Semiotics & Theory

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...

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of...

'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...

'I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' John Jeremiah Sullivan'Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin' Observer'I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather,...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop...

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to...

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians-Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer...

A vivid account of the literary culture of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the time of Columbus to Latin American Independence, this Very Short Introduction explores the origins of Latin American literature in Spanish and tells the story of how...

Classic criticism.This volume brings together the three most influential ancient Greek treatises on literature.Aristotle's Poetics contains his treatment of Greek tragedy: its history, nature, and conventions, with details on poetic diction. Stephen...

Homi K. Bhabha is one of the most highly renowned figures in contemporary post-colonial studies. This volume explores his writings and their influence on postcolonial theory, introducing in clear and accessible language the key concepts of his work,...

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem-and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies"I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter...

This book provides a new account of Bowen's fiction that highlights in particular the force and originality of Bowen's virtually psychoanalytic thinking about development, sexuality and gender. Focusing on the relationship between Bowen's work and the...

Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating...

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Erich Fromm (1900-1980) is known to most readers as the author of the international bestseller The Art of Loving (1956). What may be less widely known is that Fromm was a social psychoanalyst whose...

Seldom has a royal court invited such intensive study as that of Henry VIII, or become so prominent in popular culture. Nonetheless, Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII is committed to offering a fresh perspective on Tudor court...

A literary master's entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasure What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full...

Contemporary fiction is a wide and diverse field, now global in dimension, with an enormous range of novels and writers that continues to grow at a fantastic speed. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert Eaglestone provides a clear and engaging...

This enduringly popular book has become a classic in the expanding and increasingly popular field of Gothic Studies. This long awaited new edition contains a new chapter on 'Contemporary Gothic', an expanded section on American Gothic and more discussion...

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of...

Julia Kristeva is one of Europe's most brilliant and original theorists, widely acclaimed for her work in such diverse areas as linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary and political theory. The Kristeva Reader is a fully-comprehensive, easily accessible...

With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. As in the title essay, the widely admired "Reflections on Exile," the fact of his own exile and the fate of the...

What is the difference between literal and figurative writing? Is there really a secret set of tricks used by top authors to make their writing even better? Why not use these tricks all the time? This excellent little book, by English literature and...

Violence and the Sacred is Rene Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek...

In recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds...

In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence - from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, John Ruskin to Joan Didion - the book explores style,...

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...

How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as of the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony...

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers...

The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics. Covers all the major schools and methods that make...

Why think? Not, according to Gilles Deleuze, in order to be clever, but because thinking transforms life. Why read literature? Not for pure entertainment, Deleuze tells us, but because literature can recreate the boundaries of life. With his emphasis on...

Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound's elusive...

This short textbook provides an introduction to queer theory, exploring its key genealogies and terms as well as its application across various academic disciplines and to contemporary life more generally. The authors engage with a wide range of...

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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to...

For the late twentieth century, the death of the author assumed a significance analogous to the death of God one hundred years previously. In this now classic study, Sean Burke both provides the first detailed explanation of anti-authorialism and shows...

Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today--how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of...

In his discussion of clowns in nineteenth-century French painting from Jean-Leon Gerome's 1857 La Sortie du bal masque to Georges Rouault, art historian Francis Haskell wondered why they are so sad. The myth of the sad clown as an allegory for the...

Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new...

In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century-both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it-we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple...

From a leading figure in comparative literature, a major new survey of the field that points the way forward for a discipline undergoing rapid changesLiterary studies are being transformed today by the expansive and disruptive forces of globalization...