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Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Here is one of Thomas Hardy's most popular novels, soon to be released as a major motion picture in May 2015.I shall do one thing in this life one thing certain that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die'Independent and spirited, Bathsheba Everdene owns the hearts of three men. Striving to win her love in different ways, their relationships with Bathsheba complicate her life in bucolic Wessex and cast shadows over their own. With the morals and expectations of rural society weighing heavily upon her, Bathsheba experiences the torture of unrequited love and betrayal, and discovers how random acts of chance and tragedy can dramatically alter life's course.The first of Hardy's novels to become a major literary success, Far from the Madding Crowd explores what it means to live and to love.

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Book SynopsisPosthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent “turns” toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Essays examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life.Trade ReviewThis superb book haunts in all of the best and most disquieting ways: memories of a future already lost to ourselves, with writers who illuminate those registers of nonlife and postlife that arise when all of the living-on and living-through of humans has been exhausted or self-extinguished. The chapters serve as a chanting of rites to the nonhuman animal, to plants, to birds, to the inorganic, to the planet, to the ends of stories. -- Gregory Seigworth, Millersville University This splendid collection proposes a site of inquiry-critical life studies-that not only generates unexpected questions but offers invaluable perspectives on many obdurate philosophical topics that currently confront us regarding the posthuman, the inhuman, the inorganic, and the anthropocene. If, as the title of Isabelle Stenger's essay proposes, "Thinking Life: The Problem Has Changed," then these essays consider-in rigorous as well as ludic modes-what it may now mean to think life. -- Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times This collection of insightful and comprehensive essays resists the celebratory tone on the question of the posthuman and provides much-needed critical depth and analytic vigor. A necessary and novel contribution to the studies of life and biopolitics. -- Donna V. Jones, author of The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism and ModernityTable of ContentsPreface: Postscript on the Posthuman Introduction: Critical Life Studies and the Problems of Inhuman Rites and Posthumous Life, by Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook Part I. Posthuman Vestiges 1. Pre- and Posthuman Animals: The Limits and Possibilities of Animal-Human Relations, by Nicole Anderson 2. Posthumanism and Narrativity: Beginning Again with Arendt, Derrida, and Deleuze, by Frida Beckman 3. Subject Matters, by Susan Hekman Part II. Organic Rites 4. Therefore, the Animal That Saw Derrida, by Akira Mizuta Lippit 5. The Plant and the Sovereign: Plant and Animal Life in Derrida, by Jeffrey T. Nealon 6. Of Ecology, Immunity, and Islands: The Lost Maples of Big Bend, by Cary Wolfe Part III. Inorganic Rites 7. After Nature: The Dynamic Automation of Technical Objects, by Luciana Parisi 8. Nonpersons, by Alastair Hunt 9. Supra- and Subpersonal Registers of Political Physiology, by John Protevi 10. Geophilosophy, Geocommunism: Is There Life After Man?, by Arun Saldanha Part IV. Posthumous Life 11. Proliferation, Extinction, and an Anthropocene Aesthetic, by Myra J. Hird 12. Spectral Life: The Uncanny Valley Is in Fact a Gigantic Plain, Stretching as Far as the Eye Can See in Every Direction, by Timothy Morton 13. Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer, by Eugene Thacker 14. Thinking Life: The Problem Has Changed, by Isabelle Stengers Index

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Book SynopsisMore than 450 succinct entries from A to Z help readers make sense of the interdisciplinary knowledge of cultural criticism that includes film, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, poststructuralist, and postmodernist theory as well as philosophy, media studies, linguistics.

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Book SynopsisA classical historian confronts our crises of time, radically calling into question our relations to the past, present, and future.Trade ReviewSince his classic Mirror of Herodotus, Francois Hartog has emerged as the most significant theorist of history and chronicler of our changing relationship to our own past that France has produced. In this series of meditative chapters, he takes us from the Greeks to the present once more, emphasizing how the theory of history must move from diagnosing the modern gap between expectation and experience to confronting the exigency of historical crisis today. Hartog's reflections are valuable for all humanists. -- Samuel Moyn, Columbia University In a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in history's role in contemporary society, Francois Hartog shows how unexamined assumptions about the past shape our understandings of ourselves and our place in history. -- Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles Francois Hartog's pioneering work on the concept of 'regimes of historicity' makes this book a must for scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities. A distinguished classical historian, Hartog uses specific, well-chosen examples to explain how understanding regimes of historicity will allow us to better understand the conditions of possibility for producing histories and, more generally, our own relationship to time. -- Robert Morrissey, University of Chicago Francois Hartog is perhaps the most important historian of historiography today... Regimes of Historicity should be required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future writing of history. American Historical Review Regimes of Historicity should be required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future writing of history. Time's BooksTable of ContentsPresentism: Stopgap or New State? Introduction: Orders of Time and Regimes of Historicity Orders of Time 1 1. Making History: Sahlins's Islands 2. From Odysseus's Tears to Augustine's Meditations 3. Chateaubriand, Between Old and New Regimes of Historicity Orders of Time 2 4. Memory, History, and the Present 5. Heritage and the Present Our Doubly Indebted Present: The Reign of Presentism Notes Index

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Book SynopsisHow did early modern scholarsas exemplified by Leibnizsearch for their origins in the study of language?Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century scholars turned to languageetymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structurefor evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe. In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route tTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsConventions1. Grimaldi at the Gates of Muscovy (Fall 1689)2. Making the Worst of a Bad Assignment: Origines Guelficae and the Linguistic Project (Autumn 1690-Summer 1692)3. Building the Network (Winter 1691-Summer 1692)4. The Jesuit Search for an Overland Route to China (1685-1689)5. Seeking the Languages of Grand Tartary (August 1693-December 1694)6. Assembling Novissima Sinica (February-September 1695)7. Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld and Gothic Origins (November 1695-December 1697)8. The Grand Embassy of Peter the Great (Summer-Fall 1697)9. The Jesuits of Paris and China (1689, November 1697-March 1698)10. The Foundations of Modern Historical Linguistics (1697-1716)AcknowledgmentsAppendix I. "Desiderata circa linguas quorundam populorum"Appendix II. Plan for a Moscow Academy of Sciences and ArtsNotesBibliographyIndex of LettersGeneral Index

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Book SynopsisThe 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Encompassing a range of genres, it is geographically and culturally boundless and influenced by great novelists working in other languages. Michael Schmidt, choosing as his travel companions not critics or theorists but other novelists, does full justice to its complexity.Trade ReviewGiven the fluidity with which [Schmidt] ranges across the canon (as well as quite a bit beyond it), one is tempted to say that he carries English literature inside his head as if it were a single poem, except that there are sections in The Novel on the major Continental influences, too—the French, the Russians, Cervantes, Kafka—so it isn’t only English. If anyone’s up for the job, it would seem to be him… Take a breath, clear the week, turn off the WiFi, and throw yourself in… The book, at its heart, is a long conversation about craft. The terms of discourse aren’t the classroom shibboleths of plot, character, and theme, but language, form, and address. Here is where we feel the force of Schmidt’s experience as an editor and a publisher as well as a novelist… Like no other art, not poetry or music on the one hand, not photography or movies on the other, [a novel] joins the self to the world, puts the self in the world, does the deep dive of interiority and surveils the social scope… [Novels] are also exceptionally good at representing subjectivity, at making us feel what it’s like to inhabit a character’s mind. Film and television, for all their glories as narrative and visual media, have still not gotten very far in that respect, nor is it easy to see how they might… Schmidt reminds us what’s at stake, for novels and their intercourse with selves. The Novel isn’t just a marvelous account of what the form can do; it is also a record, in the figure who appears in its pages, of what it can do to us. The book is a biography in that sense, too. Its protagonist is Schmidt himself, a single reader singularly reading. -- William Deresiewicz * The Atlantic *[Schmidt] reads so intelligently and writes so pungently… Schmidt’s achievement: a herculean literary labor, carried off with swashbuckling style and critical aggression. -- John Sutherland * New York Times Book Review *If you want your books a bit quieter and more extensive chronologically, then do try poet Michael Schmidt’s 700-year history of the novel, The Novel: A Biography, which covers the rise and relevance of the novel and its community of booklovers in a delightful tale, not at all twice-told, that reminds us of exactly why we read. -- Brenda Wineapple * Wall Street Journal *A wonderful, opinionated and encyclopedic book that threatens to drive you to a lifetime of rereading books you thought you knew and discovering books you know you don’t. -- Rowan Williams * New Statesman *The Novel: A Biography is a marvel of sustained attention, responsiveness, tolerance and intelligence… It is Schmidt’s triumph that one reads on and on without being bored or annoyed by his keen generosity. Any young person hot for literature would be wise to take this fat, though never obese, volume as an all-in-one course in how and what to read. Then, rather than spend three years picking up the opinions of current academics, the apprentice novelist can learn a foreign language or two, listen, look and then go on his or her travels, wheeling this book as vade mecum. -- Frederic Raphael * Literary Review *In recent years, while the bookish among us were bracing ourselves for the bookless future, stowing our chapbooks and dog-eared novellas in secret underground bunkers, the poet and scholar Michael Schmidt was writing a profile of the novel. The feat itself is uplifting. Bulky without being dense or opaque, The Novel: A Biography belongs on the shelf near Ian Watt’s lucid The Rise of the Novel and Jane Smiley’s livelier user manual, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Taking as his guide The March of Literature, Ford Madox Ford’s classic tour through the pleasures of serious reading, Schmidt steers clear of the canon wars and their farcical reenactments. He doesn’t settle the question of whether Middlemarch makes us better people. He isn’t worried about ‘trigger warnings.’ And he doesn’t care that a Stanford professor is actively not reading books. Instead, with humor and keen insight, he gives us the story of the novel as told by practitioners of the form. The book is meant for ordinary readers, whose interest is not the death of theory or the rise of program fiction, but what Schmidt calls, in a memorable line, ‘our hunger for experience transformed.’ -- Drew Calvert * Los Angeles Review of Books *The Novel is one of the most important works of both literary history and criticism to be published in the last decade… The reason Schmidt’s book is so effective and important has to do with its approach, its scope, and its artistry, which all come together to produce a book of such varied usefulness, such compact wisdom, that it’ll take a lot more than a few reviews to fully understand its brilliant contribution to literary study… Here, collected in one place, we have the largest repository of the greatest novelists’ opinions and views on other novelists. It would take the rest of us going through countless letters and essays and interviews with all these writers to achieve such a feat. Schmidt has done us all a great, great favor… Maybe the most complete history of the novel in English ever produced… [A] multitudinous achievement… Schmidt [is] an uncannily astute critic… Schmidt’s masterpiece… Schmidt’s writing is a triumph of critical acumen and aesthetic elegance… [The Novel] is a monumental achievement, in its historical importance and its stylistic beauty… It is, itself, a work of art, just as vital and remarkable as the many works it chronicles. -- Jonathan Russell Clark * The Millions *Rare in contemporary literary criticism is the scholar who betrays a love for literature… How refreshing, then, to encounter in Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography not a theory of the novel, but a life. And what a life it is… Schmidt arranges his examination both chronologically and thematically, taking into account the influences and developments that have shaped the novel for hundreds of years. The Novel is at once encyclopedia, history, and ‘biography.’ …[Schmidt’s] lyrical prose weaves together literary analysis, biography, and cultural criticism… Another delightful aspect of The Novel consists of the surprising and insightful connections Schmidt finds among writers… The Novel is more revelatory (and interesting) than a merely chronological account would be. -- Karen Swallow Prior * Books & Culture *[Schmidt] is a wonderful and penetrating critic, lucid and insightful about a dizzying range of novelists. -- Nick Romeo * Daily Beast *Show[s] how much is to be gained by the application of unfettered intelligence to the study of literature… Schmidt seems to have read every novel ever published in English… This is as sensitive an appreciation of Fielding’s style (all those essayistic addresses to the reader that introduce each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones) as any I’ve ever read. And what Schmidt does for Fielding he does equally well for Ford Madox Ford, Mary Shelley, and (by my count) about 347 others… [Schmidt’s] sensibilities are wholly to be trusted. -- Stephen Akewy * Open Letters Monthly *I was left breathless at Michael Schmidt’s erudition and voracious appetite for reading. -- Alexander Lucie-Smith * The Tablet *[Schmidt] has written what claims to be a ‘biography’ of the novel. It isn’t. It’s something much more peculiar and interesting… Illuminating and fascinating. And because the book makes no pretense to objectivity, the prose is engaging and witty… [A] marvelous book… If there is a future for encyclopedic books ‘after’ the internet, this is a model of how it should be done. -- Robert Eaglestone * Times Higher Education *The title and the length of Michael Schmidt’s book promise something more than an annotated chronology. This is not a rise of, nor an aspects of, nor even a theory of, the novel, but a nuanced account of the development of an innovative form… Schmidt’s preferences are strong and warm. He admires a range of authors from Thomas Love Peacock and Walter Scott to Anthony Burgess and Peter Carey… The Novel: A Biography incidentally provides the material for one to make a personal re-reading list. -- Lindsay Duguid * Times Literary Supplement *[Schmidt] prove[s] his wide-ranging reading tastes, his ability to weave a colorful literary tapestry and his conviction that the novel is irrepressible. * Kirkus Reviews *If focusing on the events surrounding one novel isn’t enough, or is too much, Michael Schmidt offers an eclectic variety in The Novel: A Biography. At 1,160 pages, this hefty volume features 350 novelists from Canada, Australia, Africa, Britain, Ireland, the United States, and the Caribbean and covers 700 years of storytelling. But Schmidt does something different: while the book is arranged chronologically, the chapters are theme-based (e.g., ‘The Human Comedy,’ ‘Teller and Tale,’ ‘Sex and Sensibility’) and follow no specific outline, blending author biographies, interviews, reviews, and criticism into fluid narratives… This is a compelling edition for writers and other readers alike; a portrayal that is aligned with Edwin Muir’s belief that the ‘only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.’ -- Annalisa Pesek * Library Journal *I toast a certainty—the long and fruitful life of poet, critic, and scholar Michael Schmidt’s book, The Novel: A Biography. Readers for generations will listen through Schmidt’s ear to thrilling conversations, novelist to novelist, and walk guided by Schmidt through these 1200 pages of his joyful and wise understanding. -- Stanley MossMichael Schmidt is one of literature’s most ambitious champions, riding out against the naysayers, the indifferent, and the purse holders, determined to enlarge readers’ vision and rouse us all to pay attention. Were it not for his rich and adventurous catalogue of publications at Carcanet Press, and the efforts of a few other brave spirits at other small presses (such as Bloodaxe Books) the landscape of poetry in the U.K. would be depopulated, if not desolate. He has now turned his prodigious energies to telling the story of the novel’s transformation through time: a Bildungsroman of the genre from a persevering and unappeasable lover. -- Marina Warner

