Semiotics & Theory

Performativity has emerged as a critical new idea across the humanities and social sciences, from literary and cultural studies to the study of gender and the philosophy of action. In this volume, Jeffrey Alexander demonstrates how performance can...

The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression 'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific...

Terry Eagleton is one of the most influential contemporary literary theorists and critics. His diverse body of work has been crucial to developments in cultural theory and literary critical practice in modern times, and for a generation of humanities...

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the idea of intertextuality and the debates surrounding it, focusing on the four key thinkers whose work has been central to these debates - Kristeva, Barthes, Bloom and Genette. * A comprehensive introduction...

In the usual order of things, lives run their course and eventually one becomes who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity. But as a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, a...

On 10 September 2008, amid much fanfare, the Great Collider run by CERN in Geneva was turned on. The Collider was supposed to fire protons around a seventeen-mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to the speed of light and...

The writings of Jean Baudrillard have dramatically altered the face of critical theory and promise to pose challenges well into the 21st century. His work on simulation, media, the status of the image, the system of objects, hyperreality, and information...

This volume assesses the current state of Literacy Theory and examines the issues to be addressed by future research. The essays cover established theoretical perspectives and debates and also examine the changing face of literacy studies in the modern...

In this brilliantly provocative and comprehensively informative introductory text, Niall Lucy shows the student how postmodern literary theory works, what its origins are, and what its consequences.Book InformationISBN 9780631200017Author Niall...

In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naive. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate...

John Sturrock's classic explication of Structuralism represents the most succinct and balanced survey available of a major critical movement associated with the thought of such key figures as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser...

In this controversial manifesto, Jean-Michel Rabate addresses current anxieties about the future of literary and cultural theory and proposes that it still has a crucial role to play.About the AuthorJean-Michel Rabate is Professor of English and...

Literature today is a very different concept from that of only a generation ago, and this difference is attributed usually to 'postmodernism'. Most radical of all is the possibility that the very notion of literature is rendered untenable by...

Since the publication in France of his Oeuvres Completes in the mid-1970s, the breadth of Bataille's writing and influence has become increasingly apparent across the disciplines in, for example, the fields of literature, art, art history, philosophy,...

This anthology presents a series of texts in which major twentieth-century thinkers engage in dialogue with their predecessors. Presents a series of texts in which major twentieth-century thinkers engage in dialogue with their predecessors. Offers an...

This volume provides a unique insight into the formative influence of one of the century's most distinguished public intellectuals, Raymond Williams (1921-1988). Williams' concern with the dynamics of all forms of writing transformed the ways in which we...

Michael Payne introduces the principal writings of Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault and Louis Althusser by means of a detailed focus on their common interest in the forms and conditions of knowledge.About the AuthorMichael Payne is John P. Corzer...

Psychoanalysis and Narrative is a clear and exemplary demonstration of the ways in which the vital connections between psychoanalysis and literature can be articulated without reductive simplification. Following Freud's assumption that sexuality and...

This book is an examination of three major literary, critical and philosophical movements in European and Anglo-American literature. It aims to show their differences (often pointed out) and their similarities (never yet demonstrated) and to make...

How can we handle the unevenness between the West and the Rest? How inevitable is the binary logic of winners and losers? How can theory help us resolve our ethical and political problems? Can theory help us think beyond the "winner talks all"...

How can we handle the unevenness between the West and the Rest? How inevitable is the binary logic of winners and losers? How can theory help us resolve our ethical and political problems? Can theory help us think beyond the "winner talks all"...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783847100461Author Irena Avsenik NabergojFormat HardbackPage Count 229Imprint V&R unipress GmbHPublisher V&R unipress GmbHWeight(grams) 522g

The stormy history of Poland has made commitment a staple feature of much Polish writing. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz is not only a good example of a Polish committed writer, he also illustrates the complexity of...

Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life, essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781438471938Author Daniel FriedFormat HardbackPage Count 334Imprint State University of New York PressPublisher State University of New York...

In a rare fusion of literary sensibility with psychological research, Norman N. Holland brings to light important data showing how personality in the fullest sense of character development and identity affects the way in which we read and interpret...

Complaints about the decline of critical standards in literature and culture in general have been voiced for much of the twentieth century. These have extended from F.R. Leavis's laments for a "lost center of intelligence and urbane spirit," to...

Irving Babbitt was a giant of American criticism. His writings from the 1890s to the 1930s helped advance American criticism and scholarship to international esteem. More than seventy years after his death his intellectual staying power remains...

In a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch extolled the virtue of poetry and letters for promoting an understanding of both human nature and morals. The letter was designed to console him after hearing a prediction that he was soon to die and that he ought to...

Language is the species-specific human version of the animal system of communication. In contrast to non-human animals, language enables humans to invent a plurality of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for our actions; gain conscious...

Mimesis is a critical and philosophical term going back to Aristotle. It carries a wide range of meanings, including imitation, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, and the presentation of self. In modern literary criticism, mimesis has...

This book is a direct product of World War II, of the long years at sea that gave the author the feeling that the past was no more than an illusion. He compares past with present, one nation with another, to clarify the conviction that the nature of...

Ridiculous Critics is an anthology of eighteenth-century writings on the figure of the literary critic, and on the critic's mixed and complex role. The collection assembles critical texts and satirical images chronologically to suggest a vision of the...

Scholars, librarians, students, and database vendors have all applauded the increase in access to rare, old, venerated, and obscure texts that has resulted from the rise of electronic resources. Almost everyone associated with any branch of cultural...

This first biography of poet and writer Margaret Walker (1915-98) offers a comprehensive close reading of a fixture in American culture for a majority of the 20th century. Without defining herself as a radical or even a feminist, Walker followed the...

Hélène Cixous has dreamed for years of "The Book-I-Don't-Write," but each time she approaches it, it withdraws. The-Book-I-Don't-Write is always just out of reach. When Jacques Derrida told her the Book would get written one day, but differently, Cixous...

The fourth edition of this classic beginner's guide to literary studies has been fully updated throughout. Mario Klarer offers a concise and accessible discussion of central issues in English and world literature as well as film and television series...

Offers a hybrid "dossier" of materials that engage with the figure of the fool through a variety of methods in relation to three distinct but interrelated approaches to literature: creative practice, critical scholarship, and pedagogy This innovative...

The importance of rhythm spans time and space, its significance both natural and constructed. As contemporary society challenges us to search for connection, the question of rhythm is profoundly and uniquely capable of managing the exchange and dialogue...

First Published in 1972, The Scholar-Critic argues that it's a mistake to consider literary criticism and literary scholarship as each other's antitheses. The two approaches to literature are, except at the most superficial level, complementary, both...