Semiotics & Theory

The Semiotics of Love brings together work on early symbolism, literary practices, and contemporary communication on the theme of romance and the idea of love to forge an understanding of the semiotic-cultural side of romance. Moving beyond psychological...

"I read Peter Y. Paik's lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible." -Bruce Sterling Revolutionary narratives in recent science...

This collection provides a thorough representation of the early and ongoing conversation between Gothic and theory philosophical, aesthetic, psychological and cultural.Book InformationISBN 9781474427784Author Jerrold E. HogleFormat PaperbackPage Count...

This third edition of Hans Bertens' bestselling book is an essential guide to the often confusing and complicated world of literary theory. Exploring a broad range of topics from Marxist and feminist criticism to postmodernism and new historicism...

The Zizek Reader - which includes a Foreword by Zizek and a new, previously unpublished essay on cyberspace - provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the flamboyant work of a figure who has been variously described as 'one of the most...

In the newly revised version of The Sourcebook of Magic you will discover afresh the basic 77 NLP patterns for transformational magic. What's new? A change from merely describing the patterns to presenting the key questions that allow you to guide a...

This field-defining collection consolidates and builds momentum in the burgeoning area of affect studies. The contributors include many of the central theorists of affect-those visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing...

Since the book's first publication in 1988, Alain Badiou's Being and Event has established itself of one of the most important and controversial works in contemporary philosophy and its author as one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Being...

For twenty years, the renowned philosopher of science Sandra Harding has argued that science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and feminist critique must inform one another. In The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, Harding...

A venture into the realm of contemporary literary theory, this book takes as its point of departure ""the nexus between philosophical hermeneutics and rhetoric"" that Hans-Georg Gadamer discusses in his writings. But rather that explicating Gadamer's...

This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois society as a central feature of a "public sphere" in which political, ethical, and literary judgements could mingle under the benign rule of reason. The disintegration of this...

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political...

An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory's formative text on the literary canon. Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory's Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the...

'The professor, the critic and the novelist work in harmony to provide a valuable tutorial on modern fiction' ObserverHow does the novel represent human consciousness on the page?In eleven sparkling essays on some of the great novelists of the last 200...

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what "one" is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is...

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...

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,...

Econarratives are all around us, describing and shaping human interactions with other species and the physical environment. This book provides a foundational theory of econarrative, drawing from narratology, human ecology, critical discourse analysis,...

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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What can underground pipes tell us about human eating habits and the spread or containment of disease, such as COVID-19? Why are sewers spitting...

Iser examines what happens during the reading process, and how it is basic to the development of a theory of aesthetic response, setting in motion a chain of events that depends both on the text and the exercise of certain human faculties.About the...

"I am the product of priests", Lacan once said of himself. Educated by the Marist Brothers (or Little Brothers of Mary), he was a pious child and acquired considerable, personal knowledge of the torments and cunning of Christian spirituality. He was...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780486295770Author Aristotle AristotleFormat PaperbackPage Count 64Imprint Dover Publications Inc.Publisher Dover Publications Inc.Weight(grams)...

These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)-known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky-as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in...

What is poststructuralist theory, and what difference does it make to literary criticism? Where do we find the meaning of the text: in the author's head? in the reader's? Or do we, instead, make meaning in the practice of reading itself? If so, what part...

The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte,...

Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the pleasure of orgasm, from appropriation to dis-appropriation,...

Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture - for example in the writings of Ayn Rand - and also...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it,...

In her debut book, A. V. Marraccini explores how we inhabit works of art, and how our sense of longing informs and changes our relationship to them. Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of...

Not exercising as much as you should? Counting your calories in your sleep? Feeling ashamed for not being happier? You may be a victim of the wellness syndrome. In this ground-breaking new book, Carl Cederstroem and Andre Spicer argue that the...

This extraordinarily wide-ranging work represents a new departure for contemporary literary theory. Author of Beginnings and the controversial Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the...

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...

To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death,...

This popular text provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The readings are drawn from a diverse selection of thinkers both historical and contemporary.Book InformationISBN 9780745014913Author Patrick...

Through a series of incisive readings of leading theoretical figures of affirmationism -- Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou -- Benjamin Noys contests the tendency of recent theory to rely on affirmation, and...

Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed "Epistemology of the...

Science fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do...

This classic text remains one of the clearest and most incisive introductions to postmodernism. Perhaps more importantly, it is a compelling discussion of why postmodernism matters. Working through the issue of representation in art forms from fiction to...

The words 'Anthropocene animals' conjure pictures of dead albatrosses' bodies filled with plastic fragments, polar bears adrift on melting ice sheets, solitary elephants in the savannah. Suspended between the impersonal nature of the Great Extinction and...