Literary theory Books

3663 products


  • Hannah Arendt

    Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales) Hannah Arendt

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisStudying one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century, this new and welcome addition to the Routledge Critical Thinkers series examines the theories from Arendt’s three main works, offers explanations to the main claims of the works, and presents a guide to her philosophical, literary and cultural context.Table of ContentsWhy Arendt? 1 Biography, Theory and Politics2 Thinking and Society3 Acting4 Labour, Work and Modernism5 Judging: From Kant to Eichmann6 Anti-Semitism7 Imperialism, Racism and Nation8 TotalitarianismCoda: EvilAfter Arendt

    2 in stock

    £24.32

  • HansGeorg Gadamer Routledge Critical Thinkers

    Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales) HansGeorg Gadamer Routledge Critical Thinkers

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisHans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutics is one of the most important modern theories of reading, offering both a framework for understanding the practice and a method for its interpretation.Table of ContentsWhy Gadamer? Key Ideas. 1. Hermeneutics in Theory: From Schleiermacher to Heidegger 2. The Greeks (1): Plato and Dialogue 3. The Greeks (2): Aristotle and Phronēsis 4. Situation and Horizon, Prejudice and Tradition, Language and Play 5. Hermeneutics in Practice: Reading Texts After Gadamer Further Reading

    2 in stock

    £25.99

  • Martin Heidegger Routledge Critical Thinkers

    Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales) Martin Heidegger Routledge Critical Thinkers

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisSince the publication of his mammoth work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought, and is a key influence for modern literary and cultural theory. This guidebook provides an ideal entry-point for readers new to Heidegger, outlining such issues and concepts as: the limits of 'theory' the history of being the origin of the work of art language the literary work poetry and the political Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. Fully updated throughout and featuring a new section on enviromental thought and ecocriticism, this guidebook clearly and concisely introduces Heidegger's crucial work relating to art, language and poetry, and outlines his continuing influence on critical theory.Trade Review' ... a useful, focused introduction to Heidegger, well-indexed, and with a helpful list of further reading, much to be recommended.' -- Literature & TheoryTable of ContentsWhy Heidegger? 1. The Limits of the Theoretical 2. Deep History (Geschichte) 3. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ 4. The Death of Art? 5. Language, Tradition and the Craft of Thinking Interlude: The Hut at Todtnauberg 6. Heidegger and the Poetic 7. Nazism, Poetry and the Political 8. Heidegger, Environmentalism and Ecocriticism After Heidegger

    2 in stock

    £24.32

  • The Kristeva Reader

    John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Kristeva Reader

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisJulia Kristeva is a theorist and has been acclaimed for her work in linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary and political theory. This is an introduction to her work in English, containing a range of essays from all phases of her career.Trade Review"Toril Moi, with her usual exegetical lucidity, makes sense for us of the immensely difficult and varied aspects of Julia Kristeva's intellectual project, characterized by Moi as an attempt to 'think the unthinkable'." London Review of Books "Excellently edited and introduced by Toril Moi." City LimitsTable of ContentsPreface vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 I Linguistics, Semiotics, Textuality 23 1 The System and the Speaking Subject 24 2 Word, Dialogue and Novel 34 3 From Symbol to Sign 62 4 Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science 74 5 Revolution in Poetic Language 89 II Women, Psychoanalysis. Politics 137 6 About Chinese Women 138 7 Stabat Mater 160 8 Women’s Time 187 9 The True-Real 214 10 Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents 238 11 Why the United States? 272 12 A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident 292 13 Psychoanalysis and the Polis 301 Index 321

