Semiotics & Theory

Blackness and Value investigates the principles by which 'value' operates, and asks if it is useful to imagine that the concepts of racial blackness and whiteness in the United States operate in terms of these principles. Testing these concepts by...

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What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of...

Daniel Gunn's aim is to investigate ways in which psychoanalytic writing and certain kinds of creative fiction can be seen to have common concerns, objectives and procedures. He examines the work of various psychoanalysts from Freud through to Lacan, as...

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This third volume of Q. D. Leavis's essays brings together pieces on hitherto unexplored aspects of Victorian literature. Most of these date from towards the end of her life and are previously unpublished. There are also essays and reviews which appeared...

Sidney's statement in his Apology for Poetry that quantitative verse on the Latin model is more suitable than the accentual verse of the English tradition 'lively to express divers passions, by the low and lofty sound of the well-weighed syllable' is...

Critics take for granted the importance of rhythm in poetry and prose, above all its capacity for suggesting states of mind, especially emotional states. But they are seldom clear what range of effects rhythm can reasonably be credited with, nor even, at...

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of...

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The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, first published in 2004, offers a lucid introduction and overview of one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies. The volume aims to introduce readers to key...

Literary forgeries are usually regarded as spurious versions of genuine literature. Faking Literature, first published in 2001, argues that the production of a literary forgery is an act that reveals the spurious nature of literature itself. Literature...

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Why has autobiography been central to African American political speech throughout the twentieth century? What is it about the racialization process that persistently places African Americans in the position of speaking from personal experience? In...

In this wide-ranging study, Neil Lazarus explores the subject of cultural practice in the modern world system. The book contains individual chapters on a range of topics from modernity, globalization and the 'West', and nationalism and decolonization, to...

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer viable, coherent accounts of ethics? Or are our social and intellectual worlds too fragmented for any broad consensus about the moral life? These issues have emerged as some of the most contentious in literary...

In Ideology and Inscription Tom Cohen questions the way history, ideology and politics are invoked in contemporary cultural studies. Enlisting the work of three seminal figures in literary theory - Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and M. Bakhtin - Cohen...

This book addresses the central crisis in critical theory today: how to theorise the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and a dialogical agent. By engaging with a wide range of leading political, philosophical, and critical thinkers -...

The possibility of literary theory has been repeatedly put at risk by the apparently simple question 'What is a literary text?' Throughout the twentieth century the epistemological status of literature, the problem of language's claim to true...

In Chronoschisms Ursula Heise explores the way developments in transportation, communication and information technology have led to the emergence of a different culture of time in Western societies. The radical transformation in our understanding and...

Rhetoric and composition is an academic discipline that informs all other fields in teaching students how to communicate their ideas and construct their arguments. It has grown dramatically to become a cornerstone of many undergraduate courses and...

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of...

The anti-sceptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey has attracted new attention in...

Colin Falck's book has had a widespread influence since it first appeared in 1989. Hailed as a work that alters the way we think about literary theory and its institutionalisation in America and Britain, it is a philosophically informed account of the...

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The language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under any single rubric - 'dialogism,' 'marxism,' 'prosaics,' 'authorship' - because the philosophic foundation of his writing rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The...

The postmodern debate has been heavily influenced by often contradictory conclusions about the foundations of knowledge: hermeneutics challenges epistemology, politics challenges science, identity theory challenges critical theory, pragmatism challenges...

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's...

Wordsworth's poetry has been a focus for many of the theoretical schools of criticism that comprise modern literary studies. Don Bialostosky here proposes to adjudicate the diverse claims of these numerous schools and to trace their implications for...

The relationship of words to the things they represent and to the mind which forms them has long been the subject of linguistic enquiry. Joseph Graham's challenging book, first published in 1992, takes this debate into the field of literary theory,...

Originally published in 1982, this is an anthology of studies by French literary theorists representing the most significant contributions to the field made in France in the preceding fifteen years. The essays were published here in English for the first...

The Modernist movement has been regarded as representing a crisis point in Western thought. This volume looks at that crisis in terms of its reinterpretation of ideas concerning vitalism: the animation of the universe, whether spiritual or based in...

The urge to autobiography reveals itself every day, in the stories we tell about ourselves. Literary autobiography is the most highly developed form of this universal activity of self-promotion, a kind of writing practised in the west over many centuries...

This highly original and penetrating study explores fundamental intellectual predispositions and concepts which underpin the literature and thought of the Augustan period in England. By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way...

Re-thinking Theory offers a bold approach to literary studies, itself explicitly theoretical and yet making a searching critique of the modes, concepts and movements which comprise literary theory. Discussing key concepts such as ideology, signification...

The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose reflects on her own fictional craft and turns her well-developed analytic abilities on other writers fictional and critical, from Hawthorne to Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate those...

It is remarkable that some theoretical developments in narratology have bypassed poetic narratives, concentrating almost exclusively on prose fiction. Clare Kinney's original study aims to redress the balance by exploring the distinctive narrative...

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of...