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewWinner of the 2015 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association Winner of the 2016 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture, Media Ecology Association One of Flavorwire's 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2015 "Challenging and original."--Michael Wood, London Review of Books "This impressive, innovative book connects art and politics by way of forms."--Andrew Sturgeon, Flavorwire, from "10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015" "Levine proposes a fresh way to think of formalism in literary studies... To illustrate her methodology, Levine turns her sights in many directions, from 19th-century classics by writers such as Dickens to contemporary television (The Wire). Throughout, Levine's prose is lucid and engaging."--Choice "Forms is a genuinely interdisciplinary book, and Levine exhibits considerable ambition and intellectual dexterity in her integration of different disciplinary perspectives."--Gregory Tate, Review of English StudiesTable of ContentsPreface ix Acknowldgements xv I Introduction The Affordances of Form 1 II Whole 42 III Rhythm 49 IV Hierarchy 82 V Network 112 VI The Wire 132 Notes 151 Index 169

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Book SynopsisTraces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts – infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism – in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida’s work.Trade Review"In this impressive book, Kevin Attell changes our understanding of Giorgio Agamben. From now on we will have to see Agamben's work, from the very beginning, as in dialogue with Derrida. As a result an important thinker becomes still more significant to the shape of contemporary European theory." -- -Simon During University of Queensland "Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction is an enormously ambitious book covering the breadth of Giorgio Agamben's writings, from his earliest work on potentiality and discourse up through his later political and theological writings. Attell's interpretations, informed by vast philosophical erudition, presenting independent interpretations of all the texts that he treats, are paradigms for work on theory. This is one of the highest caliber works of theory or continental philosophy to appear in a long time." -- -Joshua Kates Indiana University "This remarkably rigorous, lucid, and open-minded study details the important differences between Agamben and Derrida, something many would regard as minor variants in a similarly deconstructive model, but which Derrida's late seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign affirm to be profound. Attell meticulously traces the trajectories of Derrida's and Agamben's careers, demonstrating in an elegant and textually based fashion the incisive nature of Agamben's engagement with Derrida, how so many of Agamben's major themes-potentiality, sovereignty, ban, messianic time, play and profanation, and the animal-could be considered as critical, indeed polemical, responses to Derrida's philosophical project. The strong distinction between Agamben's and Derrida's (and Benjamin's and Schmitt's) notions of messianic time is particularly dazzling." -- -Eleanor Kaufman University of California, Los AngelesTable of ContentsIntroduction: An Esoteric Dossier Part One: First Principles 1. Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure Overture: "Before the Law" Semiology and Saussure Semiology and the Sphinx 2. "The Human Voice" Introduction to Origin of Geometry Speech and Phenomena Infancy and History Excursus: Agamben and Derrida Read Benveniste Language and Death 3. Potenza and Differance Dunamis and Energeia Dunamis and Adunamia Writing and Potentiality Part Two: Strategy without Finality or Means without End 4. Sovereignty, Law, and Violence Abandoning the Logic of the Ban Means and Ends: Reading the "Critique of Violence" 5. Ticks and Cats Machines Bios and Zoe Heidegger and the Animal 6. A Matter of Time Prophet or Apostle Nun, jetzt Aufhebung Messianic Nun, jetzt Aufhebung Messianic

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Book SynopsisIn this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon.Trade ReviewThis is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent. -- Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and UsBarbara Carnevali's concept of 'social aesthetics' is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social 'taste' than in terms of ideology, or economics, or identity. -- Blake Gopnik, author of WarholOscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader of this book will not fail to be convinced that 'appearances' are constitutive of society. -- Eva Illouz, author of The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative RelationsEvery sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it’s as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it’s new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of ReadingTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsProloguePart I. Appearing: On the Aesthetic Foundations of Social Life1. Life as a Spectacle: Self-Display, Reflexivity, and Artifice2. Masks and Clothes: Medial Surfaces and the Dialectic of Appearing3. Aesthetic Mediation: A Theory of Representations4. Figures: Social Images5. Out of Control: The Alienated ImagePart II. Vanity and Lies: On the Hostility Toward Appearances6. “Vanity Fair”: The Frivolity of Worldliness7. Against the Mask: The Rise of Social Romanticism8. Against the Spectacle: The Crusade of Romantic Anticapitalism9. Against Aesthetic Values: Aestheticism, Aestheticization, and Staging10. Two Baptisms and a Divorce: Homo Economicus Versus Homo AestheticusPart III. Toward a Social Aesthetics: On the Sensible Logic of Society11. The Opening: Aesthetic Foundations of the Common World12. Aisthesis: Senses and Social Sensibility13. Social Taste and the Will to Please14. Aesthetic Labor and Social Design: The Value of Appearances15. Prestige and Other Magic SpellsConclusion: Social Immaterialism or the Philosophy of Andy WarholAfterwordAppendix: Illustrations Mentioned in the TextNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA literary critical and historical chronicle of womens culture in the United States from 1830 to the present, by a leading Americanist.Trade Review“The Female Complaint advances and refines the relationship between intimacy and publicity in ways that suggestively rethink the category of individuality in late capitalism. . . . The Female Complaint is an uncannily hopeful book, finding value and possibility in a wholly nonredemptive account of convention.” - Jordan Alexander Stein, GLQ“Berlant sounds like your smartest and bitchiest friend—and the insights just keep coming.” - Heather Love, Women’s Review of Books“Some of the most important essays on U.S. culture produced during the past decade appear in The Female Complaint.” - Shirley Samuels, Novel“The Female Complaint is a tour de force, a bracing read for feministand postmodernist students of popular culture, as well as for genretheorists.” - Linda Seidel, Journal of Popular Culture“The affective pleasure of reading The Female Complaint emerges from its unwillingness to sacrifice either incisive political critique that challenges the limits of women’s culture or textured formal accounts of the powerful emotional experience its texts provide for its consumers. . . . Theoretically ambitious and cogently argued, funny and invigorating, Berlant’s text promises to profoundly reshape how we think about sentimentality, gender, and affect in American culture.” - Margaret Ronda, American Book Review“Guiding us through a ‘women’s culture’ animated by scenes of longing for a fantasmatic commonality, an ever-elusive normativity, Lauren Berlant illuminates, in readings unfailingly subtle and wise, the psychic negotiations and emotional bargaining that women in U.S. culture conduct to be part of an ‘intimate public.’ More dazzlingly still, she addresses what the business of sentimentality works to obscure: the possibility of political agency in the face of a cultural machinery that makes us feel helpless to do anything more than affirm our ability to feel. To read The Female Complaint is to realize how long and how much it’s been needed.”—Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive“Lauren Berlant’s voice is as unmistakable as Ella Fitzgerald singing scat. By turns seductive and bracing, gentle and wise, reassuring and disorienting, The Female Complaint asks readers to take mass-mediated women’s culture seriously. By the end of this absorbing book, you will understand the importance of living better clichés, why love requires amnesia, and how banality can be therapeutic. You will also have an irresistible craving to watch Now, Voyager one more time, in whatever setting enables you to thrive, and to give this fascinating book to someone who deserves to love better, or to forgive herself for just getting by.”—Mary Poovey, New York University“Of all the feminist cultural theorists whom I admire, Lauren Berlant is the one I consider to be the most theoretically innovative and politically inspiring. Yet this book exceeded even my highest hopes and expectations. Refusing to dodge the really searching political questions for contemporary American culture, Berlant maps the tricky terrain of the intimate public sphere. She has written a phenomenal study of breathtaking scope. I have no doubt that scholars and students will continue to debate the issues it raises for many years to come.”—Jackie Stacey, University of Manchester"The essays take as a beginning the 'women's culture' of the eighteen-thirties, which, Berlant argues, was the U.S.’s first 'intimate public,' a mass-market culture premised upon a shared emotional world among its consumers. They go on to consider novels, films, musicals, and cultural moments whose emotional excesses reinforce an attachment to the suffocating conditions of an all-American fantasy: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Show Boat, John Stahl’s film Imitation of Life, the memorialized deaths of Princess Diana and J.F.K., Jr. . . . Sentimentality isn’t finished with us yet, though may its fantasies be met not with finger-wagging—a favored sentimental mode!—but sustained analysis. Now is the summer of our female complaint! Which, if you have the fortune of being a woman, is every summer." -- Lauren Michele Jackson * The New Yorker *“The Female Complaint advances and refines the relationship between intimacy and publicity in ways that suggestively rethink the category of individuality in late capitalism. . . . The Female Complaint is an uncannily hopeful book, finding value and possibility in a wholly nonredemptive account of convention.” -- Jordan Alexander Stein * GLQ *“The Female Complaint is a tour de force, a bracing read for feminist and postmodernist students of popular culture, as well as for genre theorists.” -- Linda Seidel * Journal of Popular Culture *“Some of the most important essays on U.S. culture produced during the past decade appear in The Female Complaint.” -- Shirley Samuels * Novel *“The affective pleasure of reading The Female Complaint emerges from its unwillingness to sacrifice either incisive political critique that challenges the limits of women’s culture or textured formal accounts of the powerful emotional experience its texts provide for its consumers. . . . Theoretically ambitious and cogently argued, funny and invigorating, Berlant’s text promises to profoundly reshape how we think about sentimentality, gender, and affect in American culture.” -- Margaret Ronda * American Book Review *Table of ContentsPreface vii Introduction: Intimacy, Publicity, and Femininity 1 1. Poor Eliza 33 2. Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat 69 3. National Brands, National Body: Imitation of Life 107 4. Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation 145 5. Remembering Love, Forgetting Everything Else: Now, Voyager 169 6. "It's Not the Tragedies That Kill Us, It's the Messes": Femininity, Formalism, and Dorothy Parker 207 7. The Compulsion to Repeat Femininity: Landscape for a Good Woman and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 233 Overture/Aperture: Showboat 1988—The Remake 265 Notes 281 Bibliography 319 Index 347

