Literary Criticism - General

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) has been acclaimed as one of the finest British novelists of the late twentieth century. Four of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and one of them, Offshore (1979), won; her final work of historical fiction, The Blue Flower...

Since Aristotle, there has been an assumption that narrative is a representation of actions or sequences of events, that this representation aims to elicit emotions, and that well-formed narratives constitute a whole, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The nature, role, and...

Crowned "Prince of Poets" in his later years, Paul Verlaine stands out among the iconoclastic founders of French modernist verse. This diglot anthology offers the most comprehensive selection of Verlaine's poetry available in English translation.Verlaine's famous works are presented here alongside poems never previously...

In Romantic theories of art and literature, the notion of mimesis--defined as art's reflection of the external world--became introspective and self-reflexive as poets and artists sought to represent the act of creativity itself. Frederick Burwick seeks to elucidate this Romantic aesthetic, first by offering...

A critical approach to interactive fiction, as literature and game.Interactive fiction--the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure--has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known...

How the poet Robert Duncan and the artist Jess made the household part of their separate and collaborative creative practice."I'm a householder," the poet Robert Duncan once explained. "My whole idea of being able to work was to have a household." In this book,...

Can established humanities methods coexist with computational thinking? It is one of the major questions in humanities research today, as scholars increasingly adopt sophisticated data science for their work. James E. Dobson explores the opportunities and complications faced by humanists in this new era....

In Strange Natures, Nicole Seymour investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary...

"With contributions from so many of the most important cultural theorists and new theoretical perspectives of the Left in the 1980s, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture will stand as an intellectual monument to its times and be referred to for years to come."--William...

Agn鑚 Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This volume considers her production as a whole, revisiting...

Lawyers, like novelists, must use language that is precise, passionate, and real, in order to tell their stories clearly and persuasively. Richard Weisberg, one of the pioneers of the dynamic new Law and Literature movement, offers this lively collection of closely linked essays exemplifying...

This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.Author: L. GoddardISBN-10:...

Always connect--that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself--those messages that state: "There will be no more...

Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a...

Although known primarily as the irreverent but dazzlingly witty playwright who penned The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde was also an able and farsighted critic. He was an early advocate of criticism as an independent branch of literature and stressed its vital role...

If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, you'll undoubtedly find radio stations representing R&B/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format. American music has created an array of rival...

In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology's--and indeed today's--most distinctive...

Just as a traveler crossing a continent won't sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can't grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data newly available to us...

As the Christian doctrine of Incarnation asserts, "the Word became Flesh." Yet, while this metaphor is grounded in Christian tradition, its varied functions far exceed any purely theological import. It speaks to the nature of God just as much as to the nature of...

This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, L騅i-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault,...

Winner of the 2005 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. In Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, highly acclaimed poet and translator Daryl Hine brings to life the words of Hesiod and the world of Archaic Greece. While...

Humans have long turned to gardens--both real and imaginary--for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their...

Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our...

Leo Bersani's career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields--including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory. Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis...

Even as media in myriad forms increasingly saturate our lives, we nonetheless tend to describe our relationship to it in terms from the twentieth century: we are consumers of media, choosing to engage with it. In Feed-Forward, Mark B. N. Hansen shows just how...

What was the Enlightenment? Though many scholars have attempted to solve this riddle, none has made as much use of contemporary answers as Dan Edelstein does here. In seeking to recover where, when, and how the concept of "the Enlightenment" first emerged, Edelstein departs...

How is the internet transforming the relationships between citizens and states? What happens to politics when international migration is coupled with digital media, making it easy for people to be politically active in a nation from outside its borders? In Nation as Network, Victoria...

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art...

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and...

Organized by the elements of fiction and comprised primarily of writing exercises, this text helps students hone and refine their craft with a practical, hands-on approach to writing fiction.Author: Anne Bernays, Pamela PamelaISBN-10: 0205616887ISBN-13: 9780205616886Publisher: PearsonLanguage: EnglishPublished: 08/01/2009Pages: 472Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.35lbsSize: 9.16h x 6.96w...

