Semiotics & Theory

In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward...

At the heart of this book is a belief that poetry matters, and that it enables us to enjoy and understand life. In this accessible guide, Andrew Hodgson equips the reader for the challenging and rewarding experience of unlocking poetry, considering the...

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original...

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch's painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist,...

Angela Carter (1940-92) is widely known for her literary fairy tales, particularly those appearing in ""The Bloody Chamber"". Her stylishly creative appropriation and adaptation of fairy-tale patterns, motifs and content are evident not only in her...

Doing English presents the ideas and debates that shape how we 'do' English today, explaining arguments about the value of literature, the canon, Shakespeare, theory, politics and the subject itself.In his lucid and engaging style, Robert...

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse,...

The collaboration of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari has been one of the most profoundly influential partnerships in contemporary thought. Anti-Oedipus is the first part of their masterpiece, Capitalism and...

Many of those whose profession involves listening to others' stories are aware of the relevance of imaginative literature to their work. However, they may rarely have the time to explore for themselves the resources available. This book offers itself as...

Terry Eagleton looks back across sixty years to an extraordinary critical milieu that transformed the study of literature Before the First World War, traditional literary scholarship was isolated from society at large. In the years following, a younger...

Hunting stories will usually glorify the hunters, since it is the hunters who write the stories. In this book, Denetem Touam Bona takes up the perspective of the hunted, using the concept of marronage to highlight the lives and creativity of colonized...

Since Gutenberg's time, every aspect of print has gradually changed. But the advent of computational media has exponentially increased the pace, transforming how books are composed, designed, edited, typeset, distributed, sold, and read. N. Katherine...

Literary theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary...

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Moebius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the...

'A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn't encountered before' Val McDermid, The TimesMost of what we say about books is really...

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, this profoundly original work explores the nature of physical suffering. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture...

This books ushers in a new way of talking about social phenomena. It develops an ontology of social objects on the basis of the claim that registration or inscription-the leaving of a trace to be called up later-is what is most fundamental to them. In...

How do bi+ people navigate identity, gender, and relationships in a biphobic society? This book explores this question to show how to better include and incorporate bi+ people in research, policy, and the everyday.You can expect this book to explore how...

"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over-like this world, and some of the people in it."In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them-"Ode to a...

Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination is the first full-length evaluation of du Maurier's fiction and the first critical study of du Maurier as a Gothic writer. Horner and Zlosnik argue that the fears at the heart of du...

A landmark work of literary criticismNorthrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is the magnum opus of one of the most important and influential literary theorists of the twentieth century. Breaking with the practice of close reading of individual texts, Frye...

Tales of neoliberalism's death are serially overstated. Following the financial crisis of 2008, neoliberalism was proclaimed a "zombie," a disgraced ideology that staggered on like an undead monster. After the political ruptures of 2016, commentators...

Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer's vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from...

Like its previous edition, this book provides an accessible introductory guide to some of the most important aspects of literary theory, linking them to more traditional terms and approaches. In doing so, it offers a fuller introduction to a wider range...

Deconstruction: Theory and Practice has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative guide to this topic. Without oversimplifying or glossing over the challenges, Norris makes deconstruction more accessible to the reader. The...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789027924667Author Meyer SchapiroFormat PaperbackPage Count 108Imprint De Gruyter MoutonPublisher De GruyterWeight(grams) 326g

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and...

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...

Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say...

In the usual order of things, lives run their course and eventually one becomes who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity. But as a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, a...

A surprising exploration of the relationship between these two twentieth-century thinkersThe transgressive writing of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and the rigorous ethical philosophy of social activist and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) seem to...

In these interviews, given between 1962 and 1980, Barthes speaks about the development of his thought, explaining why and how he wrote his many books, paying tributes to philosophers, linguists, novelists, poets, painters and film-makers who have...

Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory,...

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...

Holden Caulfield, the beat writers, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and James Dean-these and other avatars of youthful rebellion were much more than entertainment. As Leerom Medovoi shows, they were often embraced and hotly debated at the dawn of the Cold...

'Barthes' purpose is to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals and symbols of the language of mass culture' The TimesIn this magnificent and often surprising collection of essays Barthes explores the myths of mass culture. Taking subjects as...

To Have Or to Be? is one of the seminal books of the second half of the 20th century. Nothing less than a manifesto for a new social and psychological revolution to save our threatened planet, this book is a summary of the penetrating thought of Eric...

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what...

In How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field's central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and...

Time Binds is a powerful argument that temporal and sexual dissonance are intertwined, and that the writing of history can be both embodied and erotic. Challenging queer theory's recent emphasis on loss and trauma, Elizabeth Freeman foregrounds bodily...