Literary theory

Realism seems to be everywhere, both as a trending critical term and as a revitalized aesthetic practice.

Originally published in 1970, John Lydgate sets out to restore a sense of perspective to the work of Lydgate, not by attributing a spurious modernity as a precursor of the Renaissance, but by accepting the fact that he is fundamentally medieval.

The first of its kind, this collection will explore the ways that literature and journalism have intersected in the work of American writers.

This volume is the first critical anthology of contemporary writings and illustrations about memory in Renaissance England.

Sidney Homan defines a pivotal line as "e;a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play .

This book offers a critical engagement with contemporary IR textbooks via a novel folklorist approach.

Studies on the aesthetic representations of atrocity the world over have taken different discursive dimensions from history, sociology, political to human rights.

This study presents a critique of social constructionist identity politics, which is distinguished from specific identity-based political positions, from within and with social constructionist commitments.

First published in 1957, Literary Criticism: A Short History traces our aesthetic heritage from its classical origins up to the contemporary state of criticism in the English-speaking world.

Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils offers a major theoretical statement of where poetic conventions come from.

The expression "e;litterature migrante,"e; coined by Quebecois critics in the mid-1980s, reflected the emerging body of literary works written by recent immigrants to the province.

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence.

Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature.

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal.

What is the political potential of poetry in the contemporary era?

Tobias Doring uses Postcolonialism as a backdrop to examine and question the traditional genres of travel writing, nature poetry, adventure tales, autobiography and the epic, assessing their relevance to, and modification by, the Caribbean experience.

The classic serial, invented by BBC Radio Drama sixty years ago, survived and adapted itself to television, the arrival of colour and the global market in what has become a flood of classics with all channels competing for ratings and overseas sales.

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's eclectic body of work from the perspective of his heterodox materialist arguments about the imagination, political reform, and the principle of life itself, and his contributions to Romantic-era science.

This cutting-edge collection of essays showcases the work of some of the most influential theorists of the past thirty years as they grapple with the question of how literature should be treated in contemporary theory.

These collected essays contain fundamental contributions to contemporary cultural analysis and theory as well as exemplary interpretations of film, literature and other media.

This book provides a complete guide to analyzing literary works, from an introduction of basic principles to the finer details.

Renaissance humanism takes as one of its subjects for inquiry the category of the human itself.

Jane Austen and Critical Theory is a collection of new essays that addresses the absence of critical theory in Austen studies-an absence that has limited the reach of Austen criticism.

Modernism and Its Environments surveys new developments in modernist studies inspired by ecocriticism and the environmental humanities.

An introductory guide to comedy in English literature that systematically applies comic theory to a wide range of texts from Chaucer to Bridget Jones's Diary.

Postcolonial Counterpoint is a critical study of Orientalism and the state of Francophone and postcolonial studies, examined through the lens of the historical and cross-cultural relations between France and North Africa.

In this fully updated second edition, the author clearly introduces and assesses all of Freud's thought, focusing on those areas of philosophy on which Freud is acknowledged to have had a lasting impact.

Ralph Cohen was highly regarded as the visionary founding editor of New Literary History, but his own theoretical essays appeared in such a scattering of publications that their conceptual originality, underlying coherence, and range of application have not been readily apparent.

The term 'cityscaping' is here introduced to characterise the creative process through which the image of the city is created and represented in various media - text, film and artefacts.

Wir interpretieren nicht nur Texte und haben dafür eine besondere „hermeneutische Kunst“ (Schleiermacher) entwickelt,  sondern wir interpretieren auch die Welt um uns.

First published in 1979, each volume contains a collection of essays on the novel drawn from periodicals which demonstrates the primary concerns of those discussing the nature and purpose of prose fiction in the period from 1830 to 1900.

This book uses narrative responses to the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a starting point for an analysis of notions of disaster, vulnerability, reconstruction and recovery.

This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction.

Critical theory meets Latin American fiction in this bold and challenging analysis of literature and literary criticism through post-structuralist analysis.

With its innovative narrative structure and its controversial explorations of race, gender and empire, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a landmark of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day.

Explores how literary laws and values illuminate and challenge the jurisdiction of justice and the law.

Magical realism has deep roots across many African languages and regions.

Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis.

This anthology explores the multitude of evidence for recognisable fairy tales drawn from sources in the much older cultures of the ancient world, appearing much earlier than the 17th century where awareness of most fairy tales tends to begin.

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory.