Semiotics & Theory

An interdisciplinary study of issues of language manipulation, this book explores the interpretation stage of critical discourse analysis (CDA) for students in areas such as English language, media studies and applied linguistics, as well as...

How does theatre shape the body and perceptions of it? How do bodies on stage challenge audience assumptions about material evidence and the truth? Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies responds to these questions by examining how theatre participates in...

Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin...

It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded...

'We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon.' So wrote Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly before he took his...

The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of...

At the same time that 1970s feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow were challenging earlier models that assumed the masculine psyche as the norm for human development and mental/emotional health, writers such as Anne...

Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification.In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as...

In this fresh and often playful interdisciplinary study, Lisa Zunshine presents a fluid discussion of how key concepts from cognitive science complicate our cultural interpretations of "strange" literary phenomena. From Short Circuit to I, Robot, from...

For decades, we have been told we live in the "information age"-a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and...

Richard Parmentier takes up Ferdinand de Saussure's challenge to study the "life of signs in society" by using semiotic tools proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. He studies how semiotic theory can illuminate highly complex social and cultural practices...

A captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre.The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary...

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an...

Divided into four descriptive sections-"Theory and the Ethics of Literary Text," "Confronting the Difficult: The Ethics of Race and Power," "Making Darkness Visible: The Ethical Implications of Narrative as Witness," and "Ways of Seeing: The Diversity of...

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But...

Haunting's consequences for the literary imagination.Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language,...

George Steiner's accomplishments in criticism, in theory of literature, and in the history of ideas have made him a central figure on the contemporary intellectual scene. He is as widely known for his frequent contributions to the New Yorker and TLS as...

Nortrop Frye differed from other theorists of myth in tracing all of the major literary genres--romance, comedy, satire, not just tragedy--to myth and ritual. This volume is the most thorough presentation of his thinking on the subject.Reviews"...this...

Shoshana Felman ranks as one of the most influential literary critics of the past five decades. Her work has inspired and shaped such divergent fields as psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, speech-act theory and performance studies, feminist and...

"This concise and lucid volume offers a satisfying survey of all the major theories, from structuralism in the 1960s to deconstruction today, that have made academic criticism both intriguing and off-putting to the outsider." -New York Times Book Review...

C.S. Peirce was the founder of pragmatism and a pioneer in the field of semiotics. His work investigated the problem of meaning, which is the core aspect of semiosis as well as a significant issue in many academic fields. Floyd Merrell demonstrates...

A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine...

One of the most famous literary critics of the twentieth century, Edward Said's work has been hugely influential far beyond academia. As a prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause and a noted music critic, Said redefined the role of the public...

In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for...

Matters of space, spatiality, geography, topography and place have mostly remained neglected in modern scholarship and teaching because in most modern and postmodern literary criticism history and temporality have been dominating discourses. But in...

Originally published in 1981. The meaning and objectives of literature, argues David Bleich, are created by the reader, who depends on community consensus to validate his or her judgements. Bleich proposes that the study of English be consciously...

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial...

The writings of Jean Baudrillard have dramatically altered the face of critical theory and promise to pose challenges well into the 21st century. His work on simulation, media, the status of the image, the system of objects, hyperreality, and information...

Recent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or...

New essays by prestigious thinkers such as Edward Said, Bruce Robbins, Jacqueline Rose, and Stefan Collini on the public role of writers and intellectuals.About the AuthorHelen Small is Fellow in English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is...

Drawing on her own experiences with late-onset disability and its impact on her sex life, along with her expertise as a cultural critic, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging work to undermine one's sense of self. She challenges common...

Through a series of radical and innovative chapters, Beyond Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Between Literature and Mind challenges the tradition of applied psychoanalysis that has long dominated psychoanalytic literary criticism. Benjamin H. Ogden, a...

The Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on Hoelderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program, McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin's...

Organized into two parts, "Literary Theory" and "Social and Political Theory," this Reader explores issues of community, identity, justice, and the marginalization of African American and Caribbean women in literature, society, and political movements...

The 35 original essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry. Comprises 35 original essays written by leading figures in the fieldIncludes contributions from...

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...