Semiotics & Theory

This path-breaking book explores different ways in which writing about poetry can deepen and extend our critical engagement by deploying creatively the manifold resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective...

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. The contributors to this...

A polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts.Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from...

A captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre.The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781909631359Author Peter ColeFormat PaperbackPage Count 44Imprint Sylph EditionsPublisher Sylph Editions

The possibility of literary theory has been repeatedly put at risk by the apparently simple question 'What is a literary text?' Throughout the twentieth century the epistemological status of literature, the problem of language's claim to true...

What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature?If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of...

Addresses the early twentieth-century intersection of scientific and religious discourse exploring literary modernism through the lens of cultural history, focusing on the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. It covers a range of topics such as...

The Fourth Genre offers the most comprehensive, teachable, and current introduction available today to the cutting-edge, evolving genre of creative nonfiction. While acknowledging the literary impulse of nonfiction to be a fourth genre equivalent to...

Individually and collectively, these essays establish a new direction for scholarship that examines the crucial activities of reading and writing about literature and how they relate to 'authenticity'. Though authenticity is a term deep in literary...

In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely...

"Literature matters because... it allows for experiences important to the living out of a sophisticated and satisfying human life; because other arenas of culture cannot provide them to the same degree; and because a relatively small number of texts...

In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. Combining history,...

Subversive Pleasures offers the first extended application of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical methods to film, mass-media, and cultural studies. With extraordinary interdisciplinary and multicultural range, Robert Stam explores issues that include the...

In Symbolism and Interpretation, Tzvetan Todorov examines two aspects of discourse: its production, which has traditionally been the domain of rhetoric, and its reception, which has always been the object of hermeneutics. He analyzes the diverse theories...

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...

This authoritative guide introduces the key figures in contemporary critical theory to the beginning student. Important topics in critical theory which are covered in this volume include semiotics and discourse analysis, deconstruction, feminism, queer...

Inquiring into the formation of a literary canon during the Restoration and the eighteenth century, Barbara Benedict poses the question, "Do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste?" She finds that there was a cultural dialectic at work:...

John McWhorter challenges an enduring paradigm among linguists in this provocative exploration of the origins of plantation creoles. Using a wealth of data--linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical--he proposes that the "limited access model" of...

Playing on the frequently used metaphors of the 'turn toward' or 'turn back' in scholarship on religion, The Turn Around Religion in America offers a model of religion that moves in a reciprocal relationship between these two poles. In particular, this...

Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) was one of modern Japan's most unique and important critics of capitalism, the emperor system, imperialism, and everyday life in wartime Japan. This collection of translations contains some of Tosaka's most important essays and...

Common Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's...

Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an anticapitalist poetics.Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave expression to the complex contours of...

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...

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...

An accessible and thorough introduction to literary theory and contemporary critical practice, this book is an essential resource for beginning students of literary criticism. Covers traditional approaches such as formalism and structuralism, as well as...

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of the art t/Theory in the 21st-century. With chapters written by the world's leading scholars in their field, the book explores the latest...

When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he was honored for using his craft as a novelist to bridge a troubling gap between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East. Gloria Fisk contests this pervasive way of reading Pamuk to...

This exciting interdisciplinary volume, featuring contributions from a group of leading international scholars, reflects on the long history of representations of transatlantic slaves and slavery, encompassing a broad chronological range, from the...

Focusing on works by Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Anne Carson, and Bernardine Evaristo, Katharine Burkitt investigates the relationship between literary form and textual politics in postcolonial narrative poems and verse-novels. Burkitt argues that these...

The novel since the nineteenth century has displayed a thorny ambivalence toward the question of having children. In its representation of human vitality it can seem to promote the giving of life, but again and again it betrays a nagging doubt about the...

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time...

At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in...

Where can theory go now? Where other voices concern themselves with theory's life or death, the contributors to Theory Aside take up another possibility: that our theoretical prospects are better served worrying less about "what's next?" and more about...

In this collection of essays, leading cultural theorists consider the meaning and implications of world-scale humanist scholarship by engaging with Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis. The renowned sociologist developed his influential critical...

Trespasses presents key writings of the Tokyo-born literary scholar Masao Miyoshi, one of the most important postwar intellectuals to link culture with politics and a remarkable critical voice within the academy. For more than four decades, Miyoshi...

The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Bronte, Emily...

In Personal Property, Margit Stange analyzes white slavery literature in relation to other key American writings of the time by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Jane Addams, and Kate Chopin. The anthropological theory of the exchange of women...

Shows how Renaissance writers and artists struggled to reconcile past traditions with experiences of 'discovery'. In what ways have colonial and postcolonial studies transformed our perceptions of early modern European texts and images? How have those...

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. His careful reading reveals their profound commitment...