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Book SynopsisReading across archives, canons, and continents, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. She argues that Western liberal ideology, African slavery, Asian indentured labor, colonialism and trade must be understood as being mutually constitutive.Trade Review"This is a challenging book, which should be read by all those interested in the history of capitalism and the formation of the social sciences. ...There is much to enjoy in each of these chapters, especially, the dialectical interweaving of liberal conceptions and their negation, and the careful delineation of context and claim. Ultimately, however, the book is a dissection of liberalism and its fractured and fracturing presence in the modern world." -- John Holmwood * Theory, Culture & Society *"Lisa Lowe’s ambitious new book is a reminder of the deft footwork now required of anyone attempting to negotiate this tricky terrain. In The Intimacies of Four Continents she aligns herself with postcolonial scholars like Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton, or Nayan Shah who have each provided a distinctive take on how ‘the “intimate” sphere of sexual, reproductive, or household relations’ served as ‘a site of empire’.” -- David Glover * New Formations *"[An] important asset to anyone interested in not just themes of colonialism, labour, trade, and slavery, and of Chinese Canadian prairie history respectively, but also critical methodologies—of how to read intimately for relations between people and communities and in relation across time and space—in order to grasp the possibilities of knowing that lie among what has been assumed unknowable, erased, or forgotten." -- Stephanie Fung * Canadian Literature *"Among the many fascinating contributions of the book, I found one of the most arresting to be Lowe’s suggestion in her voluminous discursive footnotes that contemporary neoliberalism, with its emphasis on 'human capital' around the world, needs to be linked with its prehistory of racialized commodification of people. For that insight alone, Lowe’s panoramic study is more than worth reading." -- Samuel Moyn * Canadian Journal of History *"Reading The Intimacies of Four Continents will change the way we look at global (and national) histories forever." -- Etsuko Taketani * Journal of American History *"The Intimacies of Four Continents will undoubtedly remain a touchstone text for those working...and struggling against those operations that continue to pronounce colonial divisions of humanity at once globally and in their local, regional, and differential instantiations." -- Hossein Ayazi * Qui Parle *"[A] work crucial for thinking not only about the history of modernity and empire but also about our enduring and decisive enterprise as readers." -- Harrod J Suarez * MELUS *Table of Contents1. The Intimacies of Four Continents 1 2. Autobiography Out of Empire 43 3. A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities 73 4. The Ruses of Liberty 101 5. Freedoms Yet to Come 135 Acknowledgments 177 Notes 181 References 269 Index 305

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Book SynopsisThis book will be of interest to anyone-in any discipline-who takes the past as a serious object of study.Trade Review. . . seminal . . .—Dublin Review of BooksTable of ContentsForeword, "All You've Got Is History," by Michael S. RothPreface to the Fortieth-Anniversary EditionPrefaceIntroduction. The Poetics of HistoryPart One: The Received Tradition1. The Historical Imagination between Metaphor and Irony2. HegelPart Two: Four Kinds of "Realism" in Nineteenth-Century Historical Writing3. Michelet4. Ranke5. Tocqueville6. BurckhardtPart Three: The Repudiation of "Realism" in Late Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of History7. Historical Consciousness and the Rebirth of Philosophy of History8. Marx9. Nietzsche10. CroceConclusionBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisCritical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to approach our relationship with other animals from the critical or left tradition in political and social thought. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of animal rights, the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order. The contributions highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of social power, mass violence, and domination, from capitalism and patriarchy to genocide, fascism, and ecocide. Contributors include well-known writers in the field as well as scholars in other areas writing on animals for the first time. Among other things, the authors apply Freud's theory of repression to our relationship to the animal, debunk the Locavore movement, expose the sexism of the animal defense movement, and point the way toward a new transformative politics that would encompass the human and animal Trade ReviewThis book breaks new ground in both critical theory and the ethics debate surrounding the mistreatment and domination of animals by humans. An indispensable collection for anyone interested in these areas of social critique, these essays sketch a comprehensive alternative to the prevailing strands of neo-Marxist and liberal philosophies. -- David Ingram, Loyola University, ChicagoSanbonmatsu has done the field of animal studies a great service by bringing together this rewarding collection of critical interventions. Just as feminist and phenomenological thinking injected needed doses of existential and hermeneutic sensitivity into the first wave of predominantly analytic animal ethics, so Critical Theory and Animal Liberation now joins pragmatism in projecting ethico-political engagement and socio-economic guidance across the new wave of animal theory. -- Ralph R. Acampora, Hofstra UniversityThis is an engaging analysis of some of the key issues in animal/human liberation, which makes it clear how connected the oppression of animals is to the oppression of other humans. All of the authors wonder how we can be sensitive to human suffering yet blind to animal suffering. The truth is, we cannot, or must not any longer. This book fulfills a long-awaited mandate demanding a deep change of view. I commend it highly. -- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of AnimalsContributors examine how our hidden, institutionalized violence to animals, epitomized by industrial farming and laboratory experimentation, coexists with spectacles of human-caused suffering, degradation and destruction of animals in “visible but not seen” forms, such as circuses and road kill....Critical Theory and Animal Liberation looks not only at the obviously hidden suffering of animals on industrial farms and in laboratories but at the plight of animals who suffer and die openly in front of our eyes through human causation. * Karen Davis, President, United Poultry Concerns *Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, edited by John Sanbonmatsu, knits together a wide range of intersectional and interdisciplinary voices from across the spectrum of Critical Animal Studies. Nuanced and multifaceted, this text succeeds in applying critical perspectives in political and social thought to the problem of our relationship with other animals..../Critical Theory and Animal Liberation/ is an invaluable text for scholars and students of a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. In particular, this book is a must-have for anyone studying or writing within the burgeoning field of Critical Animal Studies. Perhaps the most compelling achievement of this text is its instrumental role in opening up new debates around critical, 'left' classical and contemporary Marxist and posthumanist thought all while sidestepping the popular currents in apolitical, mainstream animal studies. In addition, this book offers a first ambitious step into an uncharted territory -- moving away from the liberal ethics on which most animal 'rights' theory has, since its inception, been built. * Journal for Critical Animal Studies *Due to its exercise of deepening the critique of oppression and its potential to inspire a vision of the social world made whole, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is a highly recommended read. * Humanimalia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I. Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Chapter 1: Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity and Welfare Problems Karen Davis Chapter 2: Road Kill: Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Dennis Soron Chapter 3: Corporate Power, Ecological Crisis, and Animal Rights Carl Boggs Part II. Animals, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School Chapter 4: Humanism = Speciesism?: Marx on Humans and Animals Ted Benton Chapter 5: Reflections on the Prospects for a Non-Speciesist Marxism Renzo Llorente Chapter 6: Thinking With: Animals in Schopenhauer, Horkheimer, and Adorno Christina Gerhardt Chapter 7: Animal is to Kantianism as Jew Is to Fascism: Adorno's Bestiary Eduardo Mendieta Part III. Speciesism and Ideologies of Domination Chapter 8: Dialectic of Anthropocentrism Aaron Bell Chapter 9: Animal Repression: Speciesism as Pathology Zipporah Weisberg Chapter 10: Neuroscience (a Poem) Susan Benston Chapter 11: Everyday Rituals of the Master Race: Fascism, Stratification, and the Fluidity of "Animal" Domination Victoria Johnson Part IV. Problems in Praxis Chapter 12: Constructing Extremists, Rejecting Compassion: Ideological Attacks on Animal Advocacy from Right and Left John Sorenson Chapter 13: "Green" Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of the Local Vasile Stanescu Chapter 14: After MacKinnon: Sexual Inequality in the Animal Movement Carol Adams Chapter 15: Sympathy and Interspecies Care: Toward a Unified Theory of Eco- and Animal Liberation Josephine Donovan Note Index About the Editor and Contributors

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Grave takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, Allison C. Meier has spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for her, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reverent, or permanent. While the indigent and unidentified have frequently been interred in mass graves, a fate brought into the public eye during the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice today is not unlike burials in the potter's fields of the colonial era. Burial is not the only option, of course, and Meier analyzes the rise of cremation, green burial, and new practices like human composting, investigating what is next for the grave and how existing spaces of death can be returned to community life.Object Lessons Trade ReviewBeautifully written and filled with empathy and insight, Grave is a rumination over the how and why of human burial, complete with a slew of little known historical tidbits pulled together from years of the author’s fascination with the topic. It should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in funerary history, especially in the United States. * Paul Koudounaris, author of Heavenly Bodies, Memento Mori, and Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses *A thorough, insightful survey of the past, present, and future of the grave, and how humanity has grappled with the many problems and possibilities it represents. With compassion and an uncommon eye for detail, Allison Meier examines how the grave has functioned as a site of social inequality for centuries, and how a mixture of new technology and a revival of older practices may enliven cemeteries as sites of renewed community meaning. * Bess Lovejoy, author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses (2016) *Table of Contents1. The Grave: Our House of Eternity 2. Navigating Through Necrogeography 3. The Living and the Dead 4. The Privilege of Permanence 5. An Eternal Room of Our Own 6. No Resting Place 7. To Decay or Not to Decay 8. New Ideas for the Afterlife 9. Dead Space Notes Index

