Semiotics & Theory

Because of their range, brilliance, and singularity, the ideas of the philosopher-critic-historian Michel Foucault have gained extraordinary currency throughout the Western intellectual community. This book offers a selection of seven of Foucault's most...

Everywhere today, we are urged to "connect." Literary critics celebrate a new "honesty" in contemporary fiction or call for a return to "realism." Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375725395Author Camille PagliaFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower...

The Bildungsroman is a genre novel whose territory is well traveled, that of a young and often alienated hero on the cusp of maturity, intent on discovering who he or she is and being true to that identity. The German word Bildung refers to forming and...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. We think we know the trench coat, but where does it come from and where will it take us? From its origins in the trenches of WW1, this military...

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,...

Christian Gauss Award ShortlistWinner of the ASAP Book PrizeA Literary Hub Book of the Year"Makes the case that the gimmick...is of tremendous critical value...Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag's best work."-Los Angeles Review of...

Francois Hartog explores crucial moments of change in society's "regimes of historicity," or its ways of relating to the past, present, and future. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck, and Paul Ricoeur, Hartog analyzes a broad range of texts,...

What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance understood characters as types. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind, in...

The surprising story of the relationship between experimental poetry and literary studies.In The Academic Avant-Garde, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews makes a provocative case for the radical poetic possibilities of the work of literary scholarship and lays out...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the...

Sex, more than just a part of our experience, troubles our conceptions of existence. Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, ancient and modern, philosophical and literary, Jean-Luc Nancy explores and upholds the form-giving thrust of the drive...

The degrading environment of the planet is something that touches everyone. This 2011 book offers an introductory overview of literary and cultural criticism that concerns environmental crisis in some form. Both as a way of reading texts and as a...

Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. Although he is well known for his avant-garde filmmaking, his garden, and his AIDS activism, he is also the author of over a...

From medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination, to the invention of aesthetic experience, to nineteenth-century decadent literature, and to early-twentieth century essayistic forms of writing and film, Niklaus Largier shows that...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking...

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...

This books ushers in a new way of talking about social phenomena. It develops an ontology of social objects on the basis of the claim that registration or inscription-the leaving of a trace to be called up later-is what is most fundamental to them. In...

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face...

From the earliest times, societies have been seduced by the temptation of unitary thinking. Recognizing the vulnerability of existence, people and cultures privilege regimes that confer authority on a single entity, a sovereign ruler, a transcendental...

John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary...

'An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.' Sylvia Townsend Warner There are many ways of telling the story of a life and how we've got to where we are. The questions of why and how we think the way we do...

Since the publication of Gender Trouble in 1990, Judith Butler has revolutionised our understanding of identities and the ways in which they are constructed. This volume examines her critical thought through key texts, touching upon such issues as:* The...

What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual...

'In our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding body of knowledge in its own right.' David LodgeThis anthology uses extracts from the works of the...

This is the first anthology and guide to the creative possibilities of critical writing. 'We murder to dissect' writes Wordsworth. It's a sentiment shared by many lovers of literature and art, as well as by artists and writers themselves. Too often...

A Literary Hub Favorite Book of the YearA New Statesman Book of the YearA provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism.Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found...

Realism is an essential concept in literary studies, yet for a variety of reasons it has not received the attention and clarity it deserves, often being dismissed as 'too slippery' to be of use. This accessible study remedies that failing for students...

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing offers readers an insight into the scope and range of perspectives that one encounters in this field of writing. Encompassing a diverse range of texts and styles, performances and forms, postcolonial...

A pervasive culture of confession, combined with the revolution in Internet-based communication, has crowded bookstores with autobiographies and biographies and generated an unprecedented amount of personal exposure. As columnists and reviewers tell us...

From "the man on whom nothing was lost," a unique guide to the elements of statecraft, presented through spirited interpretations of classic literary works "The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm," writes Charles...

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view. Known for his acuity...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the...

A century and a half after the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary thinking has expanded beyond the field of biology to include virtually all human-related subjects-anthropology, archeology, psychology, economics, religion, morality, politics,...

When it was first published, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge proved to be a seminal work in the psychoanalytic study of Faulkner's fiction, especially of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This softcover reissue of John Irwin's...

Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains in The Queer Child, where she examines children's strangeness, even some children's subliminal "gayness," in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of...

In this companion volume to "Iconology", the author extends his investigation to pictures - the concrete, representational objects in which images appear. Although we have many words about pictures, Mitchell notes that we do not yet have a satisfactory...

Published in 1977 as the first volume in the New Accents series, Structuralism and Semiotics made crucial debates in critical theory accessible to those with no prior knowledge of the field. Since then a generation of readers has used the book as an...