Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), one of the most original and perceptive thinkers of the twentieth century, offered a unique insight into the profound impact of the media on modern society.
In this book, Janet Todd, one of the leading authorities on seventeenth- and eighteenth century women writers, discusses gender issues from the Restoration to Romanticism investigating women authors and the fascination with culturally privileged art and with heroic death.
In this timely book Janet Todd offers an analysis and defence of the feminist literary history practised by Elaine Showalter and other contemporary American literary critics.
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.
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.
An exploration of postapocalyptic fiction, from antiquity to today, and its connections to political theory and other literary genresThe literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction-stories set after civilization's destruction-is a long one, spanning the biblical tale of Noah and Hesiod's Works and Days to the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and many others.
Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales.
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.
A Best Book of the Year in HARPER'S BAZAAR, BBC, THE NEW YORKER, GLAMOUR, GAL-DEM and HUFFPOST'Witty and thought-provoking' Stylist'Blistering' Glamour'Unusual, original and strikingly contemporary' Guardian'Absolutely brilliant' Ruth Ozeki'A gripping contemporary fable about embracing difference' The Times'A wholly 21st century take on bloodsucking' ObserverLydia is hungry.
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 message of Virgil's Aeneid once seemed straightforward enough: the epic poem returned to Aeneas and the mythical beginnings of Rome in order to celebrate the city's present world power and to praise its new master, Augustus Caesar.
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.
Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class.