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Book SynopsisWhat is literary theory? Is there a relationship between literature and culture? In fact, what is literature, and does it matter? These are some of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler in this Very Short Introduction to literary theory. Often a controversial subject, said to have transformed the study of culture and society in the past two decades, literary theory is accused of undermining respect for tradition and truth and encouraging suspicion about the political and psychological implications of cultural projects rather than admiration for great literature. Here, Jonathan Culler explains ''theory'', not by describing warring ''schools'' but by sketching key ''moves'' theory has encouraged, and speaking directly about the implications of theory for thinking about literature, human identity, and the power of language. In this new edition Culler takes a look at new material, including the ''death of theory'', the links between the theory of narrative and cognitive science, trauma theory, ecocriticism, and includes a new chapter on ''Ethics and aesthetics''. This lucid introduction is useful for anyone who has wondered what all the fuss is about or who wants to think about literature today.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.Trade ReviewReview from previous edition It is impossible to imagine a clearer treatment of the subject, or one that is, within the given limits of length, more comprehensive. Culler has always been remarkable for his expository skills, and here he has found exactly the right method and tone for his purposes. * Sir Frank Kermode *A must read for all literature students. * Bookwise *Table of Contents1. What is theory? ; 2. What is literature and does it matter? ; 3. Literature and cultural studies ; 4. Language, meaning, and interpretation ; 5. Rhetoric, poetics, and poetry ; 6. Narrative ; 7. Performative language ; 8. Identity, identification, and the subject ; 9. Ethics and aesthetics ; Appendix: Theoretical schools and movements ; References ; Further Reading ; Index

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Book SynopsisThis treatise argues that literary criticism must re-establish connections to a wide range of social activities. It sets out a new type of criticism, called ecological literary criticism, which aims to make humanistic studies more socially responsible.

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Book SynopsisA new edition issued in paperback of the critically acclaimed biography of Charles Sanders Peirce.Trade Review[P]eirce himself displayed both logical brilliance and serious moral weaknesses, as Brent's narrative so vividly illustrates. This is one of the central, tragic paradoxes of Peirce's life and thought, and Joseph Brent has done a superb job of exposing and exploring it.15.3 Sept. 1994 * American Journal of Theology and Philosophy *Peirce (1839, 1914) is America's most creative, dominant, and original philosopher. Yet the first book-length biography of the founder of pragmatism was not published until 75 years after his death: Elisabeth Walther's Charles Sanders Peirce: Leben und Werk (Baden—Baden, 1989). Now we have the first American biography, and a superb book it is. The 35 years Brent expended in making this biography have seasoned and enriched his definitive production. (The telling of Peirce's story, like his life, has been fraught with malversation. Some day the story of telling his story will be told.) Here, the facts of Peirce's life are integrated into the systematization that he hoped would for a long time to come [influence] the entire work of human reason. From fields as diverse and powerful as semiotics, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, psychology, linguistics, geology, philosophy of science, mathematics, and religion, these effects are being acknowledged. The role of Peirce's life in the chronological development of his ideas structures this narrative and gives an expositional argument for a solid interpretation of his philosophy as a single architectonic system. Five chapters of the biography cover in chronological order 75 years of Peirce's life. The sixth and last, a brilliant essay The Wasp in the Bottle, could alone make this work a masterpiece. Indiana University Press is also publishing a complete edition, Writings of Charles S. Peirce (1982— ; v.1, CH, Feb'83). Six volumes are published of 30 expected. (The project, this year, is in a struggle for continued support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.) From the published volumes, IUP has now issued the first of a projected two—volume sampler: The Essential Peirce, containing 25 well—edited, important works written by Peirce from 1867 to 1893, with an excellent introduction by Nathan Houser, associate editor of the Peirce Edition project. From Harvard University Press comes Peirce's Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898, Reasoning and the Logic of Things. The text, taken from the Houghton Library collections for the purpose of a study edition, is without the critical editorial work of the IUP editions. The 50 pages of comment by Hilary Putnam are of interest in themselves; the 160 pages of Peirce's eight lectures are demonstrations of the authority and originality of his thought. Here is a generally accessible and complete account of Peirce's mature work constructed by Peirce himself in order to introduce his philosophy to nonspecialists. This book in an undergraduate library would make Peirce's philosophy intelligible independently of philosophy courses and philosophy teachers. Each of these books is well published and contains effective notes and an adequate index. This reviewer's highest recommendation is for Brent's biography, which should be in every college and university library in America. The next priority is Reasoning and the Logic of Things, a new and valuable addition to Peirce primary sources presently available. Libraries not subscribing to the complete Writings. . .should certainly order The Essential Peirce.September 1993 -- K. J. Dykeman * Fairfield University *

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Book SynopsisIt is impossible to imagine contemporary critical theory without the work of Michel Foucault. His radical reworkings of the concepts of power, knowledge, discourse and identity have influenced the widest possible range of theories and impacted upon disciplinary fields from literary studies to anthropology. Aimed at students approaching Foucault''s texts for the first time, this volume offers:* an examination of Foucault''s contexts* a guide to his key ideas* an overview of responses to his work* practical hints on ''using Foucault''* an annotated guide to his most influential works* suggestions for further reading.Challenging not just what we think but how we think, Foucault''s work remains the subject of heated debate. Sara Mills'' Michel Foucault offers an introduction to both the ideas and the debate, fully equipping student readers for an encounter with this most influential of thinkers.Table of Contentsintroduction Why Foucault?; Part 1 Key Ideas; Chapter 1 Foucault’s intellectual and political development; Chapter 2 Power and institutions; Chapter 3 Discourse; Chapter 4 Power/Knowledge; Chapter 5 The body and sexuality; Chapter 6 Questioning the subject; Chapter 7 After Foucault;

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Book SynopsisFrom the birth of crime writing with Wilkie Collins and Dostoevsky, through Conan Doyle to the golden age of crime, with the rise of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, P. D. James brings a lifetime of reading and writing crime fiction to bear on this personal history of the genre. There are chapters on great American crime writers - the likes of Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. James also discusses many of her favourite famous detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe. P.D. James, the bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberley, Children of Men and The Murder Room, presents a brief history of detective fiction and explores the literary techniques behind history''s best crime writing.

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabate combines art, science, and autobiography to share his fascination with peeling paints and rusty metal sheets. Rust, he concludes, is a place where things living, built, and remembered commingle.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewRabate counters our instinctively negative view of rust with a surprisingly wide variety of examples drawn from philosophy as well as the arts and sciences for a strikingly and broadly convincing argument as to the merits of rust … Rabate presents rust as an imperfection with unlimited possibilities. He clarifies its role in our lives and complicates how we value its role. He brings readers his family rouille recipe and the news that someday soon, science may give us a green rust capable of cleaning our water and soil … He provides plenty of food for thought as we run into these references across daily life. * PopMatters *This is a witty, delightfully eclectic fantasy and fugue on the theme of rust, which, it turns out, is a perfect metaphor for an aesthetics of metamorphosis in and after modernism. Rust has the ruddy glow of active thinking in the process of self-transformation. Rust not only doesn’t sleep, it never stops giving off sparks. * Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA *Through his elegant alchemical associations, Rabaté spins Rust to gold. * Vanessa Place, artist and criminal defense attorney *Rust has its fascinating moments, those deeply poetic instants where metaphor becomes real and you get a tiny glimpse of the wonder that can reside inside seemingly ordinary items. * San Francisco Book Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. How to Live with Global Rust 2. Hegel and Ruskin, from the Inorganic to the Organic 3. Interlude: Blood-work 4. Rats and Jackals, Kafka after von Hofmannsthal 5. Aesthetics of Rust Conclusion: Fougères to Marseilles: Green Rust or Edible Rouille? Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection of beautiful Persian love poetry is richly illustrated with images from the British Museumâ s world-famous collection.

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Book SynopsisIrwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story-the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together.Trade ReviewThis is a fine book... Irwin has travelled far and profitably, indeed, into the history of chess, into geometry and algebra, into mythology, into alchemy, into the culture of labyrinths, and more besides. -- John Sturrock Times Literary Supplement [Irwin] has probed the labyrinthine depths principally of Poe and Borges, using the analytic tools of Jung, Lacan, and Derrida, and a score of other psychological interpreters of fiction... The result is dazzling. America [A] learned, capacious, and ultimately amazing book. Virginia Quarterly Review

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Book SynopsisThis combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion-across generations-of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure."Trade ReviewIn the ideal writing program where criticism and creative writing imply, sustain, and nourish one another, Allen Grossman's ' Summa Lyrica' would be required reading. Alan Shapiro

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Book Synopsis* This is a unique testimony to one of the most important literary friendships of our time. Robbe-Grillet, the master of the nouveau roman, considered Barthes, France s greatest postwar literary theorist and critic, as one of his very few true friends.Trade Review"The warmth of friendship between the two is palpable, with some comic teasing: 'Roland speaks quietly,' Robbe-Grillet says. 'I don't speak quietly,' Barthes objects. 'You don't speak quietly,' his friend ripostes, 'but you take the precaution of always having a cigarette between your lips, which, as you know [...] doesn't allow you to shout things out.' The modern literary event-goer wonders melancholically: où sont les Gitanes d'antan?" Steven Poole, The Guardian "The book's arrival in English should be embraced as a challenge to the many reductions of 'French theory' to a mausoleum of movements, -isms, and masterable ideas. A disapporving critic once called Barthes the Pierre Laval to Robbe-Grillet's Marshal Pétain, but this volume shows them to be eels - not quite a pair, not easy to catch, but always electric." Times Literary Supplement "The image of Robbe-Grillet lying in the bath reciting texts by Barthes that he has learned by heart is only one of many unexpected delights of this extremely engaging little book. The dialogue between Barthes and Robbe-Grillet at Cerisy - friendly fencing - teaches much about each of them." Jonathan Culler, Cornell University "Robbe-Grillet describes his friendship with Barthes as a literary love affair without intimacy: 'un certain type de rapport amoureux'. This paradox is traced in its complexity and mystery through the four brief texts of this collection in which the novelist explores the different phases of his relationship with his most eminent critic, laying bare their shared vulnerability and fragility in a way which compels the reader's attention." Christina Howells, University of OxfordTable of ContentsForeword by Olivier Corpet viiWhy I love Barthes, 1978 1Roland Barthes's choice, 1981 51Yet another Roland Barthes, 1995 61I like, I don't like, 1980 77Translator's Notes 81

