Semiotics & Theory

At a time when even much of the political left seems to believe that transnational capitalism is here to stay, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies refuses to accept the inevitability of the so-called 'New World Order'. By giving substantial...

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert...

During the late eighteenth century the Bible underwent a shift in interpretation so radical as to make it virtually a different book from what it had been a hundred years earlier. Even as its text was being revealed as neither stable nor original, the...

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...

When it was first published, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge proved to be a seminal work in the psychoanalytic study of Faulkner's fiction, especially of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This softcover reissue of John Irwin's...

"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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780312280864Author Susan SontagFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint St Martin's PressPublisher St Martin's PressWeight(grams) 304gDimensions(mm) 212mm *...

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...

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...

"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...

This 1995 book by Pierre Macherey was his first dealing with literature and theory since his seminal A Theory of Literary Production. Continuing the project of Althusserian theory, Macherey engages in a series of close exegeses of classical texts in...

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,...

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 angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures. This book uses the angel to explore the relations between modernist literature and early twentieth-century debates...

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...

The Historian's Wizard of Oz synthesizes four decades of scholarly interpretations of L. Frank Baum's classic children's novel as an allegory of the Gilded Age political economy and a comment on the gold standard. The heart of the book is an annotated...

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...

Through contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and analyses of literary texts such as Heart of Darkness, Lilith's Brood, and Moby-Dick, this book explores the cosmopolitan impulses behind the literary imagination. Patell argues that cosmopolitanism...

What is semiotics? What does it mean? How does it work? Over the past few decades, semiotics has increasingly gained popularity and yet, to many, the very term remains an enigma. This Dictionary of Semiotics is a much-needed reference book for the terms...

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...

Literary personification has long been taken for granted as an important aspect of Western narrative; Paul de Man has given it still greater prominence as 'the master trope of poetic discourse'. James Paxson here offers a much-needed critical and...

This book was first published by Cambridge in 1979. It is taken from the 1967 Clark Lectures and is in the first place a vigourous defence of the study of English in a modern university. Leavis is concerned with English Literature as a living reality,...

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...