Semiotics & Theory

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 -...

Artful Histories is an account of modern Australian autobiography that radically revises theories of autobiography and discusses a remarkably broad range of popular and literary texts written over a period of three decades. In his challenge to...

The work of the German philosopher Manfred Frank has profoundly affected the direction of the contemporary debate in many areas of philosophy and literary theory. This present collection, first published in 1998, brings together some of his most...

In this provocative and timely book, John Docker takes his readers on an intellectual adventure. The journey includes an introductory guided tour of the history of modernism, consideration of the development of postmodernism, explanation of the...

The first book in the Cultural Margins series is a 1994 study of racism and homophobia in British politics, which demonstrates the demonisation of blacks, lesbians, and gays in New Right discourse. Anna Marie Smith develops theoretical insights from...

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...

How does a reader respond to a work of literature and how does he begin to evaluate it? Mr Olsen attempts to answer these and related questions. The book is in two parts. In the first three chapters, the author demolishes established theories that...

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John Stuart Mill described Bentham and Coleridge as 'the two great seminal minds' of early nineteenth-century England. Coleridge, who asserted the primacy of the transcendent imagination, was in a obvious sense the direct opposite of Bentham, the...

In Islam and Postcolonial Narrative, John Erickson examines four major authors from the 'third world' - Assia Djebar, Adelkebir Khatibi, Tahar ben Jelloun and Salman Rushdie - all of whom have engaged in a critique of the relationship between Islam and...

Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their...

The virtual suppression of explicit ethical and evaluative discourse by current literary theory can be seen as the momentary triumph of a sceptical post Enlightenment reflective tradition over others vital to a full account of human and literary worth...

The essays in this collection are concerned with the philosophical problems that arise in connection with the understanding and evaluation of literature - such problems as the relationship between the work and the author (authorial intention), between...

Few thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century have so profoundly and radically transformed our understanding of writing and literature as Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Derridian deconstruction remains one of the most powerful intellectual...

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...

Resisting Representation brings together some of the most provocative essays by leading scholar Elaine Scarry. Through her readings of texts by Hardy, Beckett, Boethius, Thackeray, and others, Scarry examines the ability of language to accommodate...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780993895302Author Peter Pericles TrifonasFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint PosttextePublisher PosttexteWeight(grams) 318g

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814214497Author John PierFormat HardbackPage Count 252Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams) 535g

The city is an essential theme of modernity in literature, architecture, photography and film. This book first focuses on ardent reactions to the metropolitan explosion in the nineteenth century, with Baudelaire and Poe as key figures. More recent...

An original and wide-ranging study of the mappings used to impose meaning on the world, Mapping Reality argues that maps create rather than merely represent the ground on which they rest. Distinctions between map and territory questioned by some...

Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950 brings together important new scholarship focused on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and its institutional presence in shaping and directing American print, film, and art culture. From Harlem to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780898759419Author Lord Kames Henry HomeFormat PaperbackPage Count 504Imprint University Press of the PacificPublisher University Press of the...

Scarlet Letters explores the fascination exerted by adultery throughout the long history of western cultures. Critics from the UK, USA and Australia, working in a variety of specialisms, have contributed to this substantial new collection of close...

Much of the widespread interest in the Bloomsbury Group over the past quarter-century has been biographical, yet without the Group's works there would be little interest in their lives. The studies in literary and intellectual history and collected in...

Paul Ricoeur s contribution to the theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics, is considerable: he ranks among the masters of this discipline alongside Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. In addition to major works like The Conflict of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814255506Author Daniel PundayFormat PaperbackPage Count 180Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams)...

In his 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata Lev Tolstoy declared war on human sexuality. Having fathered thirteen children by his wife and at least two children by peasant women, the great Russian writer now has the arrogance to suggest that people should...

As signifying creatures, we fear the false creation 'signifying nothing' because, like Macbeth, we think of them as daggers of the mind that raise questions about the reality of our signs, about signs as tools of creation and power, about the dark...

Cognitive cultural theorists have rarely taken up sex, sexuality, or gender identity. When they have done so, they have often stressed the evolutionary sources of gender differences. In Sexual Identities, Patrick Colm Hogan extends his pioneering work on...

In its specially-commissioned fourteen chapters, this important book discusses an impressively wide range of issues around the theme of male spirituality in the nineteenth century, drawing from history, cultural studies, art history and literary...

Meredith is a novelist whom many readers have discovered with excitement, drawn to his radical portrayal of social and personal relations, especially of gender. Neil Robert's book is the first full-length study for ten years, and is the first to examine...

Critics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalization in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed...

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Today's student of literature is faced with an overwhelming variety of critical approaches. The need to evaluate their usefulness in furthering our understanding of literature is therefore a growing concern. In Literary Meaning, Wendell V. Harris...

Edward Said continues to fascinate and stir controversy, nowhere more than with his classic work Orientalism. Debating Orientalism brings a rare mix of perspectives to an ongoing polemic. Contributors from a range of disciplines take stock of the book's...

For the last twenty-five years, Language, Discourse, Society has been the most intellectually challenging series in English. Its titles range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous...

Schiller to Derrida is a historical critique of literary theory in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Starting with the work of Kant and Schiller, it traces an idealist tradition through nineteenth-century Romantic theory (including...

A first in multimodal/multisemiotic discourse studies this collection of original articles by international scholars focuses primarily on texts from non-English speaking contexts. The illuminating insights enhance our understanding of how language and...

Transversal Subjects, now in paperback, proposes a combined theory of consciousness, subjectivity and agency stemming from analyses of junctures in Western philosophical and critical discourses that have greatly influenced the development of present-day...