Semiotics & Theory

This large and ambitious study reinterprets the evolution of British and German Romanticism as a progress through three successive 'moods.' By this term Pfau here means emotion "read in its embodied manifestation as the 'voice' of a historical moment,...

How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"?...

How do the stories we tell about money shape our economies?Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells...

"Saving the Text" cuts through Jacques Derrida's complex blend of philosophy, commentary, and elaborate wordplay to ascertain his place in the history of criticism and the significance of Glas as literary event. Distinguished critic and scholar Geoffrey...

This book brings together key essays and excerpts from the broad spectrum of Frederic Jameson's writings, providing an accessible introduction to the intricacies of his thought and uncovering new and exciting aspects of his work.About the AuthorMichael...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Cropping up everywhere, whether steel latticework or tapered monopoles, encrusted with fiberglass antennas, cell towers raise up high into the...

By remapping the configurations of mourning across modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Elias Khoury, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida), Signifying...

"Dreams are as black as death." -Theodor W. Adorno Adorno was fascinated by his dreams and wrote them down throughout his life. He envisaged publishing a collection of them although in the event no more than a few appeared in his lifetime. Dream Notes...

"The most thorough, systematic and convincing semiotics of the theater we have. . . . [L]ike those of Eco, it is an important conceptual synthesis, and a bibliographical gold mine." -Modern Language Notes" . . . impresses with its thoroughness and the...

The study of what is collectively labeled "New Media" - the cultural and artistic practices made possible by digital technology - has become one of the most vibrant areas of scholarly activity and is rapidly turning into an established academic field,...

The work of Michel Foucault is much read, widely cited, and occasionally misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this collection aims to clarify, to contextualize, and to contribute to Foucauldian scholarship in a very specific way. Rather...

Edward Said is one of the foremost thinkers writing today. His work as a literary and cultural critic, a political commentator, and the champion of the cause of Palestinian rights has given him a unique position in western intellectual life. This new...

The purpose of art, according to the artist Banksy, is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. The purpose of that creative practice called "theory" is to disturb everyone-to perpetually unsettle all our staid assumptions, all our fixed...

Renowned as one of the most brilliant satirists ever, Jonathan Swift has long fascinated Hibernophiles beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sean Moore's examination of Swift's writings and the economics behind the distribution of his work elucidates...

This book analyzes a range of texts that seek, in different ways, to represent "the people." Ranciere approaches these texts as travel narratives or ethnographies whose authors have traveled not to distant or exotic lands but across class lines. In this...

Today, we have forgotten that mathematics was once aligned with the arts, rather than with the sciences. Literary Infinities analyses the connection between the late 19th-century revolution in the mathematics of the infinite and the literature of...

Letters played a foundational role in facilitating the rise of print and popularizing new modes of writing in the long eighteenth century.In Writing to the World, Rachael Scarborough King examines the shift from manuscript to print media culture in the...

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated...

The essays in this collection examine the evolution of Filipino fiction and poetry.Book InformationISBN 9789715504164Author Jonathan ChuaFormat PaperbackPage Count 364Imprint University of Hawai'i PressPublisher University of Hawai'i PressWeight(grams)...

There is a crisis in contemporary postcolonial theory: while an enormous body of challenging research has been produced under its auspices, severely critical questions about the validity and usefulness of this theory have also been raised. This Reader is...

In a parlor game played by the Surrealist group-the foremost avant-gardists of their time-participants made their marks on the quadrants of a folded sheet of paper: a many-eyed head, a distorted torso, hands fondling swollen breasts, snarling...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814215029Author Silke HorstkotteFormat HardbackPage Count 288Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University Press

This book studies sugarcane monoculture, the dominant form of cultivation in the colonial Caribbean, in the later 1600s and 1700s up to the Haitian Revolution. Researching travel literature, plantation manuals, Georgic poetry, letters, and political...

This Element develops and showcases a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and life- and self-writing. Turning the scholarly focus in the study of travel writing from eye-witnessing and...

The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations addresses the growing concern about how best to maintain and extend the accessibility of early interactive novels and hypertext fiction or narratives. These forms of...

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary...

The surging wave of indigenous politics, rights of nature, and social movements acting with rocks, rivers, glaciers, and lakes has brought to light an ecology of nonlife. Its protagonists are 'earth-beings,' geobodies that question deep-seated Western...

George Floyd's death on May 25th 2020 marked a watershed in reactions to anti-Black racism in the United States and elsewhere. Intense demonstrations around the world followed. Within literary studies, the demonstrations accelerated the scrutiny of the...

This Element presents a necessary intervention within the rapidly expanding field of research in the environmental humanities on climate change and environmental literacy. In contrast to the dominant, science-centred literacy debates, which largely...

By drawing on oceanography (marine sciences) and limnology (freshwater sciences), social sciences, and the environmental humanities, the field of the blue humanities critically examines the planet's troubled seas and distressed freshwaters from various...

Alarmist demography often situates older people as natural disasters: images of the 'gray flood' and 'silver tsunami' imbue senescence with the destructive force of climatic proportions. This Element focuses on the demographic dread arising from the...

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals surveys the role of animals across literary history and opens conversations on what literature can teach us about more-than-human life. Leading international scholars comprehensively explore how engaging...

In Edible Arrangements, Elizabeth Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating delves into larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory...

While reading transforms texts through memories, associations and re-imaginings, translation allows us to act out our reading experience, inscribe it in a new text, and engage in a dialogic and dynamic relationship with the original. In this highly...

What is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time...

By the time of his death in 2003, Edward Said was one of the most famous literary critics of the twentieth century. Said's work has been hugely influential far beyond academia. As a prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause and noted cultural critic,...

Beckett and Buddhism undertakes a twenty-first-century reassessment of the Buddhist resonances in Samuel Beckett's writing. These reverberations, as Angela Moorjani demonstrates, originated in his early reading of Schopenhauer. Drawing on letters and...

Though theory has become a common language in the humanities in recent years, the relation between theoretical speculation and its practical application has yet to be fully addressed. In The Practice of Theory, Michael Bernard-Donals examines the...

This 1981 book is a study of wide range of fiction, from short stories to tales of horror, from fairy-tales and romances to science fiction, to which the rather loose term 'fantastic' has been applied. Cutting across this wide field, Professor...

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...