Semiotics & Theory

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witness-as if the scrawl itself is not...

Literary Terms and Criticism has long been established as the best-selling guide to the study of English literature. It offers a comprehensive introduction to English poetry, drama and the novel, complete with practical advice and tips on how to analyse...

'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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a...

This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today's unstable culture-nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for ecological phenomena...

What is literary theory? Is there a relationship between literature and culture? In fact, what is literature, and does it matter? These are some of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler in this Very Short Introduction to literary theory. Often a...

Since its first publication in English in 1985, Mieke Bal's Narratology has become an international classic and the comprehensive introduction to the theory of narrative texts, both literary and non-literary. Providing insights into how readers interpret...

After six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books - it's just a wonder she's found the time. These are missives...

While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real...

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint-each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words...

"The publication of these two translations is an event to be celebrated by feminists of all persuasions." Women's Review of Books In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray elaborates on some of the major themes of Speculum of the Other Woman, her...

What stands out about racism is its ability to withstand efforts to legislate or educate it away. In The Racist Fantasy, Todd McGowan argues that its persistence is due to a massive unconscious investment in a fundamental racist fantasy. As long as this...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Poststructuralism challenges traditional ways of thinking about human beings and our relation to the world. Language, meaning, and culture are all reappraised, and with them assumptions about what...

'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,...

John Guillory considers close reading within the larger history of reading and writing as cultural techniques. At a time of debate about the future of "English" as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black...

Professor John Carey shows how early twentieth-century intellectuals imagined the 'masses' as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw,...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in...

Julian Wolfreys starts with loss. All memory is the memory of loss... All that we are, all we experience, all we remember, all that we forget but which leaves nevertheless a trace on us, in us, a trace that countersigns and writes us as who we are (in...

Postcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial deconstruction of western dominance. This Very Short Introduction discusses both the history and key debates of postcolonialism, and...

A Theory of Adaptation explores the continuous development of creative adaptation, and argues that the practice of adapting is central to the story-telling imagination. Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of adaptation through a range of media, from film...

Since the book's first publication in 1988, Alain Badiou's Being and Event has established itself of one of the most important and controversial works in contemporary philosophy and its author as one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Being...

In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and...

Beginning theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer readers the best single-volume introduction to the field. The...

An outstanding and moving essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative from the Women's Prize for Fiction-shortlisted author of Enter Ghost'Combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose' SALLY...

Focusing on Faulkner, Morrison and Coetzee as authors, critics and Nobel Prize-winning intellectuals, this book explores shifting representations of disability in 20th and 21st century literature and proposes new ways of reading their works in relation...

Jacqueline Rose is a world-renowned critic and one of the most influential and provocative scholars working in the humanities today. She is also among the most wide ranging, with books on Zionism, feminism, Sylvia Plath, children's fiction, and...

Terry Eagleton's book, in this vital new series from Blackwell, focuses on discriminating different meanings of culture, as a way of introducing to the general reader the contemporary debates around it.About the AuthorTerry Eagleton is Professor of...

Media semiotics is a lucid investigation of the critical approach in contemporary media studies. Using examples such as Big Brother and Billy Elliot, Jonathan Bignell steps easily from basic concepts to more complex theories, while devoting chapters to...

In her debut book, A. V. Marraccini explores how we inhabit works of art, and how our sense of longing informs and changes our relationship to them. Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of...

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...

Mark Turner makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. Using tools of modern linguistics, the recent work of neuroscientists, and literary masterpieces from Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante,...

A poetic, passionate and intensely personal exploration of colour written during the final year of Derek Jarman's life -- with a new introduction by Ali Smith.In Chroma, his most poetic and lyrical book, Derek Jarman explores the uses of colour. Shifting...

The first book of its kind in the field, this timely introduction to post- colonial theory offers lucid and accessible summaries of the major work of key theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said.Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. The Guide also Explores...

Story and Structure tells the untold story of how story works. Using just six primary symbols, author Leon Conrad outlines eighteen story structures and shows how they all optimally solve the problems which give rise to them. The book also demonstrates...

The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations...