Semiotics & Theory

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as...

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...

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...

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...

Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic's task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Drawing on the explosion of academic and public interest in cognitive science in the past two decades, this volume features articles that combine literary and cultural analysis with insights from neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What are the political implications of a feminist critical practice? How do the problems of the literary text relate to the priorities and perspectives of feminist politics as a whole?Sexual/Textual Politics addresses these fundamental questions and...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...