Literary theory Books
HarperCollins Publishers Shakespeare
Book SynopsisHarold Bloom, the doyen of American literary critics and author of The Western Canon, has spent a professional lifetime reading, writing about and teaching Shakespeare. In this magisterial interpretation, Bloom explains Shakespeare's genius in a radical and provocative re-reading of the plays.How to understand Shakespeare, whose ability so far exceeds his predecessors and successors, whose genius has defied generations of critics' explanations, whose work is of greater influence in the modern age even than the Bible? This book is a visionary summation of Harold Bloom's reading of Shakespeare and in it he expounds a brilliant and far-reaching critical theory: that Shakespeare was, through his dramatic characters, the inventor of human personality as we have come to understand it. In short, Shakespeare invented our understanding of ourselves. He knows us better than we do: The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us in part because he invented us ' In a chronological survey of each of the plays, Bloom explores the supra-human personalities of Shakespeare's great protagonists: Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff, Rosalind, Juliet. They represent the apogee of Shakespeare's art, that art which is Britain's most powerful and dominant cultural contribution to the world, here vividly recovered by an inspired and wise scholar at the height of his powers.Trade Review‘Brilliant… a Shakespearean reading of Shakespeare which is rich in asides and incidentals.’Robert Nye, Sunday Telegraph ‘Harold Bloom is the leading literary critic of our time… a superb advocate for the reality and influence of Shakespeare… Bloom, a great critic, also lives his literary criticism, enacts it in his soul.’James Wood, Guardian
£17.99
Columbia University Press Regimes of Historicity
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
£19.80
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Waste
Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFascinating, thought-provoking, and necessary, Brian Thill’s Waste is about not just our present but our future. You can’t read it and come out of the experience unchanged. * Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Southern Reach trilogy *If 'waste,' as Brian Thill points out, is any object plus time, then Waste is waste plus spirited curiosity and tremendous intelligence. With a gaze full of vigor and heart, Thill looks at the fate of what we discard—from space junk to horse corpses to bird bellies split open from plastic—and illuminates invisible margins we’d often rather forget. I read the whole book in one sitting, spellbound. * Leslie Jamison, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Empathy Exams *Waste is the finest filth around—or really the finest mediation of it I can think of: Thill looks deeply into how what we waste controls us at the level of the personal and the public—our discards become our fate and home both—and finds treasure. * Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night *Waste pluralizes, names a condition into which objects fall, takes us beachcombing, dumpster diving. ‘Waste is every object, plus time’… The true aim of Brian Thill’s book, however, is… that non-place to which waste is sent. We cannot afford… to believe in such a zone any longer. Of course, we never really could or did — out of sight was simply out of mind. Waste always kept coming back. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsThe beach that speaks Trash familiars/Tabflab Pigs in space Million-year panic Ruinism Splinter, shard, and stone Where the hoard is Lake Carbamazepine Acknowledgements Illustrations Bibliography Index
£9.49
Fordham University Press A World in Ruins Chronicles of Intellectual Life
Book SynopsisThis is the third volume of Maurice Blanchot’s war-time Literary Chronicles. Written in 1943, they appeared during the darkest days of the war yet also at a time when real hope for victory was becoming possible. Against the grain of any simple optimism, Blanchot identifies in ruin and disaster a sign and a chance for a mode of human relation that will truly guarantee the future.Trade Review"Maurice Blanchot's writings during the Vichy years (1941-44) may be the most crucial of his long career, particularly when read against his controversial political writings of the 1930s. Although to all appearances occasional pieces, these literary essays and reviews are also projects of self-transformation in which Blanchot becomes an increasingly distanced and even invisible observer of the disaster of Occupied France, as well as a writer whose critiques of the conventions of the novel look forward to his later experiments in fragmentary writing and the