Semiotics & Theory

How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as of the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony...

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...

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,...

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...

Julia Kristeva is one of Europe's most brilliant and original theorists, widely acclaimed for her work in such diverse areas as linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary and political theory. The Kristeva Reader is a fully-comprehensive, easily accessible...

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...

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...

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...

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 anthology explores the resilience and ubiquity of the Gothic in cinema from its earliest days to its most contemporary iterations. Fifteen newly commissioned chapters by prominent scholars in the field of Gothic and cinema studies examine the myriad...

"This anthology brings together essays by 20th-century poets on their own art: some concern themselves with its deep sources and ultimate justifications; others deal with technique, controversies among schools, the experience behind particular poems. The...

It is impossible to imagine contemporary critical theory without the work of Michel Foucault. His radical reworkings of the concepts of power, knowledge, discourse and identity have influenced the widest possible range of theories and impacted upon...

Recent developments in cognitive narrative theory have called attention to readers' active participation in making sense of narrative. However, while most psychologically inspired models address interpreters' subpersonal (i.e., unconscious) responses,...

In these interviews, given between 1962 and 1980, Barthes speaks about the development of his thought, explaining why and how he wrote his many books, paying tributes to philosophers, linguists, novelists, poets, painters and film-makers who have...

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...

Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on this renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and...

This book provides an engaging introduction to economics through a literary lens. Drawing on writers such as James Joyce, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell, each chapter is framed around a quote from 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780791459485Author Manfred FrankFormat PaperbackPage Count 296Imprint State University of New York PressPublisher State University of New York...

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...

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) ...

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...

In 1918 a young Carl Schmitt published a short satirical fiction entitled The Buribunks. He imagined a future society of beings who consistently wrote and disseminated their personal diaries. Schmitt would go on to become the infamous philosopher of the...

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...

The story of Jewish literature is a kaleidoscopic one, multilingual and transnational in character, spanning the globe as well as the centuries. In this broad, thought-provoking introduction to Jewish literature from 1492 to the present, cultural...

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,...

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...

Incessantly cited by critics, Bakhtin's work nonetheless remains relatively unavailable: partly through lack of suitable editions, partly because no individual text conveys all the key concepts or arguments. This anthology provides in a convenient format...

This successful introduction to intertextuality deftly introduces this crucial area and relates its significance to key theories and movements in the study of literature. The third edition is updated to include a brand new chapter, looking at...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...