Literary theory Books
Bloomsbury India Polycoloniality: European Transactions with
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£80.75
Bloomsbury India India in Translation, Translation in India
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£80.75
Bloomsbury India Humanity's Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy
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£80.75
Bloomsbury India Populism and Its Limits: After Articulation
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£80.75
Bloomsbury India The New Normal: Trauma, Biopolitics and Visuality
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£80.75
Bloomsbury India The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata
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£80.75
Bloomsbury Publishing USA France/Kafka: An Author in Theory
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£23.21
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) Rhythm in Modern Poetry
Book SynopsisEva Lilja is Professor Emerita of Literature in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Specializing in modernist poetry, she pioneered the study of free versification and was the founder and chair of the Nordic Society for Metrical Studies.
£27.54
Bloomsbury Publishing USA Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for
Book SynopsisStephen Frosh is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, Universityof London, UK, and author of numerous books on psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies,including Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (2013) and A Brief Introduction toPsychoanalytic Theory (2012).
£21.36
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) Cat
Book SynopsisRebecca van Laer is the author of How to Adjust to the Dark (2022). Her writing has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, BOMB, Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, and The Rumpus, among other places.
£9.49
Oxford University Press Thinking with Classical Matter
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£79.80
The University of Chicago Press Modernism and Music An Anthology of Sources
Book SynopsisThis work offers not only important statements by composers and critics, but also musical speculations by poets, novelists, philosophers, and others - all of which combine with Daniel Albright's commentary to place modernist music in the context of a broader intellectual history.
£35.15
The University of Chicago Press What Is Pastoral
Book SynopsisThis work argues that pastoral is based upon a fundamental fiction - that the lives of shepherds or other socially humble figures represent the lives of human beings in general. It explores texts ranging from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Hardy and Frost.Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Frequently Cited Works Prologue 1: Representative Anecdotes and Ideas of Pastoral 2: Mode and Genre 3: Pastoral Convention 4: Representative Shepherds 5: Pastoral Speakers 6: Pastoral Lyrics and Their Speakers 7: Modern Pastoral Lyricism 8: Pastoral Narration 9: Pastoral Novels Index
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press A Mieke Bal Reader
Book SynopsisMieke Bal has had a significant impact on every field she has touched. This work reflects the fields that Bal has most profoundly influenced: literary study, interdisciplinary methodology, visual analysis, and postmodern theology. This work brings together a collection of her work that distills her broad interests and areas of expertise.Trade Review"Quoting Caravaggio "Stimulating and intelligently written.... [Quoting Caravaggio] is very interesting to read, and is a useful additional example of contemporary artists' and critics' identification with the Baroque as a world of sensuality in pre-Enlightenment modernity." - Art Book Louise Bourgeois' "Spider" "Bal is exceptionally skilled at close reading, and the subjects she chooses to take on are commensurate in complexity to that skill." - Common Knowledge"
£38.00
The University of Chicago Press The Benchley Roundup
Book SynopsisRobert C. Benchley's sketches and articles, published in periodicals like "Life", "Vanity Fair" and "The New Yorker", earned him a reputation as one of the sharpest humourists of his time. This is a collection of pieces, selected by his son Nathaniel.
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry 19141928
Book SynopsisA full-length study of the visual poetry of the early twentieth century. Bohn illuminates the works of Apollinaire, Josep-Maria Junow, Guillermo de Torre, and others.
£28.00
University of Chicago Press A Rhetoric of Irony
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£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Literary Imagination Ancient and Modern Essays in
Book SynopsisThese essays include discussions of the Odyssey and Ulysses, the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, Mallarme's English and T.S. Eliot's religion, and the mutually antipathetic minds of Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson.
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Society as Text Paper Essays on Rhetoric Reason
Book SynopsisBrown makes elegant use of sociological theory and of insights from language philosophy, literary criticism, and rhetoric to articulate a new theory of the human sciences, using the powerful metaphor of society as text.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press On Symbols and Society Heritage of Sociology
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£27.00
The University of Chicago Press Beautiful Democracy
Book SynopsisExplores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, and magic lantern exhibitions. This work suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.Trade Review"Beautiful Democracy is an important book, reestablishing aesthetics as a vital issue both within the immediate field of American literature and far beyond it. It engages a long and complexly developed conversation on the politics of form, using rich archival material, ranging from college curricula, black print culture, and the history of film." - Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University"
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Drama Play Game English Festive Culture in the
Book SynopsisThis text demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not theatre as we understand the term today. The author contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed.
