The works of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are widely acclaimed as being among the most original and provocative writings of twentieth-century critical thought, and have become required reading for scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines.
In its original formulation, culture' was intended to be an agent for change, a mission undertaken with the aim of educating the people' by bringing the best of human thought and creativity to them.
How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and SenegalSacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic's global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances.
Contemporary celebrations of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences often harbor a distrust of traditional disciplines, which are seen as at best narrow and unimaginative, and at worst complicit in larger forms of power and policing.
To probe the literary representation of the alienated mind, Lillian Feder examines mad protagonists of literature and the work of writers for whom madness is a vehicle of self-revelation.
A landmark work of literary criticismNorthrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is the magnum opus of one of the most important and influential literary theorists of the twentieth century.
Die ›Schwelle‹ ist Ausdruck des krisenanfälligen Grenzübergangs zwischen zwei oder mehreren Sphären mit ihren jeweils ganz eigenen, oftmals konträr zueinander-stehenden Welt- und Ordnungsvorstellungen.
A Companion to Rhetoric offers the first major survey in two decades of the field of rhetorical studies and of the practice of rhetorical theory and criticism across a range of disciplines.
Written in 1980, this novel by prize-winning Indian writer Mahasweta Devi, translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Sprivak, is remarkable for the way in which it touches on vital issues that have in subsequent decades grown into matters of urgent social concern.
The Performance of Reading argues that there are distinct analogies between "e;silent"e; reading and artistic performance, and so fashions the new role of the reader as performer.
John Sturrock s classic explication of Structuralism represents the most succinct and balanced survey available of a major critical movement associated with the thought of such key figures as L vi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser theory.
Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century.
TOO FAMOUS collects pieces Michael Wolff has written as a columnist for New York, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, GQ and The Hollywood Reporter, and adds several new ones.
Novelist, critic, lecturer, reviewer, man-about-conferences, David Lodge, as both analyst and practitioner, is one of our foremost experts in the forms of fiction.
Human consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping - even rediscovery - by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.
The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth.
Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites-supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums-that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century.
A radically new way of thinking about form and context in literature, politics, and beyondForms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today-how to connect form to political, social, and historical context.
In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory.
Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for NonfictionThe Cold War was not just a contest of power.
How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and SenegalSacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic's global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances.
How rhyme became entangled with debates about the nature of liberty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetryIn his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from "e;the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.
'Nobody writes like Sally Bayley' Lemn SissayFrom the brilliantly original and critically acclaimed Sally Bayley, a literary story of working class childhood, absent or broken men and the power of literature to save and rebuild a world.
Two simple yet tremendously powerful ideas that shaped virtually every aspect of civilizationThis book is a breathtaking examination of the two greatest ideas in human history.
From a leading figure in comparative literature, a major new survey of the field that points the way forward for a discipline undergoing rapid changesLiterary studies are being transformed today by the expansive and disruptive forces of globalization.
A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fictionNow praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics.
The first comprehensive look at how Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis shaped each otherNovel Relations engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.