materializations of language." -- -Gerald L. Bruns University of Notre Dame "Writing from one world in ruins to another, Blanchot comes to us today to pose the question of what, if anything, deserves to survive the collapse of an established order of meaning. Through the richness and precision of Michael Holland's presentation of these texts, and the elegance and rigour of his translations, we meet with new understanding one of recent history's most stringent explorations of the possibilities and limitations of thought in the face of disaster. If the now-forgotten subjects of many of these essays might suggest that they have little to say to our present day, Holland helps us to see that nothing could be further from the truth. Blanchot is not writing to us, no doubt. But he is most certainly writing for us." -- -Martin Crowley Queens' College "...what makes Blanchot's critical essays so important is the depth of his engagement with writing as a concept and the experience of writing fiction that he brings to the task. An essential Blanchotian theme treated in this volume, as throughout his work, is the ambiguity of literary language. Blanchot conceives of literature as having a unique power to put language itself in question, exposing the reader or writer to what lies beyond meaning, knowledge, and all familiar relations... Holland has rendered readers a service by stressing the importance of historical context in interpreting Blanchot's writings, and by extension 20th-century French thought, more generally." -- -Calum Watt Review 31 / Kings College "How did Maurice Blanchot transform himself from journeyman reviewer to the theorist of narrative whose work transformed the intellectual landscape of the postwar era? This collection of reviews from a single, harrowing year, 1943, provides answers. Expertly introduced, annotated, and translated by leading Blanchot scholar Michael Holland, A World in Ruins provides a unique entry into making of literature under Nazi occupation." -- -Alice Kaplan Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction by Michael Holland Nicholas of Cusa The Correspondence of Madame de Lafayette The Book Novels of the Land Tocqueville's Recollections Symbolism and the Poets of Today On Montherlant's Play The Romance of Marie Dorval and Vigny Novels Machiavelli Eloquence and Literature On Jouhandeau's Work The Thirteen Forms of a Novel From Praise to Sovereignty Religious Poetry Novels French Suite Hoffman's Fantastic On the Song of Roland Kierkegaard and AEsthetics The Art of the Short Story Women Novelists of Today A History of French Literature The Influence of the American Novel The Mysticism of Angelus Silesius Autobiographical Narratives History and the Masterpiece A Study of the Apocalypse La Fontaine Without the Fables The Pure Novel The Novel of the Gaze Tradition and Surrealism A World in Ruins Index
£30.60
Faber & Faber The Intellectuals and the Masses Pride and
Book SynopsisProfessor John Carey shows how early twentieth-century intellectuals imagined the ''masses'' as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B. Yeats and other canonized writers, he relates this to the cult of the Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler.Carey''s assault on the founders of modern culture caused consternation throughout the artistic and academic establishments when it was first published in 1992.
£10.44
Oxford University Press Postmodernism
Book SynopsisPostmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists ''as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party'' - a party which includes such members as Cindy Sherman, Salman Rushdie, Jacques Derrida, Walter Abish, and Richard Rorty - creating a vastly entertaining framework in which to unravel the mysteries of the ''postmodern condition'', from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct.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 ReviewThis VSI is a terrific book. If you've ever had doubts about post-modernism and its manifestations in art, literature and identity politics, yet wondered how intelligent people came to be influenced by it ... if you are open-minded enough to consider whether there is anything worthwhile about postmodernism rather than just be mocked or dismissed out of hand ... this VSI is the book for you. * ANZ LitLovers *Table of Contents1. The rise of postmodernism ; 2. New ways of seeing the world ; 3. Politics and identity ; 4. The culture of postmodernism ; 5. The 'postmodern condition' ; References ; Further reading ; Index
£9.49
The University of Chicago Press Metaphors We Live By
Book SynopsisGeorge Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that basic metaphors used in everyday speech not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning.