£58.90
The University of Chicago Press Guys Like Us Citing Masculinity in Cold War
Book SynopsisThis work considers how writers of the 1950s and 1960s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort.
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Victorian Sexual Dissidence
Book SynopsisLate-20th-century critical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. Terms include homo/hetero and patriarchal/feminist. This text exploits that framework to show how Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge.
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press Signs and Cities Black Literary Postmodernism
Book SynopsisDubey argues that for African American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Stoicism and Emotion
Book SynopsisFerguson argues that the emergence of pornography as a literary phenomenon in Western culture can be tied to the development of utilitarian philosophy. He contends that considering the usefulness of something rather than its individual essence diverts our attention from individual identities.
£27.85
The University of Chicago Press Irony in Action Anthropology Practice and the
Book SynopsisThis collection is based on the idea that irony now extends beyond its classification as a figure of speech and is increasingly recognized as one of the major modes of human experience. The essays cover the limits to irony's liberating qualities as well as irony's more positive dimensions.
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism
Book SynopsisStanley Cavell's work is distinctive not only in its importance to philosophy but also for its remarkable interdisciplinary range. Cavell is read avidly by students of film, photography, painting, and music, but especially by students of literature, for whom Cavell offers major readings of Thoreau, Emerson, Shakespeare, and others. In this first book-length study of Cavell's writings, Michael Fischer examines Cavell's relevance to the controversies surrounding poststructuralist literary theory, particularly works by Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Stanley Fish. Throughout his study, Fischer focuses on skepticism, a central concern of Cavell's multifaceted work. Cavell, following J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein, does not refute the radical epistemological questioning of Descartes, Hume, and others, but rather characterizes skepticism as a significant human possibility or temptation. As presented by Fischer, Cavell's accounts of both external-world and other-minds skept
£26.00
University of Chicago Press The Lost Second Book of Aristotles Poetics
Book SynopsisBased on Richard Janko's philological reconstruction of the epitome, the author mounts a philosophical argument that places the statements of this summary of the Aristotelian text in their true context. It also includes explanations of Aristotle's ideas about catharsis, comedy, and a summary account of the different types of poetry.
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press The Poets Work 29 Poets on the Origins and
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£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Degradation of American History
Book SynopsisAmerican historical writing has traditionally been a form of moral reflection. However this study argues that, in the disillusionment following the 1960s, history abandoned its redemptive potential, and adopted the methodology of the social sciences. It describes the reasons for this change.
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press The Book of the Heart
Book SynopsisIn this text, Eric Jager traces the history and psychology of the self-as-text concept from antiquity to the late 20th century. He focuses on the Middle Ages, when the metaphor of a book of the heart modelled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions in literature and art.
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press The Book of the Heart
Book SynopsisIn this text, Eric Jager traces the history and psychology of the self-as-text concept from antiquity to the late 20th century. He focuses on the Middle Ages, when the metaphor of a "book of the heart" modelled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions in literature and art.
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Readings at the Edge of Literature
Book SynopsisMyra Jehlen's aim in these essays is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is also, for Jehlen, the threshold of the real.Trade Review"Readings at the Edge of Literature explores the contradictions that emerge whenever the ideal called America tries to identify itself in our literature. This collection is alert and alive, full of intellectual energy, stunning perceptions, and analytical brilliance." - Richard Poirier, author of Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Division of Literature Or the University in
Book SynopsisHow has literature become established as a separate domain within the university? Demonstrating that these questions of division are intricately related, Peggy Kamuf explores in this text, the space that the university devotes to the study of literature.
