Semiotics & Theory

Through close attention to the representation of the reader in ten of Dickens's novels, this study brings their specifically Victorian assumptions into direct confrontation with the insights of modern critical theory. The study locates in Dickens a...

This book charts the history of the concept of nihilism in some of the most important philosophers and literary theorists of the modern and postmodern periods, including Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, and Vattimo. Weller offers the first in-depth...

This original study discovers the bourgeois in the modernist and the dissenting style of Bohemia in the new artistic movements of the 1910s. Brooker sees the bohemian as the example of the modern artist, at odds with but defined by the codes of bourgeois...

This study explores the Stuart history play, a genre often viewed as an inferior or degenerate version of the exemplary Elizabethan dramatic form. Writing in the shadow of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Stuart playwrights have traditionally been evaluated...

Blake's late prophecies, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, feature a conflict between the poet-prophet Los and a Spectre embodying all he most opposes: intellectual scepticism, religious despair and a systematic philosophical logic of contraries,...

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this history of reception, it aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary...

Using a cognitive approach to literature, this book uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. Miller provides new readings of works by Conrad, Joyce, and D.H...

This original study explores the new idea of theory that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Leon Chai sees in the Romantic age a significant movement across several broad fields of intellectual endeavor, from theoretical concepts to an attempt...

Ann Kelly's provocative book breaks the mold of Swift studies. Twentieth century Swift scholars have tended to assess Jonathan Swift as a pillar of the eighteenth-century 'republic of letter', a conservative, even reactionary voice upholding classical...

This book is about a group of Victorian British writers and artists (Darwin, Stevenson, Gaskell, Ruskin, Pater, Brown and Turner) whose work emerges from recollection and whose texts embody the experience of nostalgia. The study concentrates on the...

This is the only contemporary critical study to discuss the nature of comedy with exclusive reference to novels. It examines the comic styles of novelists from Fielding and Jane Austen to Waugh and Agnus Wilson, as well as less familiar writers such as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780313205804Author John CruickshankFormat HardbackPage Count 248Imprint Praeger Publishers IncPublisher ABC-CLIO

A work by an eminent critic which addresses itself to values in literature, and attempts to answer the simple and elusive question, Why read a work of imaginative literature?Book InformationISBN 9780837160269Author David DaichesFormat HardbackPage Count...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814255773Author Matthew ClarkFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams) 367g

What is buried in the crypts of the Gothic? Building on psychoanalytic research on haunting, cryptonymy and melancholy, as well as on French philosophies of language, this book explores how haunting is not just a Gothic narrative device but the symptom...

A revisionist study of Mansfield as a profoundly colonial yet daringly experimental writer, at the forefront of modernism. The essays in this volume draw on the complete journals, letters and stories, to reveal Mansfield as a modernist who transcended...

This is an account of the part played by poetry in the life of man from earliest times to the present. Older than prose, it was the vehicle for his technology, history, philosophy and science; it helped him feel at home in his environment; it was the...

Through a close-reading of the work of five prominent American postmodernist writers, this book re-evaluates the role of the past in recent American fiction, outlines the development of the postmodernist historical novel and considers the waning...

The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory presents a short introduction to the problems, theories and concepts of literary critisicm, from the Anglo-American New Criticism to Deconstruction and Postmodernism. The book argues that modern theories can only...

Melanie L. Harris dives into the spirituality and life work of Alice Walker, literary genius and poet. Through the lens of Womanist ethics, Harris takes an inside look into the virtues and values that can be lifted from a study of Walker s non-fiction...

Rooted in close reading of texts, including the essays of E.B. White, this comprehensive assessment of the oft-slighted subform of the literary essay situates the familiar at the heart of the essay as form.Book InformationISBN 9780230620001Author G...

Necromanticism is a study of literary pilgrimage: readers' compulsion to visit literary homes, landscapes, and (especially) graves during the long Romantic period. The book draws on the histories of tourism and literary genres to highlight Romanticism's...

Ecocriticism is one of the most vibrant fields of cultural study today, and environmental issues are controversial and topical. This volume captures the excitement of green reading, reflects on its relationship to the modern academy, and provides...

What is the American thriller? Has it developed over time? What was it like in the past? This is a book about thrillers and gaining knowledge of what American thrillers were like in a specific period - the 1970s. Analysing seventies texts about crime,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814253755Author Marco CaraccioloFormat PaperbackPage Count 344Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams) 503g

This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites...

How do gender and race become objects of intellectual inquiry? What happens to marginal discourses when they participate in the academic processes of scrutiny and evaluation? In Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference, Alice Gambrell examines the...

The material elements of writing have long been undervalued, and have been dismissed by recent historicising trends of criticism; but analysis of these elements - sound, signature, letters - can transform our understanding of literary texts. In this 1994...

Narrative features such as frames, digressions, or authorial intrusions have traditionally been viewed as distractions from or anomalies in the narrative proper. In Theory and the Novel Jeffrey Williams exposes these elements as more than simple...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780837168470Author Harold OsborneFormat HardbackPage Count 341Imprint Praeger Publishers IncPublisher ABC-CLIO

This book discusses relationships among religion, literature and ethnicity in Northern Ireland since 1967. The introduction provides a theoretical account of how literature engages sectarian prejudices, allowing these to be played out in ways that can...

Imaginative literature, argues Michael Dash, does not merely reflect, but actively influences historical events. He demonstrates this by a close examination of the relations between Haiti and the United States through the imaginative literature of both...

Originally published in 1959, the basis of this book was a course of lectures given at Cambridge University entitled Three Traditions of Moral Thought: Platonic-Christian; Utilitarian; Humanist. Designed chiefly for students of literature, and...

Ghost stories are always in conversation with novelistic modes with which they are contemporary. This book examines examples from Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Henry James and Rudyard Kipling, amongst others, to the end of the twentieth century,...

In Lost in the American City , Jeremy Tambling looks at European reactions to America and American cities in the nineteenth-century. Dickens visited America in 1842 and his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit set the agenda for future discussions of...

Some children are prone to a particular kind of aggression when they are with their peers. For these children, any harm done to them-even something as inconsequential as a jostle in the lunch line-is perceived as intentional. Their style of social...

Looking at literary discourse, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction, diaries, and drama, this collection offers remarkable and fascinating examples of women writers who integrated scientific material in their literary narratives.Book InformationISBN...

It is a feat to demystify decadence genially while dealing with unsavory material usually presented complicitously. But Whissen achieves even more. He is not looking at counterculture literature but at mainstream literature in which the reader either...

Reading is both a social process and a social formation, as this book illustrates across centuries and cultural contexts. Highlighting links evident in reading communities from literary salons to online environments, each essay reflects the rich...

This volume brings together essays on the relations between fiction and the economy, all established or emergent scholars from different fields of expertise. The essays range widely in their respective foci, extending beyond purely literary studies to...