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Book SynopsisBy exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, Philosophy of Literature gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of literary works.Trade Review"The image Lamarque offers is an extremely attractive one, and it reminds us of why this is such an exciting and important field. The Philosophy of Literature is a smart, original, and erudite book, and it deserves to be widely read. Philosophers of literature will not be able to live without it." (John Gibson, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol 68, 2010) "Peter Lamarque's splendid and informative book, The Philosophy of Literature ... is brimful with insights into the nature of literature, and into the debates between philosophers interested in literature, and I cannot imagine anyone failing to learn from it." (Simon Blackburn, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 50, 2010) "[Lamarque] is always admirably clear and the rich use of literary sources in this work to illustrate the philosophical arguments also makes the book generally compelling reading. From this viewpoint, the work deserves a wide readership and may be highly recommended not just to others working at the cutting edge in this field, but also to students at all levels of university study and research and to the general educated reader." (David Carr, Analysis Reviews Vol 69, Number 3, July 2009) "In its entirety, Lamarque’s book is a comprehensive study which is admirably sensitive to literary art. His philosophical analyses and the clarifying interplay between the philosophy of literature and literary criticism have significance not only to philosophers but literary critics, too. Beyond this, Lamarque has the gift of treating complicated and subtle philosophical theories in a lucid and intelligible way… [B]esides introducing the central issues in the philosophy of literature the book also gives an extensive historical survey on the topics, which will make it very useful for teaching. Philosophy of Literature is a work which advances strong theses and simultaneously pays respect to opposing views. Whether or not the reader agrees with the main conclusions of the work, Lamarque’s lucid arguments are nourishment for the brain." (Philosophy & Literature, vol 33, 2009) "Lamarque presents a thoughtfully measured approach to a potentially overwhelming topic." (CHOICE, March 2009) "Appropriately for a book that presents itself as an introduction to the field, Lamarque gives a historical overview of various sub-topics in the philosophy of literature as well as supplementary readings for each chapter." (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March 2009) "An excellent introduction to the philosophy of literature or as an additional text for aesthetics or literature modules." (Times Higher Education Supplement)Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgements xi 1 Art 1 2 Literature 29 3 Authors 84 4 Practice 132 5 Fiction 174 6 Truth 220 7 Value 255 Bibliography 297 Index 314

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Book SynopsisMoses and Monotheism brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research on the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work.Table of ContentsIntroduction Karen Feldman and Gilad Sharvit “Why [the Jews] have Attracted this Undying Hatred” Richard Bernstein “Geistigkeit”: A Problematic Concept Joel Whitebook Heine and Freud: Deferred Action and the Concept of History Willi Goetschel Freud’s Moses: Murder, Exile, and the Question of Belonging Gabriele Schwab A Leap of Faith into Moses: Freud’s Invitation to Evenly Suspended Attention Yael Segalovitz Freud, Sellin, and the Murder of Moses Jan Assmann Creating the Jews: Mosaic Discourse in Freud and Hosea Ronald Hendel Is Psychic Phylogenesis only a Phantasy? New Biological Developments in Trauma Inheritance Catherine Malabou Moses and the Burning Bush: Leadership and Potentiality in the Bible Gilad Sharvit Notes List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAimed at students and readers of poetry at all levels, The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry takes a tour through a galaxy of examples, demonstrating how to come to terms with poetry's verbal, formal, emotional, and conceptual power. It shows how reading poems enhances our enjoyment and understanding of life.Trade Review'One of the advantages this book will have over competitors in the field is that its tone and approach are grounded in practical experience of introducing challenging texts to readers who are relatively inexperienced with (and not a little afraid of) poetry. Andrew Hodgson's guide manages to make reading poetry continuously exciting without sacrificing difficulty. Consistently literary, it makes the literary available rather than austerely or arcanely remote. Above, all students will listen because the advice is presented without condescension as if from a writer addressing fellow-practitioners. I will certainly be recommending this book to my first-year close readers and I am sincerely heartened by the fact that, published by Cambridge University Press, it is set to become a standard text.' Josie Billington, University of Liverpool'Any student of poetry, not just beginners, should find this book helpful and encouraging. Its tone is amiable but not condescending, its range of themes and examples is generous, and its insights are sensible, interesting and smart.' Michael Ferber, University of New HampshireDeeply thoughtful and superbly eloquent, this is the most inspiring guide to the study of poetry that I've ever encountered. It's an introduction and a masterclass at once. Like the literature it illuminates, this book has riches to offer readers of every kind. Refusing bullet points and jargon, refusing to flatten or over-simplify, Hodgson takes us seriously. Opening up conversation at every turn, he encourages us to embrace poetry in all its exhilarating complexity and to feel it changing our minds. He looks carefully under the microscope at rhyme and metre, form and voice, and – inseparably – he makes a powerfully sustained argument for the transformative presence of literature in our lives. … In sum it's as idiosyncratic, argumentative, stylish, loving and generally human as literature is and textbooks aren't.' Alexandra Harris, University of Birmingham'Hodgson's guide is lucid, learned, and just plain useful. He patiently and precisely describes the pleasures and value of reading and writing about verse. Filled with a wide selection of well-wrought exempla and some well-culled insights from poets themselves, the book beautifully describes why poetry matters and how it works. Like the best poets, Hodgson thinks and feels deeply about words.' Stephen Dobranski, Distinguished University Professor, Georgia State University'This is an incredibly useful, accessible guide for anyone interested in sharpening their appreciation of poetry. Andrew Hodgson's book manages to be engaging and friendly, even when introducing potentially intimidating topics like metre and scansion, without ever patronising the reader or reducing the complexity of the ideas raised. He also never loses sight of the fact that students need to discover their own reasons for engaging with poetry, beyond the mundane demands of university assessment. Through its series of wide-ranging and lucidly explored examples, his book inspires a further plunge into poetic history, by reminding us that poetry is a vital record of the diversity of human experience, rather than a rarefied separation from it.' Dr Sarah Parker, Loughborough University'… the book's language is accessible, lucid, and direct, rarely dipping into undefined poetic jargon. As such, The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry would be useful for technical communicators looking to reintroduce themselves to the act of reading poetry critically, or even those looking for a way to write a guide for difficult and diffuse subjects with clarity.' Dylan Schrader, Technical CommunicationTable of ContentsIntroduction: Reading Poetry; 1. Reading a Poem; 2. Studying a Poet; 3. Writing about Poetry; Epilogue: What Should You Read?; Glossary of Common Forms and Genres; Further Reading.

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Book SynopsisFrom his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall''s most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall''s later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci''s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular cTrade Review"Anyone whose work is informed, 'in the last instance,' by Cultural Studies will find much that is helpfully familiar in it as well as new connections, new applications, new ways of '[penetrating] the disorderly surface of things to another level of understanding,' as Hall says, invoking Marx, in the epilogue. This seems especially urgent as the ascendancy of the far Right coincides with the wholesale neoliberalization of the humanities, as Hall predicted in his 'Theoretical Legacies' lecture. It is obviously not a question of 'going back' to Hall for a truer or more 'authentic' form of Cultural Studies than that in practice today. But there is much in his legacy that illuminates the dynamics of the present, and much to put into dialogue with contemporary scholarship and practice. Morley's collection reminds us how important it is for genuine intellectual work to articulate competing and contradictory paradigms together, to work, as Hall did, from the points of contestation and conflict rather than seek solace in abstractions. This, finally, is the 'essential' in the essays assembled here." -- Liane Tanguay * American Book Review *“Along with the other volumes that Duke University Press has published, these two books of collected essays are to be welcomed. They allow us to see a fertile mind in action, engaged in and with the real world. It is a model well worth emulating.” -- Michael W. Apple * Educational Policy *"I have also narrated the effort it took for me to access his work to illustrate the importance of the Selected Writings now being released by Duke University Press. It is an event of profound historical significance that a new generation will be able to begin its political and theoretical education with systematic access to Hall’s writing. . . . The two-volume Essential Essays shows the broad scope of his work." -- Asad Haider * The Point *"It was one of Hall’s unique gifts to offer analysis of the moment as it unfolded before our eyes. I am sure I am not alone in having found his talks exhilarating in ways I could never quite understand, given that the news he relayed with such energy was almost unremittingly dire. Hall offered his readings as interpretation and self-commentary, tracing his own intellectual path." -- Jacqueline Hall * New York Review of Books *Table of ContentsA Note on the Text vii Acknowledgments ix General Introduction 1 Part I. Prologue: Class, Race, and Ethnicity 1. Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1986] 21 Part II. Deconstructing Identities: The Politics of Anti-Essentialism 2. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities [1991] 63 3. What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture? [1995] 83 4. The Multicultural Question [1998] 95 Part III. The Postcolonial and the Diasporic 5. The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power [1992] 141 6. The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen [1996] 185 7. Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad [1999] 206 Part IV. Interviews and Reflections 8. Politics, Contingency, Strategy: An Interview with David Scott [1997] 235 9. At Home and Not at Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back [2008] 263 Part V. Epilogue: Caribbean and Other Perspectives 10. Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life [2007] 303 Index 325 Place of First Publication 341

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Book SynopsisRaymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler's work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler's invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighborhoods and private worlds. But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.Trade ReviewFredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. -- Terry EagletonNot often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you'd always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books *Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today . it can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him. -- Colin MacCabeThe most muscular of writers. * Times Literary Supplement *Even the most anti-Marxian among us, [will] find ourselves compelled, if not to accept the book's intricate hypotheses, at least to accord them an ungrudged admiration for the brilliance of their formulation and the serene and quietly convinced tone in which they are advanced. -- John Banville * New York Review of Books *The small length of Jameson's book adds a tightness to its arguments and the style is often Chandler-esque: words are not wasted, literary observations are pin-sharp and there are some wry aperçu. Winningly, Jameson occasionally employs the genre's rhetoric, so his theorising becomes the pursuing of "lines of enquiry", a "procedure", etc. It's touches like this that make Jameson such a joy to read -- Cornelius Fitz * 3AM Magazine *

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Book SynopsisHayden White is widely considered to be the most influential historical theorist of the twentieth century. The Ethics of Narrative brings together nearly all of White''s uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing a lesser-known side of White: that of the public intellectual. From modern patriotism and European identity to Hannah Arendt''s writings on totalitarianism, from the idea of the historical museum and the theme of melancholy in art history to trenchant readings of Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi, the first volume of The Ethics of Narrative shows White at his most engaging, topical, and capacious.Expertly introduced by editor Robert Doran, who lucidly explains the major themes, sources, and frames of reference of White''s thought, this volume features five previously unpublished lectures, as well as more complete versions of several published essays, thereby giving the reader unique access to White''s late thought. In addition tTrade ReviewThe Ethics of Narrative is a significant posthumous collection of Hayden White's writings. Those of us who care about White will be grateful to Doran for so conscientiously undertaking this legacy groundwork. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Hayden White, History, and the Ethics of Narrative 1. The Problem with Modern Patriotism 2. Symbols and Allegories of Temporality 3. The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity 4. Catastrophe, Communal Memory, and Mythic Discourse: The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society 5. Figura and Historical Subalternation 6. The Westernization of World History 7. On Transcommunality and Models of Community 8. Anomalies of the Historical Museum or, History as Utopian Space 9. Figural Realism in Witness Literature: On Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo 10. The Elements of Totalitarianism: On Hannah Arendt 11. The Metaphysics of Western Historiography: Cosmos, Chaos, and Sequence in Historiological Representation 12. Historicality as a Trope of Political Discourse: Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics 13. Exile and Abjection 14. The Dark Side of Art History: On Melancholy 15. Against Historical Realism: A Reading of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace