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Criticism and Social Change
Book SynopsisCriticism and Social Change speaks with special timeliness to the role of the political intellectual (here embodied in Kenneth Burke). Lentricchia's provocative analysis demands serious reflection by American radicals.Frederic Jameson A profound meditation on relations obtaining among writing, political consciousness, and criticismthis last taken in its most general sense. It is written with passion and grace; it is shot through with learning, intimate knowledge of the critical tradition, and a deep (though by no means uncritical) understanding of the work (as well as social significance) of Kenneth Burke.Hayden White
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Critical Terms for Literary Study Second Edition
Book SynopsisThis expanded edition features six new chapters, each of which provides a concise history of a literary term, critically explores the issues and questions that the term raises, and then puts theory into practice by showing the reading strategies that the term permits.Table of ContentsPreface to the Second Edition Introduction/Thomas McLaughlin I: Literature as Writing 1: Representation/W. J. T. Mitchell 2: Structure/John Carlos Rowe 3: Writing/Barbara Johnson 4: Discourse/Paul A. Bove 5: Narrative/J. Hillis Miller 6: Figurative Language/Thomas McLaughlin 7: Performance/Henry Sayre 8: Author/Donald E. Pease II: Interpretation 9: Interpretation/Steven Mailloux 10: Intention/Annabel Patterson 11: Unconscious/Francoise Meltzer 12: Determinacy/Indeterminacy/Gerald Graff 13: Value/Evaluation/Barbara Herrnstein Smith 14: Influence/Louis A. Renza 15: Rhetoric/Stanley Fish III: Literature, Culture, Politics 16: Culture/Stephen Greenblatt 17: Canon/John Guillory 18: Literary History/Lee Patterson 19: Gender/Myra Jehlen 20: Race/Kwame Anthony Appiah 21: Ethnicity/Werner Sollors 22: Ideology/James H. Kavanagh 23: Popular Culture/John Fiske 24: Diversity/Louis Menand 25: Imperialism/Nationalism/Seamus Deane 26: Desire/Judith Butler 27: Ethics/Geoffrey Galt Harpham 28: Class/Daniel T. O'Hara In Place of an Afterword--Someone Reading/Frank Lentricchia References List of Contributors Index
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Theorizing Myth Narrative Ideology and
Book SynopsisIn "Theorizing Myth", Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others.Table of ContentsPart 1 Mythos among the Greeks: the prehistory of mythos and logos; from Homer through Plato. Part 2 A modern history of myth: the history of myth from the Renaissance to World War II; Sir William's myth of origins; Nietzsche's "Blond Beast" - a genealogy; Dumezil's German war God. Part 3 New directions: from World War II to the present (and possibly a little beyond); Plutarch's Siby; Gautrek's saga and the gift fox; once again, the Bovine's Lament; the Pandits and Mr Jones; epilogue - scholarship as myth.
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press The Freudian Robot
Book SynopsisThe identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? This title offers a study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious.Trade Review"An interesting and significant book. The Freudian Robot is part of a new trend in the humanities that is reinventing comparative studies in light of digital media." - Eugene Thacker, Georgia Institute of Technology"
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Scholars Art Literary Studies in a Managed
Book SynopsisFor Jerome McGann, the purpose of scholarship is to preserve and pass on cultural heritage, a feat accomplished through discussion among scholars and interested nonspecialists. In this collection of thirteen essays, McGann both addresses and exemplifies that discussion and the vocation it supports.Trade Review"Jerome McGann is an internationally influential critic, with a long career not only of scholarly labor but of setting the agenda for critical adventures, theoretical reflection, and editorial precision, low-tech and hi-tech. The engaging array of informal, essayistic conversations in The Scholar's Art holds interest for everyone, from newcomers to those who have long been following and learning from his work, with illumination and gratitude." - Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University"
£28.00
University of Chicago Press Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance
Book SynopsisThis text explores the perceived discrepancy between outward appearance and inward disposition which, it argues, influenced the work of many English Renaissance dramatists and poets. The author examines various connections between religious, legal, sexual and theatrical ideas of inward truth.
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Salome and the Dance of Writing
Book SynopsisHow does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Françoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portraitthe painted portrait, framedappears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing. Meltzer'sreadings of textual portraitsin the Gospel writers and Huysmans,Virgil and Stendhal, the Old Testament and Apuleius, Hawthorne and Poe, Kafka and Rousseau, Walter Scott and Mme de Lafayettereveal an interplay of control and subversion: writing attempts to veil the visual and to erase the sensual in favor of meaning, while portraiture, with its claims to bringing the natural object to life, resists and eludes such control. Meltzer shows how this tension is indicative of a politics of repression and subversion intrinsic to the very act of representation. Throughout, she raises and illuminates fascinating issues: about the relation of flattery to caricature, the nature of the uncanny, the relation ofrepresentation to memory and history, the narcissistic character of representation, and the interdependency of representation and power. Writing, thinking, speaking, dreaming, actingthe extent to which these are all controlled by representation must, Meltzer concludes, become consciously unconscious. In the textualportrait, she locates the moment when this essential process is both revealed and repressed.
