Semiotics & Theory

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

The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his...

Over the past decade, psychoanalysis has been a focus of continuing controversy for feminism, and at the centre of debates in the humanities about how we read literature and culture. In these essays, Jacqueline Rose continues her engagement with these...

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...

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant's groundbreaking "national sentimentality" project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and...

The Antigone myth in Western literature, art and thought.Book InformationISBN 9780192819345Author George SteinerFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University PressWeight(grams) 358gDimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm *...

This unique anthology brings together material from 38 well-known writers, artists, and scientists who attempt to describe the process by which original ideas come to them. Contributors include Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amy Lowell,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156027809Author Northrop FryeFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Houghton MifflinPublisher Houghton Mifflin

Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing's Machine: exploring certain signs and the...

A sweeping history of how writing has preserved cultural practices, traditions, and knowledge throughout human history.In How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, Walter Stephens condenses the massive history of the written word into an accessible,...

"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...

The importance of history has been powerfully reaffirmed in recent years by the appearance of major new authors, pathbreaking works, and fresh interpretations of historical events, trends, and methods. Responding to these developments, Roger Chartier...

Edward Said is perhaps best known as the author of the landmark study Orientalism, a book which changed the face of critical theory and shaped the emerging field of post-colonial studies, and for his controversial journalism on the Palestinian political...

Is Marx relevant any more? Why should we care what he wrote? What difference could it make to our reading of literature? Terry Eagleton, one of the foremost critics of our generation, has some answers in this wonderfully clear and readable analysis...

Interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and art - and other disciplines - is growing. In his new book Reflections on the Aesthetic: Psychoanalysis and the uncanny, Gregorio Kohon examines and reflects upon psychoanalytic understandings of...

Louise M. Rosenblatt's award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fields literary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction...

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...

The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty provides a balanced portrait of the intellectual relationship between these two men. Essays by leading scholars as well as selections from the primary texts of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir...

This Companion offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary movement that responds to a world reconfigured by climate change and its effects, from environmental racism and global migration to...

In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780804171632Author Peter MendelsundFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 510gDimensions(mm) 198mm *...

Is it possible to return the literary text in all its particularity to the centre of literary study, without going back to the 'words-on-the page' myopia of the past? That is the primary question which Literature in contexts engages with. In the 1980s...

Modernism is the movement which attempts to redefine the relationship between art and life, seeking to establish a mode of thought to account for new and radical practices in both realms. This anthology is a guide to the Modernist movement in literature...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and...

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...

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity-a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order...

In this introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, Ken Hirschkop presents a compact, readable, detailed, and sophisticated exposition of all of Bakhtin's important works. Using the most up-to-date sources and the new, scholarly editions of Bakhtin's texts,...

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...

Medical humanities and disability studies are disciplines at the cutting edge of innovative critical work in the study of health and disability, but to date there has been no book-length examination of the relationship between the two. Although each has...

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...

In this major intervention into the 'Asian Century', Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak challenges the reader to re-think Asia, in its political and cultural complexity, in the global South and in the metropole. Major work from one of the world's most...

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...

Originally published in 1994, Writing in the Air is one of the most significant books of modern Latin American literary and cultural criticism. In this seminal work, the influential Latin American literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar offers the most...

Eliot's Four Quartets is arguably the finest long poem in modern English literature. It is also one that presents considerable problems of interpretation. In Word Unheard, first published in 1969, Blamires aims to unravel some of these problems by...

Poetry criticism is a subject central to the study of literature. However, it is laden with technical terms that, to the beginning student, can be both intimidating and confusing. Philip Hobsbaum provides a welcome remedy, illuminating terms ranging from...