Semiotics & Theory

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert...

The Cambridge Companion to the Essay considers the history, theory, and aesthetics of the essay from the moment it's named in the late sixteenth century to the present. What is an essay? What can the essay do or think or reveal or know that other...

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Rescuing the subject from deadly dry theorists and -isms, Clare Connors focuses on the real questions that emerge when we read and study literature - such as how we find meaning and how literature relates to its historical context - before exploring the...

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...

Tropics of Discourse develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also...

Why do we read literature and how do we judge it? C. S. Lewis's classic An Experiment in Criticism springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He argues...

A revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century.During the long...

This book reflects on the figure of veering to form a new theory of literature. Contrary to a widespread sense that literature has become increasingly irrelevant to our culture and everyday life, Royle brilliantly traces a strangely compelling 'literary...

This book explains how the brain interacts with the social world-and why stories matter.How do our brains enable us to tell and follow stories? And how do stories affect our minds? In Stories and the Brain, Paul B. Armstrong analyzes the cognitive...

Sentiment analysis has gained widespread adoption in many fields, but not-until now-in literary studies. Scholars have lacked a robust methodology that adapts the tool to the skills and questions central to literary scholars. Also lacking has been...

A sweeping history of how writing has preserved cultural practices, traditions, and knowledge throughout human history.In How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, Walter Stephens condenses the massive history of the written word into an accessible,...

Memoirs in which trauma takes a major-or the major-role challenge the limits of autobiography. Leigh Gilmore presents a series of "limit-cases"-texts that combine elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory while representing...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781594484827Author Ben YagodaFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Riverhead Books,U.S.Publisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 283gDimensions(mm) 208mm *...

How did eighteenth-century readers find and make time to read?Books have always posed a problem of time for readers. Becoming widely available in the eighteenth century-when working hours increased and lighter and quicker forms of reading (newspapers,...

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis reflects on the history of psychoanalysis, its conceptual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. John Forrester probes the origins of psychoanalysis and its most beguiling concept, the transference, which is...

The age of gene-centrism and mechanism is slowly passing. In its place, the biological sciences increasingly recognise that life isn't simply a genetically determined programme but is centrally a matter of information and communication systems nested in...

" . . . a first-rate edition, which supersedes all other portable Peirces. . . . all the Peirce most people will ever need." -Louis Menand, The New York Review of Books"The Monist essays are included in the first volume of the compact and welcome...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156027755Author Vladimir NabokovFormat PaperbackPage Count 416Imprint Houghton MifflinPublisher Houghton MifflinWeight(grams) 338gDimensions(mm) 205mm *...

From Plato to Virginia Woolf, Structuralism to Practical Criticism, Introducing Literary Criticism charts the history and development of literary criticism into a rich and complex discipline.Tackling disputes over the value and meaning of literature, and...

Trauma and its aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra critically analyzes attempts by theorists and literary critics to come to terms with trauma and with the...

How does the work of influential theorist Bruno Latour offer a fresh angle on the practices and purposes of the humanities?In recent years, defenses of the humanities have tended to argue along predictable lines: the humanities foster empathy, the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781328470225Author Consultant Statistician Walter BenjaminFormat PaperbackPage Count 416Imprint Mariner Books ClassicsPublisher Mariner Books...

Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern...

Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed,...

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,...

" . . . fascinating throughout. . . . the book is recreative in the highest sense." -Arthur C. Danto, The New Republic"A gem for Holmes fans and armchair detectives with a penchant for logical reflection, and Peirce scholars." -Library JournalReviews" .....

The Sociology of Literature is a pithy primer on the history, affordances, and potential futures of this growing field of study, which finds its origins in the French Enlightenment, and its most salient expression as a sociological pursuit in the work of...

For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links...

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative provides a unique and valuable overview of current approaches to narrative study. An international team of experts explores ideas of storytelling and methods of narrative analysis as they have emerged across diverse...

The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression 'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific...

A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance.Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize...

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, first published in 2004, offers a lucid introduction and overview of one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies. The volume aims to introduce readers to key...

"Robert Scholes has written an enviable book on the uses and abuses of literary theory in the teaching of literature. One of [his] most forceful points...is that 'literary theory' is not something a teacher may either 'use' or not use, for teaching...

This ground-breaking new work offers a spirited and severe critique of the turn to an anti-aesthetic in theoretical writing and asserts that it has now become an intellectual necessity to rethink the aesthetic and remake aesthetic discourse.About the...

Do we map as we read? How central to our experience of literature is the way in which we spatialise and visualise a fictional world? Reading and Mapping Fiction offers a fresh approach to the interpretation of literary space and place centred upon the...

Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062643599Author C S LewisFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint CollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 136gDimensions(mm) 198mm *...

This "Guide for the Perplexed" provides an advanced introduction to literary theory from basic information and orientation for the uninformed leading on to more sophisticated readings. It engages directly with the difficulty many students find...

Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. Exploring the connections between...