Semiotics & Theory

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem-and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies"I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter...

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a...

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...

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova...

This important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines a series of issues that are central to the question of the postcolonial. The postcolonial paradigm, and the more recent decolonial paradigm, raise the issue of the universal: is the...

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When is the "beautiful game" at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What's...

Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been philosophy's negative alter ego, its bad other. Yet sophistry's emphasis on words and performativity over the fetishization of truth makes it an essential part of our world's cultural, political, and...

Our most revered critic returns to his signature theme "Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."For more than half a...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Our sense of smell is crucial to our survival. We can smell fear, disease, food. Fragrance is also entertainment. We can smell an expensive...

This volume brings together Martha Nussbaum's published papers, some revised for this collection, on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. It also includes two new essays and a substantial Introduction. The...

An Introduction to the Blue Humanities is the first textbook to explore the many ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary, cultural, historical, and theoretical connections and ecologies to introduce students to the history and theory of...

A trenchant analysis of sacrifice as the foundation of the modern, as well as the ancient, social order The modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic...

This highly acclaimed study analyzes the various trends in English criticism during the first four decades of this century.Reviews"One of the five works published within the last thirty years which in the opinion of representative scholars and critics...

Walter Benjamin's famous "Work of Art" essay sets out his boldest thoughts-on media and on culture in general-in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the...

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...

A New Statesman essential non-fiction book of 2021 Featured in Book Riot's 12 best nonfiction books about Black identity and history A Times Higher Education Book of the Week 2022 Finalist for the Prose Awards (Media and Cultural Studies category) ...

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking-nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among...

Brian Attebery's "strategy of fantasy" include not only the writer's strategies for inventing believable impossibiltes, but also the reader's strategies for enjoying, challenging, and conspiring with the text. Drawing on a number of current literary...

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original...

"Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd...

Tolkien and Wales is the first book to offer a detailed examination of the influence of Wales on Tolkien's fiction and scholarly work, including some relatively neglected texts.About the AuthorDr Phelpstead is a Reader in English literature at Cardiff...

A work of technical skill as well as outstanding literary merit, Structuralist Poetics was awarded the 1975 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. It was during the writing of this book that Culler developed his now famous and...

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...

Ideas in Profile: Small Introductions to Big Topics At the heart of criticism lies one question: What do you think of it? Every time we comment on an artefact, whether a poem, a play, a painting, a novel or a piano concerto, we are acting as critics,...

Since its initial publication in 1973, Hayden White's Metahistory has remained an essential book for understanding the nature of historical writing. In this classic work, White argues that a deep structural content lies beyond the surface level of...

In his most important work, Max Horkheimer surveys and demonstrates the gradual ascendancy of Reason in Western philosophy, its eventual total application to all spheres of life, and what he considers its present reified domination. First published in...

This third edition of the landmark textbook Reading Images builds on its reputation as the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. Drawing on an enormous range of examples from children's drawings to textbook...

The late twentieth century saw an explosion of interest in semiotics, the science of the signs and processes by which we communicate. In this study, the first of its kind in English, Keir Elam shows how this new 'science' can provide a radical shift in...

Jacqueline Rose is a world-renowned critic and one of the most influential and provocative scholars working in the humanities today. She is also among the most wide ranging, with books on Zionism, feminism, Sylvia Plath, children's fiction, and...

A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary scienceThe 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption...

Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century. A major new intellectual endeavour from one of the world's finest, and...

Leadership, innovation, diversity, inclusiveness, sharing, accountability-such is the resounding administrative refrain we keep hearing in the contemporary Western university. What kinds of benefits does this refrain generate? For whom? What discursive...

'Postmodernism' became the buzzword of contemporary society in the 1990s. Yet, even now, it still remains confusing and baffling in its variety of definitions, contexts and associations. Beginning postmodernism aims to offer clear, accessible and...

The Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the...

"Iser is an influential figure, and aficionados will welcome the comprehensive exposition he provides here."--Terence Cave, TLS The pioneer of "literary anthropology," Wolfgang Iser presents a wide-ranging and comprehensive exploration of this new field...

Time Binds is a powerful argument that temporal and sexual dissonance are intertwined, and that the writing of history can be both embodied and erotic. Challenging queer theory's recent emphasis on loss and trauma, Elizabeth Freeman foregrounds bodily...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781945492433Author Namwali SerpellFormat PaperbackPage Count 196Imprint Transit BooksPublisher Transit Books

A defense and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice-close reading. Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of...

Modernism was the artistic and intellectual revolution of the early twentieth century. Yet despite its now-secure location in history, the radical experimental practices of modernism continue to bewilder as much as they excite. Beginning Modernism offers...