New historicism and cultural materialism emerged in the early 1980s as prominent literary theories and came to represent a revival of interest in history and in historicising literature.
Meredith is a novelist whom many readers have discovered with excitement, drawn to his radical portrayal of social and personal relations, especially of gender.
The influence and reputation of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the greatest English political theorist and one of the greatest of all intellectuals, has never been higher than it is now.
This book examines how contemporary fantasy literature offers critical insights into western society and culture by drawing on the ancient myths of Wales.
Victims and the Postmodern Narrative suggests that reading and writing about literature are ways to gain an ethical understanding of how we live in the world.
An original and wide-ranging study of the mappings used to impose meaning on the world, Mapping Reality argues that maps create rather than merely represent the ground on which they rest.
Taking three terms from the letters of Paul as a thematic guide, Kevin Mills investigates the respective roles of faith, hope and love in language and interpretation, and uses them to uncover and to question some of the key assumptions in deconstructive and postmodernist discourse.
This is the first book to provide an account of the representation of emotional and sexual relationships between men across English literature from the Renaissance to the modern period.
This is a critical study of Friel's entire oeuvre, relating Friel's work to the problems of subjectivity, representation, history and the body, with a view to offering some placement of Friel in relation to both postmodernism and traditional humanism.
This work subjects the fundamental ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and their followers to an examination and demonstrates the baselessness of post-Saussurean claims about the relations between language, reality and self.
What does Peter Pan have to say about our conception of childhood, about how we understand the child's and our own relationship to language, sexuality, and death?
Arguing that there is a close relationship between aspects of the literature of Western spirituality and evolving ideas of the person, this book charts the interaction between literature and theology in producing certain historically-conditioned interpretations of what it means to be a person.
This book contains a lively and wide ranging collection of critical essays on Black women's writing from Afro-American, African, South African, British and Caribbean novelists, poets, short story writers and a dramatist.
The Nouveau Roman writers have been actively involved in the theory as well as the practice of fiction, participating in a series of vigorous debates on issues such as the political significance of literature, formalism and structuralism, the status of the author, etc.
This is a selection of papers on Russian literature of the Soviet period presented at the IVth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies in 1990.
In How Literature Works important issues of literary theory are vividly illustrated by application to a wide variety of texts, many quoted and discussed at length.
The introduction to a series of interdisciplinary titles, both monographs and essays, concerned with matters of literature, art and textuality within religious traditions founded upon texts and textual study.
English lit scholar Glenda Hudson examines Jane Austen's presentation of sibling love and rivalry in the context of the dramatic social and historical changes in the late 18th century--and also analyzes the incest motif in numerous works of the period.
The nine essays in this volume make significant contributions to the development of contemporary literary theory and demonstrate how a range of new approaches can be applied to modern British drama.