Semiotics & Theory

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...

The first critical study of writing without language In recent years, asemic writing-writing without language-has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest,...

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the...

There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles,...

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...

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...

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...

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's...

Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions,...

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature'Engaging, brilliant' Guardian'A talkative, tender meditation' Financial Times'Every novelist will want to read this' Daily TelegraphWhat happens within us when we read a novel? And how does a writer create its...

In this entertaining and stimulating essay, one of world literature's most distinctive thinkers sets out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, Kundera suggests, a novel is thought about only within...

By drawing on oceanography (marine sciences) and limnology (freshwater sciences), social sciences, and the environmental humanities, the field of the blue humanities critically examines the planet's troubled seas and distressed freshwaters from various...

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...

Offering guidance and inspiration to English literature instructors, this book faces the challenges of real-life teaching and the contemporary higher education classroom head on. Whether you're teaching in a community college, a state school, a liberal...

Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new...

Twentieth Century Literature is a major anthology of key representative works by fifty leading modern literary critics writing before the structuralist revolution. It is a companion volume to Modern Criticism and Theory (Longman 1988), also edited by...

Social Semiotics is a major new textbook in communication and cultural studies. It offers a comprehensive and original approach to the study of the ways in which meaning is constituted in social life. Hodge and Kress begin from the assumption that signs...

Critical Forms is an account of the generic forms in which literary criticism has been undertaken. It examines chiefly Anglophone literary criticism, with comparative discussion of French and German material, from around 1750 to the present and examines...

This book explores how the present is troubled by the past and the future. It uses the idea of haunting to explore how identities, beliefs, intimacies and hatreds are transmitted across generations and between people and how these things structure...

This book covers the key theoretical approches in modern literary theory, and includes essays and texts that are essential reading for any student of critical theory. It includes sections on Formalism and Structuralism, Feminism, Marxism, Postmodernism,...

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...

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most wide-ranging thinkers to emerge in the twentieth century. He has developed a unique 'theory of reading' or hermeneutics, which extends far beyond the reading of literary works to build into a theory for the reading of...

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what "one" is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is...

The Value of Ecocriticism offers a brief, incisive overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in a bewildering age of global environmental threat. The intellectual, moral and political complexity of environmental issues,...

Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother...

Gothic and Modernism establishes and interprets the significant presence and the transformations of the Gothic tradition at the dark heart of writing during the long twentieth century. Artfully introduced and collected by John Paul Riquelme, 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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780374522070Author Roland BarthesFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint Anchor BooksPublisher Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc

" . . . the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." -Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism" . . . draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide...

Eric Griffiths delivered hundreds of lectures at the Faculty of English in Cambridge, yet his lectures were never turned into books. If Not Critical brings together ten lectures, published here for the first time, that offer a representative selection of...

Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extractsProvides a balanced and coherent overview of developments in the field...

Volumes 1 and 2 of Stuart Hall's Essential Essays are available as a set From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s,...

During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, coloniality emerged as a new structure of power as Europeans colonized the Americas and built on the ideas of Western civilization and modernity as the endpoints of historical time and Europe as the center of...

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...

Written between 1910 and 1929, Traces is considered Ernst Bloch's most important work next to The Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia. This book, which collects aphorisms, essays, stories, and anecdotes, enacts Bloch's interest in showing how...

Humanity has always used symbols-material objects used to denote difficult, abstract concepts-to describe thoughts and feelings, or to protect secret truths from common knowledge. This concise A-Z guide is a fascinating work of reference that brings to...

In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century-both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it-we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple...

Edited by Patricia Waugh, this comprehensive guide to literary theory and criticism includes 39 specially commissioned chapters by an outstanding international team of academics. The volume is divided into four parts. Part One covers the key...

John Sturrock's classic explication of Structuralism represents the most succinct and balanced survey available of a major critical movement associated with the thought of such key figures as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser theory. ...

French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is essential reading for students in departments of literature, history, sociology and cultural studies. His work on the institutions of mental health and medicine, the history of systems of knowledge,...