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Book SynopsisWinner of the H.R.F. Keating Award for best biographical/critical book related to crime fiction, and nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe and Macavity Awards for Best Critical/Biographical book.Ninety crime writers from the world's oldest and most famous crime writing network give tips and insights into successful crime and thriller fiction.Howdunit offers a fresh perspective on the craft of crime writing from leading exponents of the genre, past and present. The book offers invaluable advice to people interested in writing crime fiction, but it also provides a fascinating picture of the way that the best crime writers have honed their skills over the years. Its unique construction and content mean that it will appeal not only to would-be writers but also to a very wide readership of crime fans.The principal contributors are current members of the legendary Detection Club, including Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Peter James, Peter Robinson, Ann Cleeves, Andrew Taylor, Elly Griffiths, Sophie HTrade Review'Aspirant crime writers will relish the tips in Howdunit'—Barry Forshaw, Financial Times ‘A must-read for fans of crime writing and would-be authors alike.’—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine ‘There can be few people in the country who know more about crime fiction than Martin Edwards.’—On Magazine

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Book SynopsisA New Statesman essential non-fiction book of 2021Featured in Book Riot''s 12 best nonfiction books about Black identity and historyA Times Higher Education Book of the Week2022 Finalist for the Prose Awards (Media and Cultural Studies category)Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren't there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile threadsometimes it's tied into a noosethat connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism. Blackface examines that history and provides hope for a future with new performance paradigms. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewExamines Hollywood’s painful, enduring ties to racist performances. * Variety *Sharp … In explicitly laying out the history and costs of blackface performance, [Ayanna Thompson] fully meets her stated aim of offering an accessible book that constitutes part of an ongoing "arc toward justice." * Times Higher Education *Blackface reveals a legacy of performance that is pointed and detrimental, known but purposely forgotten. Thompson’s analysis is exquisite and exact. A new entry for the historical record. * Ibram X. Kendi, Founding Director, Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, and author of How to Be An Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning *Essential! This is a lucid, engaging, and long overdue exorcism of American culture's greatest haunt. * Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Associate Director, Playwriting MFA program, Hunter College, CUNY, USA, recipient of the Obie Award for Best New American Play (Appropriate, An Octoroon) and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Gloria, Everybody) *A truly eye-opening, defiant, must-read. * West End Best Friend *Wide-ranging and hard-hitting… a passionate, well-informed, and gripping read… another triumph for Object Lessons. * New York Journal of Books *This is great book, brave and clear, with excellent analyses and memorable arguments and examples. * Aleks Sierz *For Ayanna Thompson, the Arizona-based author of a new book titled Blackface, understanding the present moment requires exploring the past, including ways systemic racism is rooted and reflected in blackface performance … Drawing examples from popular culture and performance history, Thompson expertly dismantles various defenses of blackface minstrelsy. * City Sun Times *Crisp and clearly argued. * The Sydney Morning Herald *Table of Contents1. Why write this book? 2. Megyn Kelly, Justin Trudeau, or [fill in another public figure’s name] 3. What is blackface? 4. Why does blackface exist? Because of Uppity Negros, of course! 5. What is the legacy of blackface? The impact on white actors 6. What is the legacy of blackface? The impact on black actors 7. Conclusion: I can’t breathe Index

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Book SynopsisThe Cahiers Series continues its exploration of translation in all its aspects with this fascinating account of how a writer can translate beloved images into words.

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Book SynopsisJill Jarvis examines the crucial role that writers and artists have played in cultivating historical memory and nurturing political resistance in Algeria, showing how literature offers the unique ability to reckon with colonial violence and to render the experiences of those marginalized by the state.Trade Review“Decolonizing Memory is a remarkable account of literature as a form of witnessing and the aesthetic as the primary register for imagining the unthinkable. Presented with elegance and a keen attention to language, the book locates Algeria at the center of the traumas of the twentieth century and demonstrates how literature could push back against the politics of silence promoted by the state. This is postcolonial scholarship at its best—theoretically sophisticated and historically grounded.” -- Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University“Jill Jarvis's comparative study of Algeria, which engages with Arabic materials alongside the French, is very impressive. Meeting a significant demand in the field, Decolonizing Memory is a strong addition to Francophone studies, memory studies, and postcolonial studies and it will appeal to all those interested in the relationship between justice and the literary.” -- Ranjana Khanna, author of * Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present *“By engaging with literary works that span decades and continents, Decolonizing Memory is a useful text to think with across disciplinary lines. . . . By arguing that literature occupies a special place in the analysis of colonialism, Jarvis entreats scholars in other fields to take lit­erature seriously.” -- Meghan Tinsley * French History *“Decolonizing Memory is a promising contribution to the flourishing research being done in the field of Memory Studies, that is challenging the Western and in this case the French politics of testimony from the postcolonial point of view.” -- T. S. Kavitha * Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy *“Jarvis offers her readers a compelling theoretic work. . . . Her text marks a significant contribution to Francophone literary theory at a time when Algeria is experiencing a new chapter in its history, with both its citizens and its writers continuing the fight for justice as they hope for a brighter future.” -- Mildred Mortimer * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Decolonizing Memory is a welcome contribution to the emerging field of postcolonial memory studies. A theoretically sophisticated intervention in debates about the representation of violence and collective trauma in colonial and postcolonial settings. . . ." -- Olivia C. Harrison * MLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. The Future of Memory 1 1. Remnants of Muslims 27 2. Untranslatable Justice 63 3. Mourning Revolt 98 4. Open Elegy 141 Conclusion. Prisons without Walls 168 Notes 197 Bibliography 255 Index 267

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Book SynopsisIn Stolen Life—the second volume in his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages with the work of thinkers ranging from Kant to Saidiya Hartman, undertaking an expansive exploration of blackness as it relates to black life and the collective refusal of social death.Trade Review"It's this spirit of the collective effort of study and exchange and resonance, the effort to keep the channels open and keep listening, that has made Moten (or, maybe, 'Moten/s') such a celebrated thinker. At the end of sentences like these, you want to say something like Amen." -- Jess Row * Bookforum *"At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten’s trilogy has reinvented both. . . . In its mixture of theoretical complexity and disarming directness, Moten’s beautifully written trilogy offers the sheer pleasure of art." -- Lidija Haas * Vulture *"My favorite book(s) of 2018 are the three volumes of Fred Moten’s consent not to be a single being, individually titled Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. In this collection of essays stretching back fifteen years, Moten challenges the reader to imagine a radically interconnected aesthetic and political sphere that stretches from Glenn Gould to Fanon to Kant to Theaster Gates, sometimes in the space of a single sentence. This trilogy is one of the great intellectual adventures of our era." -- Jess Row * Bookforum *"2018 must go down for me as the year of Fred Moten’s trilogy: Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. You could say they’re essays about art, philosophy, blackness, and the refusal of social death, but I think of them more as a fractal universe forever inviting immersion and exploration, a living force now inhabiting my bookshelf." -- Maggie Nelson * Bookforum *"consent not to be a single being, titled after a phrase of Édouard Glissant’s, ranges across an impressive number of disciplines: black studies, performance studies, aesthetics, phenomenology, ontology, ethnomusicology, jazz history, comparative literature, critical theory, etc. Without announcing its intervention as interdisciplinary–Moten deftly renders discipline beside the point. . . . Taken together, the series amounts to a powerful argument for black study—as an analytic, an impetus, a mode, the collective shout from a radical vista, whose bellow requires nothing less than 'passionate response' (Moten 2003)." -- Mimi Howard * boundary 2 *"Whether reading his poetry or theory, listening to his lectures, Moten will change how you think about almost everything." -- Melissa Chadburn * Literary Hub *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Preface ix 1. Knowledge of Freedom 1 2. Gestural Critique of Judgment 96 3. Uplift and Criminality 115 4. The New International of Decent Feelings 140 5. Rilya Wilson, Precious Doe, Buried Angel 152 6. Black Op 155 7. The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out) 161 8. Seeing Things 183 9. Air Shaft, Rent Party 188 10. Notes on Passage 191 11. Here, There, and Everywhere 213 12. Anassignment Letters 227 13. The Animaternalizing Call 237 14. Erotics of Fugitivity 241 Notes 269 Works Cited 297 Index 309

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Book SynopsisThe first critical study of writing without language In recent years, asemic writing—writing without language—has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Yet this burgeoning, fascinating field has never received a dedicated critical study. Asemic fills that gap, proposing new ways of rethinking the nature of writing.Pioneered in the work of creators such as Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly, asemic writing consolidated as a movement in the 1990s. Author Peter Schwenger first covers these “asemic ancestors” before moving to current practitioners such as Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, and Christopher Skinner, exploring how asemic writing has evolved and gained importance in the contemporary era.Asemic includes intriguing revelations about the relation of asemic writing to Chinese characters, the possibility of asemic writing in nature, and explanations of how we can read without language. Written in a lively style, this book will engage scholars of contemporary art and literary theory, as well as anyone interested in what writing was and what it is now in the process of becoming.Trade Review"How does the noncommunicative communicate? This is the seemingly innocent question Peter Schwenger unpacks. At once storehouse and treatise, Asemic has the clarity of a dictionary entry, its sagacity delivered with deceptive ease, revealing a domain vaster than anyone would have thought: a Copernican marvel."—Jed Rasula, author of History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism"Asemic is a long-overdue study of poetries that occupy liminal spaces between art, like Twombly's paintings, and recognizable words, like Michaux's poetry. Peter Schwenger offers an extended theory and an introductory survey of contemporary asemic writing by Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, Christopher Skinner, and others. From this book one can learn to read and, by extension, teach a-semiological texts."—Craig Saper, co-editor of Readies for Bob Brown's Machine"This is the first full-length exploration of the history and meaning of asemic writing. Important figures such as Michaux, Twombly, Barthes, Jim Leftwich, and Rosaire Appel are included, as well as examples from Chinese culture. Well-chosen illustrations accompany Peter Schwenger's insightful text. This book is a solid first map of a territory previously unknown to academic study."—Tim Gaze, publisher of Asemic magazine"What emerges in Schwenger’s book is an aesthetics of language, and of reading in par- ticular, that draws attention to how asemic writing lets us dive into the untapped possibilities of incomprehension."—Literary Review of Canada"The Art of Writing,Peter Schwenger’s engaging and groundbreaking book focused on the asemic as a cultural phenomenon and ratified genre of modern and contemporary art."—Art in America"Peter Schwenger offers a history of the practice, linking modern era pioneers like Barthes, Henri Michaux, and Cy Twombly to lesser-known contemporary practitioners Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, and Christopher Skinner. Pulling examples of asemic writing from a diversity of fields—across contemporary art, comics, notation, and even nature—he demonstrates poet Michael Jacobson’s fitting definition of his field: “Without words, asemic writing is able to relate to all words, colors, and even music, irrespective of the author or the reader’s original language.”"—The Brooklyn Rail"Peter Schwenger offers the first book-length academic study of this vibrant field; it is an important and valuable start to the formal study of asemic writing."—Rain Taxi Review of Books"Vital and fateful . . . engagingly international."—CAA Reviews"In a clear and in-depth way, Asemic: the Art of Writing can be seen as a first official notation of that dance, excelling in the ability to bring to a wider audience the intricacies of a subject often seen as a niche of encrypted doodles legible only to a few."—Electric Book Review

