Semiotics & Theory

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,...

What is the precise relationship between the writer of a text and the reader? Contributions to reader-response theory have suggested that the reader is relatively passive. In this 1987 text, Professor Foster argues that the relationship is more complex...

Peter Szondi is widely regarded as being among the most distinguished post-war literary critics. This first English edition of one of his most lucid and interesting series of lectures opens up his work in hermeneutics for English-speaking readers. The...

This book contextualizes 21st century representations of disappearance, torture, and detention within a historical framework of inter-American narratives. Examining a range of sources, Pitt finds a persistent focus on the body that links contemporary...

Technology, Literature and Culture provides a detailed and accessible exploration of the ways in which literature across the twentieth century has represented the inescapable presence and progress of technology. As this study argues, from the Fordist...

In this bold intervention into the understanding of the diasporic experience within cultural studies, McCarthy challenges a critical position emergent over the last thirty years (what he calls the 'new marginalism'). He confronts the liberal orthodoxies...

'Vast in its intellectual scope, it should induce not so much sleep as controversy, whether literary or scientific, philosophical or political. It skims the oceans of academe in a manner accessible to the educated public, informed and cogently argued,...

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been...

This book is a study of modern spiritualism, which flourished in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and of surrealism, in its heyday between the world wars. The pairing yields a range of provocative material for working through issues with...

A conceptualization of the literary aesthetic for a concern for the Self.Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's constructivist thinking into a practical domain, Sabrina Achilles rethinks the ways in which literature is understood and taught.Book...

Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species-botanical and human-to...

Theorizing Muriel Spark is the first serious attempt to engage the writing of Muriel Spark in a sustained theoretical reading. It has a particular emphasis on gender, psychoanalysis, postcolonial and deconstructive reading strategies. Drawing together a...

Emerson's Sublime Science explores relationships among Emerson's poetics, theory of the sublime, and engagement with electromagnetism. The book illustrates how Davy's chemistry and Faraday's physics revealed to Emerson a sublime universe in which matter...

The classic serial, invented by BBC Radio Drama sixty years ago, survived and adapted itself to television, the arrival of colour and the global market in what has become a flood of classics with all channels competing for ratings and overseas sales...

Harold Fisch explores the biblical influence on the style and structure of landmark works by Fielding, Defoe, George Eliot, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others. Whilst the great novelists could not manage without the Bible, at the same time 'it would not do'...

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...

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,...

Women's Lives into Print provides a remarkable collection of essays by feminist scholars and writers who focus on the theory, practice and writing of women's auto/biographies. Not only does it foster debate about the reading and interpretation of women's...

Here is an exploration of pulp literature and pulp mentalities: an investigation into the nature and theory of the contemporary mind in art and in life. Here too, the violent, the sensational and the erotic signify different facets of the modern...

Metaphors for God's Time in Science and Religion examines the exploratory work of metaphors for time in astrophysical cosmology, chaos theory, evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Happel claims that the Christian God is intimately involved at every...

A study of distinct forms of mass violence, the narratives each kind demands, and the collective identities constructed from and upon these, this book focuses around readings of popular and influential novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Amy Tan's...

This book brings together many of John Barrell's essays - some written especially for this volume - on the history and politics of culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It addresses a wide range of cultural practices - painting, sculpture, poetry, the...

Comprehending tragedy has been a major philosophical and critical preoccupation in Western thought. Whether concerned with the generic problem of definition or with tragedy in the context of specific writers or periods, books with multiple and often...

'A rich contribution to the study of autobiography.' - James Olney Suzanne Nalbantian provides a precise and highly original basis to identify literary art with her novel approach to autobiography. Re-examining key writers of the early twentieth-century...

This is the first book of its kind to look across disciplines at this vital aspect of British art, literature and culture. It brings the various intertwined histories of social realism into historical perspective, and argues that this sometimes...

The question of the canon has been the subject of debate in academic circles for over fifteen years. Pleasure and Change contains two lectures on this important subject by the distinguished literary critic Sir Frank Kermode. In essays that were...

Bringing together a group of intellectuals from a number of disciplines, this collection breaks new ground within the field of postcolonial diaspora studies, moving beyond the Anglophone bias of much existing scholarship by investigating comparative...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780791453667Author David R. ShumwayFormat PaperbackPage Count 237Imprint State University of New York PressPublisher State University of New York...

Students of literature, film and cultural studies need to understand key theoretical terms and concepts but often find it hard to get to grips with exactly what they mean. This book provides precise definitions of terms and concepts in literary theory,...

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...

Not just another jeremiad against prevailing isms and orthodoxies, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century examines literature in its connection to virtue and moral excellence. The author is concerned with literature as the teacher of virtue. The...

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...

This interdisciplinary study establishes connections between divergent approaches to rationality in philosophy, social science, and literary studies. Livingston provides a broad survey of the basic assumptions and questions associated with concepts of...

'Cult of Ugliness', Ezra Pound's phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T.E. Hulme - the self styled 'Men of 1914' - responded to the 'horrid or sordid or disgusting' conditions of...

The Bildungsroman is a genre novel whose territory is well traveled, that of a young and often alienated hero on the cusp of maturity, intent on discovering who he or she is and being true to that identity. The German word Bildung refers to forming and...

Joseph Conrad and the Reader is the first book fully devoted to Conrad's relation to the reader, visual theory and authorship. This challenging study proposes new approaches to modern literary criticism and deftly examines the limits of deconstructionist...

Children's Literature: New Approaches is a guide for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students of children's literature. It is structured through critics reading individual texts to bring out wider issues that are current in the field. Includes...

This study examines the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality and between historical homophobia and contemporary struggles between the Church and the homosexual? Moving from the Gothic to the late Twentieth-century, from Europe to America,...

This collection examines the ways in which religion and literature are capable of renewing what the eminent German philosopher Jurgen Habermas refers to as 'the public sphere'. The essays range from close commentaries on particular texts ( King Lear, The...

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...