Semiotics & Theory

An exploration of Kerouac's fiction, poetry, religious writing, journals, and correspondence. It encompasses his fictional rewriting of his personal life, his life-long quest for spiritual enlightenment, and his resolute belief in the blending of popular...

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...

A beautifully illustrated history of the Queen of Flowers and her enduring power in our gardens, art, religion and imagination. 'Fascinating... I'll never look at a rose in quite the same way again.' Adrian Tinniswood The rose is bursting with...

What does it mean to lead a moral life? In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human...

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,...

Human beings have constantly told stories, presented events and placed the world into narrative form. This activity suggests a very basic way of looking at the world, yet, this book argues, even the most seemingly simple of stories is embedded in a...

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,...

Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. Tragedies echoed the brutalities and injustices of the time and mirror other features of the age. Exploration was opening up new worlds, the discoveries of science were rapidly expanding...

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 *...

The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his 1978 book...

`My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation,' Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in...

"My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects-persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship, unable to represent themselves in writing, or unable to offer...

Contemporary fiction is a wide and diverse field, now global in dimension, with an enormous range of novels and writers that continues to grow at a fantastic speed. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert Eaglestone provides a clear and engaging...

This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the work and thought of the highly influential twentieth-century critic and theorist Walter Benjamin. The volume provides examinations of the different aspects of Benjamin's work that have had a...

How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity Offering a bracing theoretical corrective to ecocriticism's emphasis on pedagogies of care and interconnection, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer...

Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city...

Acclaimed author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored and On KindnessA collection of literary essays like no other - exploring the deep connections between literature and psychoanalysis - from Britain's leading psychoanalyst.For Adam Phillips - as for...

"This definitive text is the single best work on Peirce's semeiotic (as Peirce would have spelled it) allowing scholars to extrapolate beyond Peirce or to apply him to new areas . . ." -Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy Newsletter". . ...

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 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 comprehensive and discriminating account of Tolkien's work has been revised and expanded, to take account both of recent developments in scholarship, and of the recent films directed by Peter Jackson. Tracing the development of Tolkien's creative...

How does a sign represent something other than itself? How do we understand the meaning of a written symbol? Can clothes be a sign? Can sounds? Signs and symbols represent ideas and objects and, over time, these marks and gestures have multiplied into...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The haunted doll has long been a trope in horror movies, but like many fears, there is some truth at its heart. Dolls are possessed-by our...

How a better understanding of genre leads to a better understanding of the biblical text.The Bible, with its gloriously rich diversity of ancient genres, demands a flexible and historically aware approach to genre. Different conceptions of narrative,...

What is a literature? How do literatures of different countries interact with each other? In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Beecroft develops a new way of thinking about world literature. Drawing on a series of examples and case studies, the book...

In this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong...

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 this absorbing volume, David Lodge turns his incisive critical skills onto his own profession, salutes the great writers who have influenced his work, wonders about the motives of biographers, ponders the merits of creative writing courses, pulls the...

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...

" . . . 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...

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering...

Gottlob Frege's UEber Sinn und Bedeutung (`On Sense and Reference'), has come to be seen, in the century since its publication in 1892, as one of the seminal texts of analytic philosophy. It, along with the rest of Frege's writings on logic and ...

Trauma and its aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra critically analyzes attempts by theorists and literary critics to come to terms with trauma and with the...

Mikhail Bakhtin was one of the twentieth century's most influential literary theorists. This accessible introduction to his thought begins with the questions 'Why Bakhtin?' and 'Who was Bakhtin?', before dealing in detail with his ideas on authorship and...

A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our livesWhy do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us...

What is the source of a book's perceived greatness and why do certain books become part of the accepted canon? This book presents a fresh perspective on these questions: against prevalent approaches, it explains a work's reputation in terms of its...

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.About the AuthorPeter Brooks is...

A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark...