Semiotics & Theory

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...

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...

The Value of Ecocriticism offers a brief, incisive overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in a bewildering age of global environmental threat. The intellectual, moral and political complexity of environmental issues,...

Los Angeles is both the most fragmented and the most minoritized metropolis in America, and its most luridly abstract and aestheticized city. With more than eighty-five languages being spoken in its classrooms, and one homogeneous visual language...

This is the first book to explore the full range and import of Lacan's theory of poetry and its relationship to his understanding of the subject and historicity. Gilbert Chaitin's lucid and accessible study of this famously complex thinker shows how...

Now in its fourth edition, Literary Theory: The Basics is an essential guide to the complicated and often confusing world of literary theory. Readers will encounter a broad range of topics from Marxist and feminist criticism to postmodernism, queer...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Newspaper is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781947447288Author Wan-Chuan KaoFormat PaperbackPage Count 270Imprint Punctum BooksPublisher Punctum BooksWeight(grams) 268gDimensions(mm) 203mm * 127mm *...

This book argues that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes's literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thought:...

A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, Jose David Saldivar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and "outernational"...

Is consciousness like an iceberg? Does advertising lead to the commodification of humans? What is the hidden meaning of fairy tales? In 50 Ways to Understand Communication, Arthur Asa Berger familiarizes readers with important concepts written by leading...

Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780810108448Author PerloffFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Northwestern University PressPublisher Northwestern University PressWeight(grams) 513g

"Relevance" is one of the most widely used buzz words in academic and other socio-political discourses and institutions today, which constantly ask us to "be relevant." To date, there is no profound scholarly conceptualization of the...

Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World argues that our most cherished ideas about freedom-being left alone to do as we please, or uncovering the truth-have failed us. They promote the polarized thinking that blights our world. Rooted in literature,...

Neoliberal Rhetorics and Body Politics: Plastinate Exhibits as Infiltration uses transnational feminist rhetorical analyses to understand how the global force of neoliberalism infiltrates all parts of life from nation-state relationships to individual...

Carol Siegel challenges the standard representation of Lawrence in feminist criticism and places his work in the context of women's literary traditions.Book InformationISBN 9780813933238Author Carol SiegelFormat PaperbackPage Count 277Imprint University...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814255834Author Brooke RollinsFormat PaperbackPage Count 214Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams) 454g

Figurally colored narration (FCN) is narrator’s discourse (whether in the first or third person) that adopts salient features of character’s text, mainly valuation and designation, without signaling the figural part in any way. Unlike free indirect...

The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities reconsiders key debates, methods, possibilities, and failings from across the digital humanities, offering a timely interrogation of the present and future of the arts and humanities in the digital age...

Toni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of...

Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Novels of Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Vladimir Nabokov investigates the connection between realist fiction of the nineteenth and early...

Toni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of...

In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China's "long 1990s," the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked...

Two New York Times fact-checkers spark a multidisciplinary meditation on truth and fiction This volume connects two seemingly contradictory paradigms of knowledge-seeking: speculation, which attempts to think and act beyond existing knowledge and...

Jerome Klinkowitz presents an opening attempt to define postmodernism as it applies to the arts and culture. Rosenberg/Barthes/Hassan discusses the work of three critics who came to prominence in the 1960s, an era of social, ideological, and aesthetic...