lives, four...

This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a...

Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud's idea of penis envy, Ruti's...

In 1918 a young Carl Schmitt published a short satirical fiction entitled The Buribunks. He imagined a future society of beings who consistently wrote and disseminated their personal diaries. Schmitt would go on to become the infamous philosopher of the...

Holquist's masterly study draws on all of Bakhtin's known writings providing a comprehensive account of his achievement. Widely acknowledged as an exceptional guide to Bakhtin and dialogics, this book now includes a new introduction, concluding chapter...

'Postmodernism' became the buzzword of contemporary society in the 1990s. Yet, even now, it still remains confusing and baffling in its variety of definitions, contexts and associations. Beginning postmodernism aims to offer clear, accessible and...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention and force us to attend to things we've preferred to ignore. But alarms also allow us...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Glitter reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Nicole Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780809071944Author Roland BarthesFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S.Publisher Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S.

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Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780976281405Author Judy Kay KingFormat PaperbackPage Count 412Imprint Envision Editions, Ltd.Publisher Envision Editions, Ltd.Weight(grams)...

The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger's famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the...

A Literary Hub Favorite Book of the YearA New Statesman Book of the YearA provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism.Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found...

A pioneering text in its first edition, this revised publication of Cognitive Poetics offers a rigorous and principled approach to literary reading and analysis.The second edition of this seminal text features:* updated theory, frameworks, and examples...

Today, history is increasingly written in the first person. A growing number of historical works include an autobiographical dimension, as if writing about the past required exploring the inner life of the author. Neither traditional history nor...

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780816629336Author James BergerFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint University of Minnesota PressPublisher University of Minnesota PressDimensions(mm)...

Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains in The Queer Child, where she examines children's strangeness, even some children's subliminal "gayness," in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of...

In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Stanley Fish explores the rational basis of our literary, legal, and psychoanalytic interpretations. He argues that while we can never separate our judgements from the context in which they are...