Semiotics & Theory

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...

Where does the idea of the postmodern come from? Who first conceived, and who developed it? How have its meanings changed? What purposes do they serve? These are the questions addressed in The Origins of Postmodernity. The answers take us from Lima to...

The essays collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing all deal with one problem-the relation between philosophy and politics. Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat...

In "The Company We Keep", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the...

Rhetoric has shaped our understanding of the nature of language and the purpose of literature for over two millennia. It is of crucial importance in understanding the development of literary history as well as elements of philosophy, politics and culture...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781640094109Author Susan GriffinFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint CounterpointPublisher Counterpoint

As a literary mode "lyric" is difficult to define precisely. While the term has conventionally been applied to brief, songlike poems expressing the speaker's interior thoughts critics have questioned many of the assumptions underlying this definition,...

The simple yet grand language of the King James Bible has pervaded American culture from the beginning - and its powerful eloquence continues to be felt even today. In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some...

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radical new concept of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far reaching claims about language and truth provoked a...

How does a sign represent something other than itself? How do we understand the meaning of a written symbol? Can clothes be a sign? Can sounds? Signs and symbols represent ideas and objects and, over time, these marks and gestures have multiplied into...

A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our livesWhy do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us...

Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book's discussion is a series of underlying...

How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do particular energy sources make to human values, politics, and imagination? How have transitions from one energy source to another-from wood to coal, or from oil to solar to whatever...

This new edition of Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth begins with an historical, grounding overview that situates ecofeminist theory and activism within the larger field of ecocriticism and provides a timeline for...

Many writing instructors teach writing through autobiography. By considering the lives of others and then contemplating their own lives, aspiring writers discover a wellspring of material that can be used in their prose. While not explicitly for courses,...

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...

In this companion volume to "Iconology", the author extends his investigation to pictures - the concrete, representational objects in which images appear. Although we have many words about pictures, Mitchell notes that we do not yet have a satisfactory...

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most controversial theorists of our time, famous for his claim that the Gulf War never happened and for his provocative writing on terrorism, specifically 9/11. This new and fully updated second edition includes: an...

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political...

In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers...

This reader provides a solid theoretical base for all those encountering the 'author' debate for the first time. It presents key readings from the main writers on authorship, including pieces from Plato, Descartes, Shelley, Freud, T. S. Eliot, Sartre,...

Terry Eagleton's book, in this vital new series from Blackwell, focuses on discriminating different meanings of culture, as a way of introducing to the general reader the contemporary debates around it.About the AuthorTerry Eagleton is Professor of...

Kenneth Burke's innovative use of dramatism and dialectical method have made him a powerful critical force in an extraordinary variety of disciplines-education, philosophy, history, psychology, religion, and others. While most widely acclaimed as a...

Dead Pledges is the first book to explore the ways that U.S. culture-from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies-has responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. Connecting debt theory to questions of...

In recent years, hospitality has emerged as a category in French thinking for addressing a range of issues associated with immigration and other types of journeys. Rosello's book concentrates primarily on France and its former colonies in North and...

Building on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in...

In its original formulation, 'culture' was intended to be an agent for change, a mission undertaken with the aim of educating 'the people' by bringing the best of human thought and creativity to them. But in our contemporary liquid-modern world, culture...

Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for...

Showcases the energy and diversity of the young field of music semiology, appealing to readers who want to explore the meaning of music in our lives. The Dawn of Music Semiology showcases the work of nine leading musicologists, inspired by the work of...

Conversion disorder-a psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestations-offers a way to rethink the present. With so many people suffering from unexplained bodily symptoms; with so many seeking recourse...

"[Mitchell] undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language. . . . The most lucid exposition of the subject I have ever read."-Rudolf Arnheim, Times...

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...

Why have theorists approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect? Mark Currie argues that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future are vital for an understanding of narrative and its effects in the world. In a series of...

In this completely revised and considerably expanded new edition, Steven Connor considers the recent work of the most influential postmodern theorists, including Lyotard and Jameson, and offers accounts both of the work of newly emerging theorists and...

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and...

This is the second volume of Theweleit's extraordinary study of the fantasies of some of the men centrally involved in the rise of Nazism. The author develops his account by focusing on the representation of masculinity and homosexuality and their...

Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century. A major new intellectual endeavour from one of the world's finest, and...

A guide to managing data in the digital age.Winner of the ALCTS Outstanding Publication Award by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, Winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award by the Society of American ArchivistsMany people...

`Translation has long needed a champion, and at last in George Steiner it has found a scholar who is a match for the task.' Sunday Times First published in 1975, After Babel constituted the first systematic investigation of the theory and processes...

There is no other comprehensive introduction to Bakhtin. The book is aimed at arts students - the primary market. Deals extensively with gender issues.About the AuthorSue Vice is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of SheffieldBook...