Semiotics & Theory

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is a Congolese philosopher, novelist, poet, essayist, and academic, widely considered to be one of the most important African thinkers of his generation. The ideas and arguments he has developed in his writings since the 1970s,...

While celebrating the centenary of the “annus mirabilis” of modernism, we now encounter modernism after postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, critical race, feminist, queer and trans writing and theory. Out of the figures, narratives and...

- This is the first book of its kind to review a series of contemporary novels in English through the prism of the critical and theoretical categories of grievability and ungrievability. In the wake of Judith Butler’s work on (un-)grievable groups, it...

How can reading literary fiction shed light on the way we speak ourselves within psychoanalysis? Rather than offering psychoanalytic insights into literature, Rosemary Rizq, a practicing psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, explores what...

First published in 1974, New Directions in Literary History is a comprehensive attempt to present approaches to literary studies that have developed from phenomenology, stylistics and linguistics, Marxist reconsiderations of literature, interdisciplinary...

This book considers melancholy language in representative works by several British women writers in late Stuart England. To understand how these women writers understood and reframed the discussion about melancholy and women's experience of suffering in...

Cultural Theory: An Anthology is a collection of the essential readings that have shaped and defined the field of contemporary cultural theory * Features a historically diverse and methodologically concise collection of readings including rare essays...

According to some chronicles from the period, the violent arrival of the Spanish Conquerors to the Andes in the sixteenth century led to sex-dissident people who lived outside the cisheteropatriarchal model being burned at the stake. This act burned more...

In Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody places punctuation at center stage. She illuminates the performative aspects of dots, ellipses, hyphens, quotation marks, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points by considering them in...

This book takes a postcritical perspective on Joseph Conrad's central texts, including Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Lord Jim. Whereas critique is a form of reading that prioritizes suspicion, unmasking, and demystifying,...

• Offers a unique approach to cognitive studies examining how texts are broken down and organised, rather than solely looking at the main idea or summary • Introduces readers to a new cognitive thematics showing how it rises out of current approaches in...

Recent efforts to diversify and decentre the literary canon taught at universities have been moderately successful. Yet this expansion of our reading lists is only the start of a broader decolonization of literary studies as a discipline; there is much...

Recent efforts to diversify and decentre the literary canon taught at universities have been moderately successful. Yet this expansion of our reading lists is only the start of a broader decolonization of literary studies as a discipline; there is much...

The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century is a sustained critical examination of the developments in the field of literary studies from the early 2000s onwards within the context of the systematic problems in the humanities. This volume...

• Considers a fascinating mix of thinkers and writers to present an intriguing and timely argument about ’literarity’ (a term coined by Derrida) • Emphasises the value of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education • Accessible to...

Paul Hamilton here redefines romanticism in terms of its philosophical habits of self-consciousness. According to Hamilton, metaromanticism, or the ways in which writers of the romantic period generalized their own practices, was fundamentally...

The Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary crisis of mourning. In an age skeptical of history and memory, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace. The book...

During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9798765102282Author Ed SimonFormat PaperbackPage Count 136Imprint Bloomsbury Publishing USAPublisher Bloomsbury Publishing USA

A sociological history of literary studies-both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of "English" have been especially acute and...

Warning signs are all around us. In ancient Egypt, tombs were lavishly adorned with signs and symbols warning of the dire consequences that would befall any robbers and thieves. And yet these signs were often read as provocations and challenges. Why was...

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...

Discusses the aesthetic in the context of the politics of marginal communities. This involves the comparison of articles written by Welsh author and poet, Twm Morys, and two Czech authors, Bouhmil Hrabal and Vaclav Havel.Book InformationISBN...

This book questions the presupposition that "interpretation" is the basic problem of language and examines how assumptions about the constructed nature of the object of interpretation affect current discussions about interpretation in the humanities. ...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780374532352Author Professor Roland BarthesFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux IncPublisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux...

Originally published in 1982. Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the "possible articulation" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781644697078Author Susanne StratlingFormat HardbackPage Count 290Imprint Academic Studies PressPublisher Academic Studies PressWeight(grams) 156g

Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of...

Empires of the Mind tells the story of I. A. Richards, Britain's foremost literary critic in the 1920s, and his effort to promote an 850-word version of "global" English in China. Examining the cultural milieu of Cambridge between the World...

Originally publihsed in 1977. This book presents a theory for the metaphoric construal of deviant sentences. The theory has two aspects. The first relates to metaphor considered as a productive process of language and describes the mechanisms that...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781909631342Author Andrea ApplebeeFormat PaperbackPage Count 40Imprint Sylph EditionsPublisher Sylph Editions

How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but "alchemy" is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric...

Originally published in 1962. The rise of "metaphoric" criticism is a reaction against a previous critical preoccupation with psychology and time. Milton spatialized time, thoroughly mastering a metaphoric technique. Professor Cope, after...

A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself  Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an...

On the current battlefield of cultural criticism and production, no term has been more vigorously contested than 'postmodernism'. Defying clear definition, yet persisting as an indispensable category, it has become one of the central topics in the theory...

Columbus is the first blazing star in a constellation of European adventurers whose right to claim and conquer each land mass they encountered was absolutely unquestioned by their countrymen. How a system of religious beliefs made the taking of the New...

Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory seeks to place the contemporary transformation of notions of space and time, often attributed to the technologies we use, in the context of the ongoing transformations of modernity. Bringing together...

An examination of the presumed opposition between the natural human body and artificial inanimate objectsProsthesis is a landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, seamlessly integrated (both physically...

Originally published in 1973. Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative...