Literary Criticism - General

Dionysus, god of dismemberment and sponsor of the lost or abandoned feminine, originates both Jungian psychology and literature in Remembering Dionysus. Characterized by spontaneity, fluid boundaries, sexuality, embodiment, wild nature, ecstasy and chaos, Dionysus is invoked in the writing of C. G. Jung and...

Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are one of the most important and original sources of modern political philosophy but the Prison Notebooks present great difficulties to the reader. Not originally intended for publication, their fragmentary character and their often cryptic language can mystify readers, leading to...

In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and violent A Child of the Jago, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle to survive among London's poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which...

This volume provides an accessible and engaging guide to the study of American dramatic literature. Designed to support students in reading, discussing, and writing about commonly assigned American plays, this text offers timely resources to think critically and originally about key moments on the...

Partners of the Imagination is the first in-depth study of the work of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy, partners in writing and cultural and political campaigns. Beginning in the 1950s, Arden and D'Arcy created a series of hugely admired plays performed at Britain's major...

Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the...

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media...

This book explores postcolonial myths and histories within colonially structured narratives which persist and are carried in culture, language, and history in various parts of the world. It analyzes constructions of identities, stereotypes, and mythical fantasies in postcolonial society. Exploring a wide range of...

Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and the insights it can provide into the writing process. Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world....

The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic...

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek offers a synoptic overview of Star Trek, its history, its influence, and the scholarly response to the franchise, as well as possibilities for further study. This volume aims to bridge the fields of science fiction and (trans)media studies,...

This collection provides an innovative and wide-ranging introduction to the world of Arthur by looking beyond the canonical texts and themes, taking instead a transversal perspective on the Arthurian narrative. Together, its thirty-four chapters explore the continuities that make the material recognizable from one...

Literature utters the unutterable, not through logic, not through science, not through argument, but through a pitch of eloquence so pronounced the conscientious reader cannot fail to pay attention. Louis Groarke argues that literature is an honorific term we use to describe texts that...

I entered the church...It struck me suddenly that all this crowd of men and women standing all round, these priests chanting and moving about the altar, were dead... Vernon Lee was a polymath whose copious writings include deeply learned studies of art, music, literature,...

By skillfully blending the principles of Marxism and Deconstructionism, this essay compellingly demonstrates the striking parallels between Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the prevailing complacency among modern-day Americans. While many readers readily recognize the overt resemblances, such as the omnipresent surveillance facilitated by screens (phones,...

Acclaimed British historian examines the layers of craft and insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's works and offers a...

Acclaimed British historian examines the layers of craft and insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's works and offers a...

Will Morrisey again considers the political dimensions of literary classics, as previously seen in Melville's Ship of State (2019). His attention to Shakespeare's comedies is a reader's and playgoer's delight. INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The Politic Character of Shakespeare's Comedy PART ONE: THREE REGIMES: OLIGARCHY, ARISTOCRACY,...

Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a...

Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a...

This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of culture and scholars of Russian philosophy gives for the first time a systematic examination of the development of Russian philosophy during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness...

Just as soon as it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. A mere four years separate the Beatles as mere kiddy culture from the artful geniuses of Sergeant Pepper's, meaning the very same band who represents the...

This expanded fourth edition defines and cross-references 9,040 homophones and 2,133 homographs (up from 7,870 and 1,554 in the 3rd ed.). As the most comprehensive compilation of American homophones (words that sound alike) and homographs (look-alikes), this latest edition serves well where even the...

Challenging existing methodological conceptions of the analytic approach to aesthetics, Jukka Mikkonen brings together philosophy, literary studies and cognitive psychology to offer a new theory on the cognitive value of reading fiction.Philosophy, Literature and Understanding defends the epistemic significance of narratives, arguing that it...

The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery reveals the way recent scholarship in the field of slavery studies has taken a more expansive turn, in terms of both the geographical and the temporal. These new studies perform area studies-driven analyses of the representation...

The rise of Creative Writing has been accompanied from the start by two questions: can it be taught, and should it be taught? This scepticism is sometimes shared even by those who teach it, who often find themselves split between two contradictory identities: the...

A Complete Guide to Literary Analysis and Theory offers an accessible introduction to all the current approaches to literary analysis. Ranging from stylistics and historicism to post-humanism and new materialism, it also includes chapters on media studies and screen studies. The Guide is designed...

Anthropocene Ecologies of Food provides a detailed exploration of cross-cultural aspects of food production, culinary practices, and their ecological underpinning in culture. The authors draw connections between humans and the entire process of global food production, focusing on the broad implications these processes have...

Katha Vilasam: The Story Within offers a path-breaking series of 50 articles by S. Ramakrishnan, published over the course of four years in the widely read Tamil magazine Ananda Vikatan, to a wider reading public through translation into English. The writing style is intentionally...

Economic growth is generally regarded by governments and most ordinary people as a panacea for all problems, including issues caused by the COVID pandemic. But this raises an important question: is further growth in advanced economies able to increase well-being once people's basic subsistence...

This collection of short essays provides a rigorous, rich, collaborative space in which scholars and practitioners debate the value of different methodological approaches to the study of life narratives and explore a diverse range of interdisciplinary methods. Auto/biography studies has been one of the...

Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego examines the corpus of writing of two contemporary female authors. Both writers are of African descent, live in Europe and write about lives across Europe and Africa in...

This book provides a complete guide to analyzing literary works, from an introduction of basic principles to the finer details. Separated into three sections, the book covers: - Principles-this looks at what literary analysis is, its three main components, and the various possible objects...

The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery reveals the way recent scholarship in the field of slavery studies has taken a more expansive turn, in terms of both the geographical and the temporal. These new studies perform area studies-driven analyses of the representation...

A well-written, powerful examination of America's racial legacies--Kirkus ReviewsArtress Bethany White has written a beautiful book that shimmers with bravery on every page. In tackling race, she interrogates and informs, startles and prods, and implicates us all--forcing us to see ourselves through multifaceted prisms...

Social commentators, psychologists, and journalists all point to the idea that in the new millennium, traditional masculinity is in crisis. In contemporary film and literature, this predicament is often portrayed as a problem of desire--particularly, heterosexual desire. Male libido, it appears, is especially vicious...

This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey's remarkable--and still provocative--early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis. Across a series of historically and philosophically contextualized readings, the...

An obsession with individual identity pervaded Western thinking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This critical study examines the concept of identity in the works of nineteenth century American and British authors, focusing especially on psychologically mad, vague, shifting and dualistic characterization. Authors...

This book looks at Rabindranath Tagore's, experiments and journey as an educator and the influence of humanistic worldviews, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in his philosophy of education. It juxtaposes the educational systems and institutions set up by the British colonial administration with Tagore's pedagogical vision...

Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the...

Franks and Lombards in Italian Carolingian Texts examines how historians of Carolingian Italy portrayed the history of the Lombards, Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom, and the presence of the Franks in the Italian Ppeninsula. The different contexts and periods in which these writers...

This is the first ecocritical book on the works of D. H. Lawrence and also the first to consider the links between nature and gender in the poetry and the novels. In his search for a balanced relationship between male and female characters, what...

When asked the question "what is the power of poetry?," writer Ian Williams said "poetry punctures the surface." Williams' statement-that poetry matters and that it does something-is at the heart of this book. Building from this core idea that poetry perforates the everyday to...

When asked the question "what is the power of poetry?," writer Ian Williams said "poetry punctures the surface." Williams' statement-that poetry matters and that it does something-is at the heart of this book. Building from this core idea that poetry perforates the everyday to...

Ever since I can remember, I drew pictures and wrote poems. I never bought greeting cards for special occasions, but created my own with original art and verses inside. I had no professional assistance about how or what to write, so my first attempts...

This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the...

Sindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller and motivational speaker known mainly for her autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, poetry and children's books. I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays that highlight her engagement with writing that span the...

Sindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller and motivational speaker known mainly for her autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, poetry and children's books. I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays that highlight her engagement with writing that span the...

Originally published in 1990. Many post-World War I autobiographies focus on episodes of crisis. In a century torn by global strife and breakdown of cultural institutions, autobiography provides a way of recovering from crisis and restructuring reality-a healing act that involves the writer in...

The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vital interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of diaspora studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores...