Semiotics & Theory

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, ...

In Narrative Discourse Revisited Genette both answers critics of the earlier work and provides a better-defined, richer, and more systematic view of narrative form and functioning. This book not only clarifies some of the more complex issues in the study...

An Introduction to Applied Semiotics presents nineteen semiotics tools for text and image analysis. Covering a variety of different schools and approaches, together with the author's own original approach, this is a full and synthetic introduction to...

"The focus of any genuinely new piece of criticism or interpretation must be on the creative act of finding the new, but deconstruction puts the matter the other way around: its emphasis is on debunking the old. But aside from the fact that this program...

In Dockside Reading Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials...

During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and...

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...

This book by one of Latin America's leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate...

"Literature matters," says Paul B. Armstrong, "for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story." In How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the...

Consistently praised for its readability and scholarship, Studying the Novel is the ideal undergraduate companion to the study of the novel and shorter fiction. Revised throughout to reflect the profound impact of e-reading and digital resources on the...

It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject-the self-is unstable, fragmented, and decentered. One useful way to examine this principle is to look at how the subject has been treated in various media in the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a...

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have become two of the most powerful and appealing movements in modern criticism. Their conquest of Renaissance studies has escalated into global colonialisation of English and American literary history. A wealth...

The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria (1830-1962) is such that only aesthetic works have been able to register its enduring effects. In Decolonizing Memory Jill Jarvis examines the power of literature...

"My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects-persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship, unable to represent themselves in writing, or unable to offer...

Finalist, French-American Foundation Translation Prize In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of Secrets champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne...

A Dictionary of Postmodernism presents an authoritative A-Z of the critical terms and central figures related to the origins and evolution of postmodernist theory and culture. Explores the names and ideas that have come to define the postmodern condition...

What connects Shiite passion plays with Brecht's drama? Which of Goethe's poems were inspired by the Quran? How can Ibn Arabi's theology of sighs explain the plays of Heinrich von Kleist? And why did the Persian author Sadeq Hedayat identify with the...

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work-both published and unpublished-that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly...

What is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough, while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this provocative book...

An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and itnerest it can be compared with Freud's...

The late Jacques Derrida's notion of literature is explored in this new study. Starting with Derrida's self-professed inability to comment on the work of Samuel Beckett, whom Derrida nevertheless considered one of the most interesting and exemplary...

In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role...

Cultural Theory: An Anthology is a collection of the essential readings that have shaped and defined the field of contemporary cultural theory Features a historically diverse and methodologically concise collection of readings including rare essays...

'What does a woman want?'-the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte-is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman,...

In the final stages of his career, Roland Barthes abandoned his long-standing suspicion of photographic representation to write Camera Lucida, at once an elegy to his dead mother and a treatise on photography. In Writing the Image After Roland Barthes,...

The variety in contemporary philosophical and aesthetic thinking as well as in scientific and experimental research on complexity has not yet been fully adopted by narratology. By integrating cutting-edge approaches, this volume takes a step toward...

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back-investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines-offers a way for scholars in the humanities to...

The Cambridge Companion to Comics presents comics as a multifaceted prism, generating productive and insightful dialogues with the most salient issues concerning the humanities at large. This volume provides readers with the histories and theories...

Svetlana Boym was a prolific writer, a charismatic professor, a novelist, and a public intellectual. She was also a fiercely resourceful and reflective immigrant; her most resonant book, The Future of Nostalgia, was deeply rooted in that experience. Even...

Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have often sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one...

Neoliberalism has been a buzzword in literary studies for well over a decade, but its meaning remains ambiguous and its salience contentious. In Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith offer a...

New Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline's early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with...

A Deleuzian guide to reading the world, Reading the Way of Things is an exploration of the ideas of McLuhan, Deleuze, Guattari, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Burroughs, and more. It is a book that aims at getting the reader past teleological interpretations...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds...

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks seminal contribution to contemporary thought defies disciplinary boundaries. From her early translations of Derrida to her subsequent engagement with Marxism, feminism and postcolonial studies and her recent work on human...

**Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work** Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally...

This work is a translation of Hijab Imtiaz Ali's work 'Adab-e-Zareen' (1936) that contains 47 pieces of short writings that, although Ali herself categorized as short stories, are more in the nature of prose-poems that dwell on metaphysical themes of...

In this acclaimed book, Torgovnick explores the obsessions, fears, and longings that have produced Western views of the primitive. Crossing an extraordinary range of fields (anthropology, psychology, literature, art, and popular culture), Gone Primitive...

This is the first anthology to bring together the key texts of African literary theory and criticism. Brings together key texts that are otherwise hard to locateCovers all genres and critical schoolsProvides the intellectual context for understanding...