    1 in stock

    £20.85

  • New Materialisms

    Duke University Press New Materialisms

    Book SynopsisLeading cultural and political theorists argue that any account of experience, agency, and political action demands attention to the urgent issues of our own material existence and environment.Trade Review“Overall, the volume makes a convincing case for the renewal of materialism, in terms of both its theoretical purchase and its radical political potential. It shows, in ways that are often exemplary, that there are rich, and sometimes surprising, resources in the philosophical tradition for renewing materialisms.” - Keith Ansell Pearson, Radical Philosophy“New materialisms offer democratic theory an important opportunity toregard its own parameters and function – what can be hoped for and why.And Coole and Frost’s volume offers a new view of the human (and thething) that are well worth regarding. . . .” - Andrew Poe, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy“New Materialisms is an extraordinary and in fact interdisciplinary collection in its own right. . . . [T]he work coming out of the material turn is mind-blowing work, both in scholarly and in artistic research, and in art”. - Iris van der Tuin, Women’s Studies International Forum“The essays collected here—authored by leading political theorists and feminist and cultural critics—examine the ‘choreographies of becoming’ and move beyond constructivism and humanism to track processes of de- and re-materialization. The effect is to scramble habitual categories of thought—active versus passive, inert versus animate, political versus ontological, causality versus spontaneity—and force us to think materiality. As the editors put it, ‘materiality is always something more than “mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.’”—Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy“This is a strong and timely collection, one that could very well direct future discussions of the ‘new materialisms’ toward an experimental, process-oriented, and politically-engaged ‘new ontology.’”—Ellen Rooney, Brown University“New Materialisms is an extraordinary and in fact interdisciplinary collection in its own right. . . . [T]he work coming out of the material turn is mind-blowing work, both in scholarly and in artistic research, and in art”. -- Iris van der Tuin * Women's Studies International Forum *“New materialisms offer democratic theory an important opportunity toregard its own parameters and function – what can be hoped for and why.And Coole and Frost’s volume offers a new view of the human (and thething) that are well worth regarding. . . .” -- Andrew Poe * Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy *“Overall, the volume makes a convincing case for the renewal of materialism, in terms of both its theoretical purchase and its radical political potential. It shows, in ways that are often exemplary, that there are rich, and sometimes surprising, resources in the philosophical tradition for renewing materialisms.” -- Keith Ansell Pearson * Radical Philosophy *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introducing the New Materialisms / Diana Coole and Samantha Frost 1 The Force of Materiality A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism / Jane Bennett 47 Nondialectical Materialism / Pheng Cheah 70 The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh / Diana Coole 92 Impersonal Matter / Melissa A. Orlie 116 Political Matters Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom / Elizabeth Grosz 139 Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy / Samantha Frost 158 Materialities of Experience / William E. Connolly 178 The Politics of "Life Itself" and New Ways of Dying / Rosi Braidotti 201 Economies of Disruption The Elusive Material: What the Dog Doesn't Understand / Rey Chow 221 Orientations Matter / Sara Ahmed 234 Simon de Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms / Sonia Kruks 258 The Materialism of Historical Materialism / Jason Edwards 281 Bibliography 299 Contributors 319 Index 323

    £21.59

  • Class Acts

    Fordham University Press Class Acts

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisClass Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the speech act that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways?The book follows Derrida's itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida's teaching career and his famous seminar presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminarson life death, theory and practice, and forgivenessjust how Derrida the teacher interrogatedTable of ContentsAbbreviations of Works Cited | xi Introduction: The Program | 1 Part I: Derrida in Montreal (A Play in Three Speech Acts ) Argument and Dramatis Personae | 13 Act 1. The Context (1971) | 15 Intermission 1: Glyph 1 | 41 Act 2. The Signature (1979) | 45 Intermission 2: Glyph 2 | 55 Act 3. The Event (1997) | 59 Encore: Cocoon | 69 Part II: The Open Seminar The Counter-Program (Syllabus) | 75 Class 1. Agrégations: The Chance of Life Death (1975–76) | 93 Class 2. Education in Theory and Practice (1976–77) | 111 Class 3. Grace and the Machine: Perjury and Pardon (1997–98) | 127 Conclusion: Actes de naissance | 149 Acknowledgments | 157 Notes | 159 Index | 183

    1 in stock

    £17.59

  • Cambridge University Press The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean

    2 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    2 in stock

    £71.25

  • The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian

    Cambridge University Press The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisProviding a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, this Companion charts how the utopian has been understood in America since the country became a global leader. Individual chapters explore climate change, economic justice, technology, utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, and more.