Africa in Stereo analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890-2011) to offer a new cultural history attesting to pan-Africanism's ongoing and open theoretical potential. Tsitsi Jaji argues that African American popular music appealed...

An eclectic and seminal collection of poetry from the Tudor period Songs and Sonnets (1557), the first printed anthology of English poetry, was immensely influential in Tudor England and inspired many major Elizabethan writers, including Shakespeare. Collected by pioneering publisher Richard Tottel, it brought...

The Beautiful Legend of God contains the tenth and most significant book in the popular Indian epic Srimad Bhagavata Purana, which is the principal source for the story of Krishna, worshipped by many Hindus as the Supreme Being. Devoted to Krishna's miraculous incarnation, this...

Chaucer's longest complete poem is the supreme evocation of doomed courtly love in medieval English literature. Set during the tenth year of the siege of Troy, the poem relates how Troilus - with the help of Criseyde's wily uncle Pandarus - persuades her to...

This book examines the nature, sources, and implications of fallacies in philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it illustrates and evaluates various historical instances of this phenomenon. There is widespread interest in the practice and products of philosophizing, yet the important issue of fallacious reasoning...

A lively annual showcase of contemporary art and poetry. Features work by both established and emerging artists and writers. Art reviews. Book reviews. Full color. 54 pages. $12. Founded in 2007. Edited by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright. Online version at www.livemag.orgAuthor: Jeffrey Cyphers WrightISBN-10: 821815891XISBN-13:...

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian...

In his youth, Vladimir Nabokov aspired to become a landscape artist. Even though he eventually realized that his true vocation was literature, his keen sense of visual detail, nuanced perception of color, and vast knowledge of the fine arts are all manifest in his...

Written with verve and intensity (and a good bit of wordplay), this is the long-awaited study of Flaubert and the modern literary field that constitutes the definitive work on the sociology of art by one of the world's leading social theorists. Drawing upon the...

The volume traces the scope and development of Caryl Churchill's theatre from her early writing for radio and television, through her stage career of the 1970s and 1980s to her recent major success Far Away (2000). Making use of contemporary critical and feminist theory,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States,...

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at 'The Beginning' and concluding with 'The End', chapters range from the familiar, such as 'Character', 'Narrative' and 'The Author', to the more unusual,...

In cultures throughout human history people have believed that some part of themselves continued to exist after they died. Part of that belief is that living can influence what happens to the dead in the afterlife, and the dead can return from the afterlife...

A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medｬicine, 'I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me...

This lyrical drama was written about twenty-five years ago. It is based on the following story from the Mahabharata. In the course of his wanderings, in fulfilment of a vow of penance, Arjuna came to Manipur. There he saw Chitrangada, the beautiful daughter of...

"Tajkahayk" is probably one of the most foretelling Armenian political tracts of the 19th century, written on the eve of what came to be known as the "Armenian Question." Raffi, a gifted political and literary commentator, could see the clash between an emerging Armenian...

First published in Tbilisi (Georgia) in 1879, "The Golden Rooster" is the second and most popular in a trilogy of short novels by Raffi focusing on the ethos and social significance of the traditional Armenian merchant class of the Caucasus. With this trilogy Raffi...

Transnational Literature: The Basics provides an indispensable overview of this important new field of study and the literature it explores. It concisely describes the various ways in which literature can be understood as being "transnational," explains why scholars in literary studies have become so...

In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu questions the preeminent ideas of social anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss who stressed the structural principles governing human action rather than the actions themselves and, Bourdieu asserts, doesn't account for all observable nuances of behaviour. Drawing on...

Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Literature - Middle East, language: English, abstract: This is a narratological study of "God Dies by the Nile" (1985) and "Woman at Point Zero" (1982) by Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian female writer. The study...