£15.20
Taylor & Francis Ltd Structuralist Poetics Structuralism Linguistics
Book SynopsisA work of technical skill as well as outstanding literary merit, Structuralist Poetics was awarded the 1975 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. It was during the writing of this book that Culler developed his now famous and remarkably complex theory of poetics and narrative, and while never a populariser he nonetheless makes it crystal clear within these pages.Trade Review''The brilliance, precision and clarity with which Dr Culler conducts his argument make this a book which all those concerned with the analysis of literature should read.' - A.S. Byatt'The brilliance, precision and clarity with which Dr Culler conducts his argument make this a book which all those concerned with the analysis of literature should read.' - A.S. Byatt, Times Education SupplementTable of ContentsPART I Structuralism and Linguistic Models 1 The Linguistic Foundation 2 The Development of a Method: Two Examples 3 Jakobson’s Poetic Analyses 4 Greimas and Structural Semantics 5 Linguistic Metaphors in Criticism PART II Poetics 6 Literary Competence 7 Convention and Naturalization 8 Poetics of the Lyric 9 Poetics of the Novel PART III Perspectives 10 ‘Beyond’ Structuralism: Tel Quel 11 Conclusion: Structuralism and the Qualities of Literature
£12.99
Taylor & Francis Jacques Derrida
Book SynopsisThere are few figures more important in literary and critical theory than Jacques Derrida. Whether lauded or condemned, his writing has had far-reaching ramifications, and his work on deconstruction cannot be ignored. This volume introduces students of literature and cultural studies to Derrida's enormously influential texts, covering such topics as: deconstruction, text and difference; literature and freedom; law, justice and the 'democracy to come'; drugs, secrets and gifts. Nicholas Royle's unique book, written in an innovative and original style, is an outstanding introduction to the methods and significance of Jacques Derrida.Trade Review'Royle has the admirable gift of rendering the most difficult material accessible to students ... he can make it exciting to them, inspiring them to read more.' - Critical and Cultural TheoryTable of ContentsSeries Editor's Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Why Derrida? 2. Key ideas 3. Deconstruction the earthquake 4. Be free 5. Supplement 6. Text 7. Difference 8. The most interesting thing in the world 9. Monsters 10. My Secret Life 11. Poetry Break 12. After Derrida Further Reading Works Cited Index
£19.99
Oxford University Press The Tragic Imagination The Literary Agenda
Book SynopsisRowan Williams explores the definition of the tragic as a mode of narrative, in this short and thought-provoking volume. He turns to subjects including the role of irony in tragedy, the relationship between tragedy and political as well as religious rhetoric, common ground between tragedy and comedy, and the complex place of theology in the debate.Trade ReviewThere are insights and humane wisdom to be found on every page of Williams's study ... As Williams's incisive readings suggest, great tragedies can yield crucial moral knowledge. Preparing oneself to receive this knowledge, though, likely requires an imagination formed by other liturgies. Even then, perhaps, to watch a tragedy is to undertake a risk that promises no certain insight. * Steven Knepper, Commonweal Magazine *The Tragic Imagination proves rewarding. Williams offers intelligent - and not straighforwardly theological - readings of Madea, Antigone, King Lear, Othello, and modern plays by Sarah Kane and Edward Bond. * Clare Carlisle, Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Handling danger: the political roots of tragedy 2: Acknowledgement and hiddenness: what does tragedy make us know? 3: Reconciliation and its discontents: thinking with Hegel 4: Absolute tragedy and moral extremity 5: Tragedy against pessimism: religious discourse and tragic drama 6: Conclusions
£22.32
Oxford University Press Narratives and Narrators
Book SynopsisNarratives are artefacts of a special kind: they are intentionally crafted devices which fulfil their story-telling function by manifesting the intentions of their makers. But narrative itself is too inclusive a category for much more to be said about it than this; we should focus attention instead on the vaguely defined but interesting category of things rich in narrative structure. Such devices offer significant possibilities, not merely for the representation of stories, but for the expression of point of view; they have also played an important role in the evolution of reliable communication. Narratives and narrators argues that much of the pleasure of narrative communication depends on deep-seated and early developing tendencies in human beings to imitation and to joint attention, and imitation turns out to be the key to understanding such important literary techniques as free indirect discourse and character-focused narration. The book also examines irony in narrative, with an emTrade ReviewRich with examples drawn from both literature and film ... the book makes an interesting and important contribution not only to our understanding of the nature of narratives but also to the nature of our engagement with them. * Amy Kind, The Philosophical Quarterly *a rich study. * Adriana Boneta, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *abounds in analyses and arguments as Currie identifies and interrogates (generally successfully) strong counter-theses that challenge his own * Daniel D. Hutto, Times Literary Supplement *I expect Gregory Currie's new book, Narratives and Narrators, to attain the same importance and influence in philosophical thinking about narrative that his earlier books The Nature of Fiction and Image and Mind have had in the philosophy of fiction and film, respectively. It is an ambitious, careful, and philosophically rich work containing a number of novel and important arguments... The book has many virtues, and the greatest of them might be that it opens up new areas for exploration in the philosophic study of narrative. * James Harold, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *The book is ambitious in its topics and contains fresh approaches to various traditional problems ... full of thought-provoking arguments and intriguing proposals. * Jukka Mikkonen, Mind *This fairly short book does a lot of work ... consistently challenging * Raphael Lyne, Cambridge Quarterly *Table of ContentsPreface ; Acknowledgements ; Analytical contents ; 1. Representation ; 2. The content of narrative ; 3. Two ways of looking at a narrative ; 4. Authors and narrators ; 5. Expression and imitation ; 6. Resistance ; 7. Character-focused narration ; 8. Irony: a pretended point of view ; 9. Dis-interpretation ; 10. Narrative and character ; 11. Character scepticism ; In Conclusion ; Bibliography ; Indexes
£70.40
Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers Decolonizing the Literary Imagination
Book Synopsis
£40.50
Editorial Anagrama No soy un robot
Book Synopsis
£19.22
HarperCollins Publishers Far From the Madding Crowd Collins Classics
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.
