The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization.
Austen After 200 explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the first publication of her novels.
This is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare.
Written by teachers who are also at the forefront of the development of critical theory, The State of Theory offers a diversity of perspectives, both practical and theoretical, on the current state of literary studies in education.
Die Idylle steht im Spannungsfeld von Kitsch und Katastrophe, das Nils Jablonski durch medienkomparatistische close readings literarischer, filmischer und televisiver Texte untersucht.
The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious structures into an "e;event"e; that triggers, by virtue of a "e;cut,"e; an expected/unexpected resolution.
Victorian Narrative Technologies tells the story of how the British, who wanted nothing to do with the Suez Canal during the decades in which it was being internationally planned and invested, came to own it.
This book studies the way in which medieval ways of knowing the Oriental 'other' were constructed around the idea of a utopic East as located in the legend and Letter of Prester John (c.
Postcolonial Theories is a lively introduction to postcolonial theories, contexts and literatures which presents both the theory and practice to students in approachable and attractive ways.
This book investigates the thematic and conceptual dimensions of insidious trauma in contemporary eastern African literatures and cultural productions.
With reference to the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, this book offers a critical investigation into such epic issues as the end of art and the inherent laws of literature's evolution, while conflating the two into one major argumentation.
Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language.
For over two hundred years, the Gothic has remained fixed in the European and American imaginations, steadily securing its position as a global cultural mode in recent decades.
Mourning Freud analyses Freud's experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century.
In Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies, John Storey looks at the concept of utopianism from a cultural studies perspective and argues that radical utopianism can awaken the political promise of cultural studies.
Translation and Migration examines the ways in which the presence or absence of translation in situations of migratory movement has currently and historically shaped social, cultural and economic relations between groups and individuals.
Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities: Art, Literature and Urban Spaces explores phenomena of urban mapping in the discourses and strategies of a variety of postwar artists and practitioners of space: Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Buckingham, contemporary Situationist projects.
Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term "e;climate fiction"e; has paradoxically exhausted the term's descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance.
Develops a new psychoanalytic theory of genius, a concept that is often invoked and pervasive in popular culture but which is rarely scrutinized in depth.
This book explores how writers such as Amos Tutuola, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, VS Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Wole Soyinka came to be published in London in important educational series such as the Three Crown Series and African Writers Series.
The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works.