    2 in stock

    £24.69

  • Cambridge University Press Jane Austen and Other Minds

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisJane Austen''s fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen''s fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell''s choice of Austen as a means to pursue ''passionate exchange,'' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.

    2 in stock

    £21.84

  • The Politics and Poetics of Ciceros Brutus

    Cambridge University Press The Politics and Poetics of Ciceros Brutus

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisCicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a magisterial dialogue on Rome's oratorical and political history, was written amidst Julius Caesar's rise to power. This book examines how Cicero, in responding to the civic crisis and contemporary intellectual developments, ultimately created the first complex account of literary history in the European tradition.Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Ciceropaideia; 2. The intellectual genealogy of the Brutus; 3. Caesar and the political crisis; 4. Truthmaking and the past; 5. Beginning (and) literary history; 6. Perfecting literary history; 7. Cicero's Attici; 8. Minerva, Venus, and Cicero's judgments on Caesar's style; Conclusion.

    2 in stock

    £22.99

  • Critical Essays on the Drive

    Taylor & Francis Ltd Critical Essays on the Drive

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisThis thorough text provides a complete overview of the drive in Lacanian psychoanalysis.Divided into four key areas, the book considers clinical, theoretical, historical, and cultural aspects of the drive, with editorial headnotes throughout. The introduction to the collection provides a comprehensive overview of the theory and history of the drive as a concept and is followed by discussion of clinical cases. Critical Essays on the Drive then assesses theoretical aspects, with chapters by world-leading Lacanian scholars. The final parts of the book explore the history of drive theory and its impact on art and culture, debunking the notion that the drive is a dormant or defunct concept and considering its applications by artists, academics, and cultural theorists.Critical Essays on the Drive will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists in practice and in training. It will also be of great interest to acad

    1 in stock

    £31.99

  • Theory Conspiracy

    Taylor & Francis Ltd Theory Conspiracy

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisTheory Conspiracy provides a state-of-the-art collection that takes stage on the meeting and/or battlegrounds between conspiracy theory and theory-asconspiracy. By deliberately scrambling the syntaxconspiracy theory cum theory conspiracyit seeks to open a set of reflections on the articulation between theory and conspiracy that addresses how conspiracy might rattle the sense of theory as such. In this sense, the volume also inevitably stumbles on the recent debates on postcritique. The suspicion that our ways of reading in the humanities have been far too suspicious, if not paranoid, has gained considerable attention in a humanities continuously questioned as superfluous at best and leftist and dangerous at worst. The chapters in this volume all approach this problematic from different angles. It features clear engaging writing by a set of contributors who have published extensively on questions of paranoia, conspiracy theory, and/or the state of theory today. This collection Trade Review'Conspiracy theories are shallow but run deep—borne of antiquity, perfected in modernity, and ubiquitous today as virtual intellectualisms of the most paranoid kind. They are a perverse philosophy of history about who controls what, or what controls whom. They concern less the 'Other' than the 'They.' For all these reasons and more, this volume is ever so urgent. In their impressively erudite and lively essays, the authors convened here demonstrate that committed reading is the only means we have to understand conspiracy theory in all of its bewildering plurality. They show you how to think conspiracies from within in order to critique them from without. Essential reading is an understatement to describe Theory Conspiracy.'Andrew Cole, Princeton University, USA'This highly engaging, original and timely collection of essays confronts the problems of living in an era of theory overload, a world in which images and figures cohere into elaborate accounts of how we live now. Even if those accounts don’t match reality, they nevertheless expose something of the Real. The events explored in this book—from Trump to Gilets Jaunes—are more worthy of critique, more fascinating, and more illuminating than the banalities of actuality. Theory Conspiracy is as entertaining as it is significant.'Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, USATable of ContentsTheory Conspiracy: An Introduction PART 1: Backgrounds 1. Being Catiline: Sex, Lies, and Coup d’états in the Liberal Order 2. Unsettling History: How an Egyptian Conspiracy Theory Turns Time into Place 3. The Kristeva File 4. A Portrait of Baudelaire as a Conspiracy Theorist PART 2: Contemporary 5. Conspiracy and Ressentiment: The Vexed Politics of the Gilets Jaunes 6. Ugly Freedoms and Insurrectionary Conspiracies 7. Don’t Look Up, Birds Aren’t Real: Comedy and Conspiracy PART 3: Critical 8. Has Conspiracy Theory Run Out of Steam? 9. A Reparative Chronotope of Critique 10. Conspiring with Theory: Popper, Antitheory, and the Epistemology of Ignorance 11. A Sketch of Conspiratorial Reason

