Semiotics & Theory

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with...

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers-among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156027809Author Northrop FryeFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Houghton MifflinPublisher Houghton Mifflin

A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies. The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was...

Jacques Derrida's revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy-called deconstruction-changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy,...

Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city...

"Eco wittily and enchantingly develops themes often touched on in his previous works, but he delves deeper into their complex nature...this collection can be read with pleasure by those unversed in semiotic theory." -Times Literary SupplementReviews"Eco...

From the creator of UlyssesGuide.com, this essential guide to James Joyce's masterpiece weaves together plot summaries, interpretive analyses, scholarly perspectives, and historical and biographical context to create an easy-to-read, entertaining, and...

In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence - from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, John Ruskin to Joan Didion - the book explores style,...

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated...

Science Fiction is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to one of the most popular areas of modern culture. This second edition reflects how the field is rapidly changing in both its practice and its critical reception. With an entirely new...

Literary Analysis: The Basics is an insightful introduction to analysing a wide range of literary forms. Providing a clear outline of the methodologies employed in twenty-first century literary analysis, it introduces readers to the genres, canons,...

Rescuing the subject from deadly dry theorists and -isms, Clare Connors focuses on the real questions that emerge when we read and study literature - such as how we find meaning and how literature relates to its historical context - before exploring the...

In this important new book the leading philosopher Jacques Ranciere continues his reflections on the representative power of works of art. How does art render events that have spanned an era? What roles does it assign to those who enacted them or those...

Green Studies is a booming area for study and The Green Studies Reader is a fantastically comprehensive selection of critical texts which address the connection between ecology, culture, and literature. It offers a complete guide to the growing area of...

What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375725395Author Camille PagliaFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and...

Engages literary texts in order to theorise the distinctive cognitive and affective experiences of drivingWhat sorts of things do we think about when we're driving or being driven in a car? Drivetime seeks to answer this question by drawing upon a rich...

Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book's discussion is a series of underlying...

"The Lives of Machines is intelligent, closely argued, and persuasive, and puts forth a contention that will unsettle the current consensus about Victorian attitudes toward the machine."---Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt UniversityToday we commonly describe...

Julia Kristeva is one of Europe's most brilliant and original theorists, widely acclaimed for her work in such diverse areas as linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary and political theory. The Kristeva Reader is a fully-comprehensive, easily accessible...

One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature-by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation...

This pioneering book introduces students to the practice and art of creative writing and creative reading. It offers a fresh, distinctive and beautifully written synthesis of the discipline. David Morley discusses where creative writing comes from, the...

Why do some books grab you from the very first line?What did Aristotle have to say about the art of telling stories?Is there a secret structure to stories known by all the best writers? In this neat pocket book, English lecturer Amy Jones describes the...

Violence and the Sacred is Rene Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek...

The Oxford Handbooks series is a major new initiative in academic publishing. Each volume offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the...

During the last 300 years circus clowns have emerged as powerful cultural icons. This is the first semiotic analysis of the range of make-up and costumes through which the clowns' performing identities have been established and go on developing. It also...

This acclaimed short study, originally published in 1983, and now thoroughly updated, elucidates the varied theoretical contributions of Roland Barthes (1915-80), the 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with the...

This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problems of mimesis, between presentation and re-presentaion. Four "scenes" comprise the book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781584351702Author Franco "Bifo" BerardiFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Semiotext (E)Publisher AutonomediaDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm

Michael McKeon, author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, here assembles a collection of influential essays on the theory of the novel. Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Levi-Strauss, Lukacs, Bakhtin, and other prominent...

This 1981 book is a study of wide range of fiction, from short stories to tales of horror, from fairy-tales and romances to science fiction, to which the rather loose term 'fantastic' has been applied. Cutting across this wide field, Professor...

"Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades's desire - ágalma, the good object.I would go even further...

Lucretius's long shadow falls across the disciplines of literary history and criticism, philosophy, religious studies, classics, political philosophy, and the history of science. The best recent example is Stephen Greenblatt's popular account of the...

This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working...

William Empson (1906-84) was one of the twentieth century's most distinctive critical voices, and left a profound mark upon Anglo-American literary culture. Published in 1993, this book was the first full study of Empson's literary criticism in its...

"...not merely interesting and novel, but also exceedingly provocative and heuristically fertile." -The Review of Metaphysics "...essential reading for anyone interesting in...the new reader-centered forms of criticism." -Library Journal In this...

Roland Barthes was one of the most widely influential thinkers of the 20th Century and his immensely popular and readable writings have covered topics ranging from wrestling to photography. The semiotic power of fashion and clothing were of perennial...

Eliot's Four Quartets is arguably the finest long poem in modern English literature. It is also one that presents considerable problems of interpretation. In Word Unheard, first published in 1969, Blamires aims to unravel some of these problems by...