£5.62
Columbia University Press Posthumous Life
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
£25.50
Columbia University Press The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and
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.
£29.75
Columbia University Press Regimes of Historicity
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
£25.50
Cornell University Press Narrative Discourse Revisited
Book Synopsis
£19.94
Modern Language Association of America Teaching Narrative Theory
Book SynopsisThe last two decades have seen a burst of renewed interest in narrative theory across many academic disciplines as scholars analyze the power of storytelling in print and other media. Teaching Narrative Theory provides a comprehensive resource for instructors who aim to help students identify and understand the distinctive features of narrativity in a text or discourse and make use of the terms and concepts of the field.This volume in the Options for Teaching series is organized to assist teachers at different levels of instruction and in different disciplinary settings. In twenty-one essays, the contributors discuss narrative theory’s various teaching contexts (e.g., classes on literature, creative writing, and folklore and ethnography); key concepts and terms (e.g., story and plot, time and space, voice, perspective); applications beyond printed texts (e.g., film and digital media); and impact on other areas of theory (e.g., gender and ethnic studies). A glossary provides a guide to the challenging technical terminology characteristic of the field, and the volume as a whole emphasizes the importance of understanding and implementing technical terms in learning narrative theory.
£36.86
Johns Hopkins University Press Leibniz Discovers Asia
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
£49.95
Harvard University Press The Novel
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
£28.86
Princeton University Press Forms
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
£16.19
Fordham University Press Giorgio Agamben
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
£19.79
Columbia University Press Social Appearances
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
£19.80
Duke University Press Monstrous Intimacies
Book SynopsisChristina Sharpe interprets Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that grapple with the sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation, and their present-day legacies.Trade Review“Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. . . . Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.” - Sam McBean, Elevate Difference“This is a bold, challenging book which is unrelenting in its interpretation of slavery and the effects it has had on subsequent generations, black and white. In effect, the monstrous intimacies continue.” - Danielle Mulholland, M/C Reviews“Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies succeeds in illuminating the complex entanglements of desire and horror at the heart of Black and White subjectification ‘after’ slavery. More profoundly, this text powerfully balances the fact of history’s monstrous persistence and the desire for what she identifies, after Dionne Brand, as a modality of Black life unhinged to historical narrative (129).” - Sarah Cervenak, Women’s Studies“The materials in Monstrous Intimacies register as being profoundly relevant not only for African American literature, but also for studies of the history of slavery in relation to the U.S. South. Moreover, her second chapter, focusing on the literature and culture of South Africa, addresses histories of racism, colonialism, and imperialism and speaks to discourses on the global South.” - Riché Richardson, Southern Literary Journal"Overall…Sharpe successfully demonstrates the presence of "monstrous intimacies" in each chapter. Most importantly, she creates a methodology for understanding the psychological development of post-slavery subjects and the seductive story-telling that represents his or her experience." - Denia Fraser, Kritikon Litterarum“Monstrous Intimacies is a remarkable study, lucid, engaging, and thoroughly engrossing.”—Sharon Patricia Holland, author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity“Monstrous Intimacies is an original, enriching look at the variety of artistic forms and practices that interrogate the illness of the post-slavery subject. It is international in its scope, interdisciplinary in its approach, and consistently intelligent in its execution.”—Ashraf Rushdy, author of Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction“Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies succeeds in illuminating the complex entanglements of desire and horror at the heart of Black and White subjectification ‘after’ slavery. More profoundly, this text powerfully balances the fact of history’s monstrous persistence and the desire for what she identifies, after Dionne Brand, as a modality of Black life unhinged to historical narrative (129).” -- Sarah Cervenak * Women's Studies *“This is a bold, challenging book which is unrelenting in its interpretation of slavery and the effects it has had on subsequent generations, black and white. In effect, the monstrous intimacies continue.” -- Danielle Mulholland * M/C Reviews *“Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. . . . Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.” -- Sam McBean * Elevate Difference *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Making Monstrous Intimacies: Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom 1 1. Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Reading the "Days That Were Pages of Hysteria" 27 2. Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation 67 3. Isaac Julien's The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life 111 4. Kara Walker's Monstrous Intimacies 153 Notes 189 Bibliography 223 Index 243