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a punishment, as the voice of God, as a terrorist’s final weapon, as a luxury good, as the reason for torture—in short, as an object we both do and do not recognize. Concluding with the prospects for its future in a world burgeoning with noise, Biguenet asks whether we should desire or fear silence—or if it is even ours to choose. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewWhen I realized I was making notes on memorable passages in Silence several times a page, I knew I’d found the book I’ve been needing to read. John Biguenet’s extended meditation on silence is provocative, witty, moving, and truly golden. * Valerie Martin, Orange Prize-winning novelist and author, most recently, of The Ghost of the Mary Celeste *One virtue of silence is that it enables us to contemplate a work like John Biguenet’s ever-fascinating new book. One virtue of his book—one of many—is that it does not go overboard in treating silence as a virtue. * Garret Keizer, author of The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want *Taking us from the ancient world to Houston's Rothko Chapel to outer space, John Biguenet gives us a surprisingly boisterous tour of silence, stillness, and calm. Biguenet takes a space that looks at first glance like it is empty, as if it were, actually, defined by its emptiness, and he fills it with his erudition, his wisdom, his warmth, and his wit. We are lucky to spend this time rapt at his feet, to take all of this in. * Jessa Crispin, editor-in-chief Booklust and author of The Dead Ladies Project *What makes [Silence] stand out is the way this silence retreats, fails to materialize as such. The book unfolds as a failed or botched detective story: the search for silence, for a state that defies the human. Written in the form of a memoir or notes to and from one self to others… [Silence] ends as [Biguenet] leafs through a National Geographic, reads an article on noise pollution at sea and its catastrophic effects on the social life of whales. ‘What is the future of silence,’ he asks? ‘More lonely whales,’ he fears. It’s enough to make you never want to speak again. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Biguenet examines how we define silence, how we seek silence, how we sell silence, and how silence relates to things such as reading, the stage, secrets, and even dolls. He talks about how true silence is virtually unachievable in the modern world and how people become disoriented in pure silence. ... At the end of Silence, Biguenet contemplates the future. As he writes amidst noise and commotion, the "hum" of the modern world as he describes it, he read a National Geographic article about whales and how passing ships disrupt their ability to communicate with one another. Their ‘silence’ is broken. Thus, we are left to consider how silence or lack thereof impacts not only us but the entire ecosystem around us. It's a poignant reminder that in the modern world, with its hectic pace and ever present noise, sometimes what we most need is the one thing we can't seem to get. * Frank Valish, Under the Radar *Object Lessons’ describes themselves as ‘short, beautiful books,’ and to that, I'll say, amen. … [I]t is in this simplicity that we find insight and even beauty. … Silence by John Biguenet … explores whether it's possible — or indeed if we would want — to experience true ‘silence.’ … If you read enough ‘Object Lessons’ books, you'll fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones — caution recommended on pontificating on the objects surrounding you. More importantly, though, in the tradition of McPhee's Oranges, they inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday that we've taken for granted. These are not so much lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we care to look. * Chicago Tribune *Biguenet goes on to deal with our responses to tragedy, terror and crime, the relationship of children with toys and pets, Freud's views on the uncanny, gender roles in asking of questions and giving of advice … and many other facets as he shows how silence is an integral part of our lives, even in ways we could have never imagined. * Business Standard, India *We inevitably fall into a sense of wonder in the first pages of the book. * T24 *Table of ContentsI What Is Silence? II Selling Silence Seeking Silence Silence Versus Solitude Voluntary Silences III The Representation of Silence Silent Reading Silence on Stage The Unspeakable IV The Silenced Moment The Silence of Dolls Silencing Silence and Secrets V The Future of Silence

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Book Synopsis"Paradigms for a Metaphorology may be read as a kind of beginner''s guide to Blumenberg, a programmatic introduction to his vast and multifaceted oeuvre. Its brevity makes it an ideal point of entry for readers daunted by the sheer bulk of Blumenberg''s later writings, or distracted by their profusion of historical detail. Paradigms expresses many of Blumenberg''s key ideas with a directness, concision, and clarity he would rarely match elsewhere. What is more, because it served as a beginner's guide for its author as well, allowing him to undertake an initial survey of problems that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life, it has the additional advantage that it can offer us a glimpse into what might be called the ''genesis of the Blumenbergian world.'"from the Afterword by Robert SavageWhat role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can the images used by philosophers tell us more about the hopes and cares, attitudes and indifferences that regulate an epoch than their carefully elaborated systems of thought?In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, originally published in 1960 and here made available for the first time in English translation, Hans Blumenberg (19201996) approaches these questions by examining the relationship between metaphors and concepts. Blumenberg argues for the existence of "absolute metaphors" that cannot be translated back into conceptual language. These metaphors answer the supposedly naïve, theoretically unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence. They leap into a void that concepts are unable to fill.An afterword by the translator, Robert Savage, positions the book in the intellectual context of its time and explains its continuing importance for work in the history of ideas.Trade ReviewParadigms for a Metaphorology is a model of scholarly translation. Savage's handling of citations and sources is scrupulous and thorough.... And he provides judicious explanatory notes that work in conjunction with the afterword and Blumenberg's own notes to guide readers through Blumenberg's own reading and career. Finally, and most importantly, his English rendering is consistently accurate while also being, in the context of translations of German philosophy, remarkably readable.... In short, readers approaching Blumenberg's reflections on metaphor through the English language could not ask for a more reliable and helpful guide than this volume. -- David Adams * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *Table of ContentsHans Blumenberg: An Introduction Part I: History, Secularization, and Reality 1. The Linguistic Reality of Philosophy (1946/1947) 2. World Pictures and World Models (1961) 3. "Secularization": Critique of a Category of Hisotrical Illegitimacy (1964) 4. The Concept of Reality and the Theory of the State (1968/1969) 5. Preliminary Remarks on the Concept of Reality (1974) Part II: Metaphors, Rhetoric, and Nonconceptuality 6. Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation (1957) 7. Introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) 8. An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric (1971) 9. Observations Drawn from Metaphors (1971) 10. Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality (1979) 11. Theory of Nonconceptuality (circa 1975, excerpt) Part III: Nature, Technology, and Asthetics 12. The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem (1951) 13. "Imitation of Nature": Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being (1957) 14. Phenomenological Aspects on Life-World and Technization (1963) 15. Socrates and the objet ambigu: Paul Valery's Discussion of the Ontology of the Aesthetic Object and Its Tradition (1964) 16. The Essential Ambiguity of the Aesthetic Object (1966) 17. Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics (1966) Part IV: Fables, Anecdotes, and the Novel 18. The Absolute Father (1952/1953) 19. The Mythos and Ethos of America in the Work of William Faulkner (1958) 20. The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel (1964) 21. Pensiveness (1980) 22. Moments of Goethe (1982) 23. Beyond the Edge of Reality: Three Short Essays (1983) 24. Of Nonunderstanding: Glosses on Three Fables (1984) 25. Unknown Aesopica: From Newly Found Fables (1985) 26. Advancing into Eternal Silence: A Century after the Sailing of the Fram (1993)

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive account of all major trends in Russian interwar literary theory and its wider impact in our post-deconstruction and world literature era, this book attempts to answer two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when it is no longer available as an option?Trade Review"Eloquent and erudite, Galin Tihanov offers us a magisterial account of twentieth-century Russian literary theory. His book is not a survey but a careful analysis of diverse movements and theorists whose unexpected juxtapositions put familiar concepts and people in an entirely new light. This is intellectual history at its best." -- Michael Wachtel * Princeton University *"Committed both to rigorous historical contextualization and to the clear analysis of ideas, Tihanov's highly original book addresses a topic of major concern to the humanities, the rise of literary theory, showing the central contribution of Russian thinkers to it. This is the first book one should read on its subject." -- William Mills Todd III * Harvard University *"The foundational status of literary theory in twentieth-century Russia has never been described with greater attention to detail than in Galin Tihanov's new book. And this extraordinary historical groundwork results in the ultimate challenge for literary criticism today: can and should the discipline survive under epistemological conditions that are now so radically different?" -- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht * Stanford University *"Up to now, no one has woven together the many threads of Russian literary thought—Formalism, Socialist Realism, Marxism, the Bakhtin Circle, and the many groups, domestic and émigré, that shaped modern theory. With a large cast of characters and a sharp, cumulative argument, Tihanov renders obsolete numerous received judgments about theory's origins and impact." -- Haun Saussy * University of Chicago *"Tihanov has written an excellent book that provides a plethora of substance for reflection, and most importantly reminds us of the time when literature and the study of literature was taken seriously to an extent that to most readers today seems like an act of defamiliarization in itself." -- Eli Park Sorensen * Hong Kong Review of Books *"[One] senses that Tihanov, whose own intellectual range is staggering, could have chosen any number of examples to demonstrate his thesis....[A] rich and generous book." -- Caryl Emerson * The Russian Review *"There are few literary critics and theorists that delve into the afterlives of past theories and theoretical trends as dazzlingly and lucidly as Galin Tihanov does." -- Daiana Gârdan * Metacritic *"Tihanov's journey across past intellectual landscapes is engaging and helpful: it allows us to understand a great deal about the past, the present, and ourselves in that present." -- Galina Babak * New Literary Observer *"If literary theory is your thing, and you're feeling uninspired by what the Anglo-American academy has to offer, The Birth and Death is a fine showcase for what is, in effect, another world of literary theory, largely untapped. That Tihanov writes about...quite different approaches to literature—as well as about canon wars within the Russian émigré community—with such authority and erudition is, frankly, remarkable in itself." -- Ken Hirschkop * Textual Practice *"This detailed, authoritative study of the European twentieth century in terms of literary and cultural theory, its only fault being its understatement, ranges through several countries and languages, bringing familiar names into interesting juxtapositions." -- Jeremy Tambling * The Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue: What This Book Is and Is Not About chapter abstractThe Prologue introduces the reader to the goals of the book and its methodology. The death of literary theory is discussed, in Derridean sense, as opening up the much more important question of its multiple legacies. The precise meaning of "literary theory" is also clarified, in comparison with recent meta-discourses that draw on "theory" understood, more broadly and less specifically, as Continental philosophy. Introduction: The Radical Historicity of Literary Theory chapter abstractThe chapter explores the birth of literary theory in the years around World War I through a chronotopic prism: this birth took place at a precise moment in time and in a precise location – and for good reasons. The multiple (and overlapping) scenarios that best describe the emergence of literary theory point to the disintegration and modification of mainstream philosophical discourses (phenomenology; Marxism); the need to respond to new experimental developments in literature; exile, polyglossia, and the productive estrangement from a single (one's own national) language in which literature is thought. Asserting its radical historicity, one can observe that literary theory emerged in Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar decades as one of the conceptual by-products of the transition from a regime of relevance that recognizes literature for its role in social and political practice to a regime that values literature primarily for its qualities as art. 1Russian Formalism: Entanglements at Birth and Later Reverberations chapter abstractThis chapter is an exploration of the complex relationship between Formalism and Marxism, and between the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature—and their respective argumentative logics—at work in Formalism and Marxism. To detail this, the chapter offers three case studies framed by the question of Formalism's impact and its encounters with intellectual formations that had their own (larger) stake in the political debates of the time: the 1927 public dispute between Formalism and Marxism; Viktor Shklovsky's theory of estrangement and its multiple echoes; and the mediated presence of Formalism in Eurasianism, a Russian exilic movement that sought to reconcile Formalism and Marxism, as well as the distinct regimes of relevance within which they operated. 2A Skeptic at the Cradle of Theory: Gustav Shpet's Reflections on Literature chapter abstractThis chapter takes the discussion of the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature into new territory: it reveals how the more traditional regime of relevance that insisted on literature's wider social commitment and significance operated in a milder and more diffuse fashion in the 1920s as an invitation to interpret literature, not through the prism of literary theory—which would have entailed an insistence on the uniqueness of literature grounded in the specific way it uses language—but rather through the less radical screen of aesthetics and philosophy of art. Gustav Shpet is very much a thinker who participates in this process, but his place in it is contradictory and inconclusive: although foreshadowing some important tenets of Structuralism, he remained in the end poised between innovation and regression, and his ultimate loyalty tended to be with a philosophical and aesthetic approach to literature and the arts. 3Toward a Philosophy of Culture: Bakhtin beyond Literary Theory chapter abstractDuring the 1930s, Mikhail Bakhtin arrived at a new way of capturing the relevance of literature, different from the regimes of relevance that sustained the work of either the Russian Formalists or Gustav Shpet. Bakhtin's transition in the 1930s from ethics and aesthetics to philosophy of culture, analyzed in the first section of this chapter, is crucial for understanding this new regime. The chapter then proceeds to offer a case study of Bakhtin's positioning in relation to the 1930s Soviet debates on the classical and the canon; this prepares the ground for returning to the question of Bakhtin's impact and later appropriations of his work, especially through the lens of postmodernism and post-Structuralism. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to grasp the specific regime of relevance that sustained the significance of literature in Bakhtin's writings of the 1930s, still centered around the importance of language, but not around "literariness." 4The Boundaries of Modernity: Semantic Paleontology and Its Subterranean Impact chapter abstractThe presence of semantic paleontology in literary studies and its importance for the methodological debates of the 1930s have never before been examined systematically. The chapter thus begins by outlining the foundations of semantic paleontology and its interventions in the study of literature during the 1930s; the analysis then focuses on the principal methodological distinctions that semantic paleontology sought to draw in order to assert its own identity vis-à-vis other trends, especially Russian Formalism. Attention then turns to the central question: what was the place of semantic paleontology in the 1930s polemics on how and where one should draw the boundaries of modernity, and how did this shape the way its practitioners assigned significance to literature. The final section explores the impact of semantic paleontology on cultural and literary theory; this impact persisted into the early 1980s, at times paradoxically reinforced by the critique semantic paleontology triggered. 5Interwar Exiles: Regimes of Relevance in Émigré Criticism and Theory chapter abstractThis chapter returns to the importance of exile and discusses literary theory not per se, but in its interactions with another distinct discourse, that of literary criticism, which had its own dynamic and its own conventions. The symbiosis of literary theory and criticism was a palpable feature of literary life in the diaspora, where the social and professional makeup of the new intelligentsia encouraged this conversion to a greater degree. The chapter is thus an examination of the ways in which émigré literary criticism between the world wars sought to extend an inherited regime of relevance that would conceive of literature as speaking directly to the traditional collective concerns of its creators and readers—in contrast to a radically different perspective that sought to endorse a regime of relevance in which literature would be denationalized so as to address the private concerns of the exile. Epilogue: A Fast-Forward to "World Literature" chapter abstractToday the legacy of modern literary theory is not available in a pure and concentrated fashion; instead, it is dispersed, dissipated, often fittingly elusive. This inheritance is now performing its work in a climate already dominated by a different regime of relevance, which it faces directly and must negotiate. The patrimony of literary theory is currently active within a regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value, with only residual recall of its previously highly treasured autonomy. This regime of relevance has engendered the interpretative framework of "world literature" that has recently grown and gained popularity. Looking at Russian literary theory during the interwar decades, we are struck by the fact that many of its major trends were, obliquely or more directly, relevant to this new framework of understanding and valorizing literature in the regime of its global production and consumption.

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Book SynopsisTo our modern ears the word “creature” has wild, musky, even monstrous, connotations. And yet the terms “creaturely” and “love,” taken together, have traditionally been associated with theological debates around the enigmatic affection between God and His key creation, Man. In Creaturely Love, Dominic Pettman explores the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. In an eminently approachable work of wide cultural reach and meticulous scholarship, Pettman undertakes an unprecedented examination of how animals shape the understanding and expression of love between people. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature (Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust), premodern texts and fairy tales (Fourier, Fournival, Ovid), and contemporary films and online phenomena (Wendy and Lucy, Her, memes), Pettman demonstrates that from pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies, animals have constantly appeared in our writings and thoughts about passionate desire.By following certain charismatic animals during their passage through the love letters of philosophers, the romances of novelists, the conceits of fables, the epiphanies of poets, the paradoxes of contemporary films, and the digital menageries of the Internet, Creaturely Love ultimately argues that in our utilization of the animal in our amorous expression, we are acknowledging that what we adore in our beloveds is not (only) their humanity, but their creatureliness.Trade Review"Pettman has written yet another absorbing, witty, moving, and smart book about the question of human exceptionalism, this time in relation to desire and love, attending especially to literary and artistic works. The book makes a significant contribution particularly to a revisionist reading of modernist literary/artistic history with relation to the presence of the nonhuman animal, or the creaturely."—Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz"Dominic Pettman writes thoughtful, light-fingered books on significant questions that are simultaneously timely and timeless. In Creaturely Love, he takes up the perennial awkwardness that haunts every effort to etherealize romance: the proximity of our loving bodies to the critter-creatures that rut and tread and mount and cover each other just outside our windows. Drawing on the newest (and some of the oldest) thinking about humans and animals, Pettman here recalls us to ourselves—by ruminating on just how hard it is to say what exactly that might mean."—D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University"Bettman’s ideas and readings will doubtless find application in future scholarship; his text makes readers eager to see all genres of cultural production in the new framework this exciting work provides."—The Goose"The book offers an interesting engagement with the complexity of expressions of affection."—CHOICE connectTable of ContentsContentsPrefaceIntroduction: On the Stupidity of Oysters1. Divining Creaturely Love2. Horsing Around: The Marriage Blanc of Nietzsche, Andreas-Salomé, and Rée3. Groping for an Opening: Rilke between Animal and Angel4. Electric Caresses: Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou5. Between Perfection and Temptation: Musil, Claudine, and Veronica6. The Biological Travesty7. “The Creature Whom We Love”: Proust and Jealousy8. The Love Tone: Capture and Captivation9. “The Soft Word That Comes Deceiving”: Fournival’s Bestiary of Love10. The Cuckold and the Cockatrice: Fourier and Hazlitt11. The Animal Bride and Horny Toads12. Unsettled Being: Ovid’s Metamorphoses13. Fickle Metaphysics14. Nymphomania and Faunication15. Senseless Arabesques: Wendy and Lucy16. The Goat in the Machine (A Reprise)Conclusion: On Cetaceous MaidensEpilogue: Animal Magnetism and Alternative Currents (or Tesla and the White Dove)AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWorks do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome conflict of interpretations - a discursive, ideological struggle - therefore needs to be supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings, rather than an abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book about "method", but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.Trade ReviewAllegory and Ideology charges an antique form with renewed political urgency. At its heart is the melancholy conviction that we can never directly lay hold of history. -- Ted Tregear * Marx & Philosophy Review of Books *Throughout this challenging, boundary-crossing new tome, we are repeatedly given such experiences of the intersection of the most minute details of a text and the grandest movements of history, making for a kind of head-spinning and euphoric journey. Yet this bewildering back-and-forth is in line, after all, with what the experience of the dialectic-with its unexpected connections between previously unrelated social strata-is supposed to feel like in the first place. In that, Jameson, as a dialectician, has once again achieved his aim. -- Thomas J. Millay * Critical Inquiry *The world, it seems, keeps trying to catch up to Jameson, whose talent for dialectical unification still shines forth with radioactive power. After you've read him, it's impossible to unsee what he's shown you: his phenomenology of everyday life reveals the hidden architecture of the capitalist mode of produciton with the aesthetic aptitude of a modern novelist. -- James Draney * Full Stop *Allegory, for Jameson, is less a means of overriding difference than a means of preserving it. To look at history and find a great deal of allegory, as this book does, is to find in history, amidst all the destruction, an impulse to preserve and a large quantity of successful preservation. -- Bruce Robbins * The Baffler *Allegory and Ideology involves its readers in the process of intellectual discovery. We may learn from the author of Allegory and Ideology the delight in moving ideas around, forcing them to change the company they keep, in order to see what happens. Jameson's distinctive feature seems to be the way in which his periods rework and transform all objects of analysis by placing them in an ever-shifting syntactical architecture. His intense account of Auerbach's Dante can easily be read as a declaration of Jameson's own poetics. Nothing has a meaning, in Allegory and Ideology, if not through a complex relation to everything else. -- Franco Moretti * New Left Review *

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Book SynopsisBringing together Mary Klages's bestselling introductory books Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed and Key Terms in Literary Theory into one fully integrated and substantially revised, expanded and updated volume, this is an accessible and authoritative guide for anyone entering the often bewildering world of literary theory for the first time. Literary Theory: The Complete Guide includes: Accessible chapters on all the major schools of theory from deconstruction through psychoanalytic criticism to Marxism and postcolonialism New chapters introducing ecocriticism and biographies Expanded and updated guides to feminist theory, queer theory, postmodernism and globalization New and fully integrated extracts of theoretical and literary texts to guide students through their use of theory Accessible coverage of major theorists such as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, Deleuze and Guattari and Bhabha ETrade ReviewThis is a useful and realistically priced item for the student at (above all) college and first-/second-year university levels, and will hold its own against numerous competitors (above all in the area of philosophical ideas ... A successful attempt has been made to guide students in what class discussions might offer them, how themes might be followed-up in personal research; and beyond that, how tutors and teachers might develop and incorporate ideas and research inquiries into their teaching programmes. * Reference Reviews *Klages’s third work on literary theory combines, often word-for-word, text from her first two works, Key Terms in Literary Theory (CH, Dec'12, 50-1817) and Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed (CH, Sep'07, 45-0121). The present work is “complete” in the sense that, as the author writes, it acts as "a complete guide to literary theory" (italics hers) as she teaches it at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In the five-page introduction, Klages deftly condenses thousands of years of literary theory into an easy-to-understand explanation. Klages goes on to examine particular literary theory movements from the 19th century to the present. Chapters (which are roughly 20 pages) discuss key ideas and thinkers of each movement. The most useful addition to this volume are the teacher’s notes that accompany each chapter. In these notes Klages analyzes Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the lens of the theory discussed. The two concluding sections offer biographies of literary theorists and definitions of literary theory terms … Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE *This book provides a very comprehensive and approachable overview. It reads easily and it does not fall prey to jargon. The 'teacher’s notes' are also quite clear and illustrate aptly how critical theory may be used. * Anne Goarzin, Université Rennes 2, France *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Humanist Literary Theory 1. Structuralism 2. Deconstruction 3. Psychoanalysis 4. Feminist Theories 5. Queer Theories 6. Ideology and Discourse 7. Race and Postcolonialism 8. Ecocriticism 9. Postmodernism 10. Biographies 11. Terms Index

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Book SynopsisThis book considers Mansfield's ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer by examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum.

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Book SynopsisA pivotal work in the history of feminism and a groundbreaking intervention into film theory, Sexuality in the Field of Vision is a brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theoryTrade ReviewFormidably intelligent, eloquent, and knowledgeable. * City Limits *Jacqueline Rose has no peer among critics of her generation. The brilliance of her literary insight, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking. -- Edward Said

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