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press The Surreptitious Speech Presence Africaine and
Book SynopsisDistinguished scholar V. Y. Mudimbe assembles a lively tribute to Presence Africaine, the landmark African studies journal begun in 1947 Paris. While it celebrates the project's forty-year history, The Surreptitious Speech does not naively canonize the journal but rather offers a vibrant discussion and critical reading of its context, characteristics, and significance.
£38.00
The University of Chicago Press Paper Minds Literature and the Ecology of
Book SynopsisA study of the knowledge we can glean about perception and consciousness through the study of literature.Trade Review"In this series of elegantly connected essays, Jonathan Kramnick excavates a kinetic, haptic, and immersive alternative to contemplative aesthetics in the eighteenth century and follows its ramifications into contemporary debates about theory of mind. How does free indirect discourse offer its own way of working through the 'hard problem' of consciousness? What can apostrophe teach us about the supposed divide between perceiving the world and acting in it? Moving deftly from locodescriptive poetry and common sense philosophy to novels about cognitive science, these astute and sometimes polemical writings broaden our understanding of what an aesthetics and ethics of everyday dwelling might be and of how literary forms provide unique insight on theories of perception."--Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago "Paper Minds is beautifully written in elegant, witty prose with maximum clarity. It makes original contributions to at least three fields: cognitive literary criticism, eighteenth-century British studies, and the study of contemporary literature. This is a book to read and re-read carefully, and to feature prominently in any discussion concerning the contributions and merits of a cognitive approach to literature."--Alan Richardson, Boston College, author of The Neural Sublime "The essays assembled here are distinguished by a supple, eloquent prose and by their humane tone. They offer an eye-opening picture of how, from the eighteenth century onward, a particular set of literary forms has made it possible to set down 'perceptual or emotional or cognitive experience on the page.' Paper Minds is a landmark book both for scholars of eighteenth-century literary studies and for scholars from other periods working at the intersection between literary analysis and cognitive science."--Deidre Shauna Lynch, Harvard University "Paper Minds places literary study proudly in the company of other university disciplines, both in theory and in practice. Kramnick's philosophic concerns and his precision about cognition drive brilliant readings that range from all but forgotten landscape poems, to old novels as obscure as The Blazing World or as familiar as Robinson Crusoe, to prize-winning novelists of the present century. He probes the mystery of conscious experience with revelatory lucidity. His aesthetics of craft and the everyday--if perhaps tinged with urban nostalgia--precisely carve out an alternative to the classic aesthetics of distance."--John Bender, Stanford University
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Mathematics and Humor
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£18.58
The University of Chicago Press Making Sense of Literature
Book SynopsisIn this commonsense approach to the fundamental issues involved in understanding and evaluating literary works, John Reichert examines the method and structure of rational critical argument and its relationship to the nature of reading. With clarity and vigor, he shows how we can cut through competing critical languages to sort right readings from wrong ones, better from worse. His incisive analyses are augmented by illustrations from distinguished critics writing about major literary works. Reichert considers criticism broadly as the imparting of one's understanding of a poem or play or novel to another reader. When the rhetorical function of critical language is recognized, seemingly distinct approaches to literature can be seen as different though often compatible means to a single end. He contends that the critic's job is not to report a personal response but to describe how a readerany readerought to respond to a particular work. This necessitates postulating the author's intentio
£27.00
The University of Chicago Press Altered Reading Levinas and Literature
Book SynopsisExamining Levinas's texts and readings by Derrida, Blanchot, and Bataille, this text shows how the thread of the literary leads to the internal tensions of Levinas's ethical discourse. It provides a critical account of Levinas's early and mature philosophy as well as later transitional essays.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Courtesy Phoenix Poets
Book SynopsisIn this, his first book, Alan Shapiro vividly recreates some of the more memorable and poignant moments from his Jewish-American childhood, and in the process reveals his compassionate interest in the forgotten, the alienated, and the infirm. The Courtesy is an intelligent, reflective examination of the poet's own psychological history. The Courtesy is really an admirable book: it shows up the unreality of a lot of the other poetry one reads, dealing honestly and with that perversity which is a sign of thoughfulness, with the slight but heavy matter of our everyday defeats.--Michael Hoffman, Poetry Nation Review
£26.00