£19.79
Duke University Press The Female Complaint
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
£21.59
Duke University Press The Intimacies of Four Continents
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
£20.69
Johns Hopkins University Press Metahistory
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
£23.85
Rowman & Littlefield Critical Theory and Animal Liberation
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
£53.20
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Grave
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
£9.49
Dalkey Archive Press Theory of Prose
Book SynopsisAs time has proven, Theory of Prose still remains one of the twentieth century’s most significant works of literary theory. It not only anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Founded on the concept of “making strange,” it lays bare the inner workings of fiction—especially the works of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Sterne, Dickens, Bely and Rozanov—and imparts a new way of seeing, of reading, and of interacting with the world.Trade Review"Out of Shklovsky’s conviction came critical works of great beauty and complexity, but also several utterly remarkable literary works." -Martin Riker "Shklovsky’s audacity gave him the freedom to take apart Cervantes and Sterne, Gogol and Tolstoy, with a brilliance that still dazzles ninety years later."-The Nation "Shklovsky, who refers to own his style as "serpentine," employs digression, repetition, autobiography and occasional salutations to the reader, confounding one's expectations of how a book of literary criticism should unfold. In doing so, he crafts a true rarity: a superbly written, extended critical study that's capable of inducing a feeling of affection in the reader towards its author."-The Guardian
£12.34
Oxford University Press Literary Theory
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
£9.49
Columbia University Press Ecological Literary Criticism
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.
£25.50
Indiana University Press Charles Sanders Peirce Enlarged Edition Revised
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 *
£25.19
HarperCollins Publishers Inc On Stories
Book Synopsis
£12.59
Houghton Mifflin Lectures On Literature
Book Synopsis
£17.09
Taylor & Francis Ltd Michel Foucault
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;
£19.99
Faber & Faber Talking about Detective Fiction
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.
£10.44
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Rust
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
£9.49
British Museum Press Persian Love Poetry
Book SynopsisThis collection of beautiful Persian love poetry is richly illustrated with images from the British Museumâ s world-famous collection.
£9.49
Johns Hopkins University Press The Mystery to a Solution
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
£24.22
Hopkins Fulfillment Service The Sighted Singer
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
£27.45
State University of New York Press Derrida and Negative Theology
Book SynopsisThis book explores the thought of Jacques Derrida as it relates to the tradition of apophatic thought-negative theology and philosophy-in both Western and Eastern traditions. Following the Introduction by Toby Foshay, two of Derrida''s essays on negative theology, Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy and How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, are reprinted here. These are followed by essays from a Western perspective by Mark C. Taylor and Michel Despland, and essays from an Eastern perspective by David Loy, a Buddhist, and Harold Coward, a Hindu. In the Conclusion, Jacques Derrida responds to these discussions.
£24.27
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Why I Love Barthes
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
£9.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Philosophy of Literature
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
£27.50
Fordham University Press Freud and Monotheism
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
£21.59
Cambridge University Press The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry
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.
£15.19
Duke University Press Essential Essays Volume 2
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
£21.59