    2 in stock

    £36.99

  • Taylor & Francis Ltd Thomas Ogden

    1 in stock

    a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

    1 in stock

    £19.99

  • Taylor & Francis Psychoanalysis Poetic Testimony and the Trauma of the Holocaust

    2 in stock

    a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

    2 in stock

    £31.99

  • Taylor & Francis Old Norse Mythology

    2 in stock

    a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

    2 in stock

    £37.99

  • The Routledge Anthology of Climate Fiction

    Taylor & Francis The Routledge Anthology of Climate Fiction

    2 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    2 in stock

    £34.19

  • Taylor & Francis Ideological Fantasies in Planning Theories and Practices

    2 in stock

    a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

    2 in stock

    £37.99

  • Taylor & Francis Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition

    1 in stock

    a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

    1 in stock

    £37.99

  • Taylor & Francis The Routledge Anthology of Global Science Fiction Origins

    15 in stock

    a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

    15 in stock

    £37.99

  • Taylor & Francis Ltd Dalit Studies

    2 in stock

    a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

    2 in stock

    £37.99

  • Race in American Literature and Culture

    Cambridge University Press Race in American Literature and Culture

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisExploring the unsteady foundations of American literary history, Race in American Literature and Culture examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth while considering aspects of the literary and interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape. A multicultural study of the influential and complex presence of race in the American imagination, the book pushes debate in exciting new directions. Offering expert explorations of how the history of race has been represented and written about, it shows in what ways those representations and writings have influenced wider American culture. Distinguished scholars from African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies foreground the conflicts in question across different traditions and different modes of interpretation, and are thus able comprehensively and creatively to address in the volume how and why race has been so centraTable of ContentsPart I. Fractured Foundations: 1. American empire Edward Larkin; 2. Synchronic and diachronic: Race in early American literatures Katy Chiles; 3. Protean oceans: Racial uncertainty in Arthur Gordon Pym and Emmanuel Appadocca Gesa Mackenthun; Part II. Racial Citizenship: 4. 'Faithful Reflection' and the work of African American literary history Derrick Spires; 5. Beyond protest Koritha Mitchell; 6. Affiliated races Edlie L. Wong; Part III. Contending Forces: 7. Reconstructing race Sarah Gardner; 8. Out of the silent South: White Southerners writing race during the long reconstruction John Grammer; 9. Neighborliness, race, and nineteenth-century regional fiction Stephanie Foote; Part IV. Reconfigurations: 10. Passing M. Giulia Fabi; 11. Beyond assimilation John Alba Cutler; 12. Native reconfigurations Kiara M. Vigil; 13. Dispossessions and repositionings: Sarah Winnemucca's school as anti-colonialist lesson Cari Carpenter; 14. 'White by Law,' White by literature: Naturalization and the constructedness of race in the literature of American naturalism Mita Banerjee; Part V. Envisioning Race: 15. Picturing race: African Americans in US visual culture before the Civil War Martha J. Cutter; 16. 'The Man That Was a Thing': Uncle Tom's Cabin, photographic vision, and the portrayal of race in the nineteenth century Maurice Wallace; 17. Locating race Melanie B. Taylor; 18. De-forming and re-making: Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other and the multifocal decolonial novel Paula M. L. Moya and Luz M. Jiménez Ruvalcaba; Part VI. Case Studies: 19. Collective biographies and African American history: Men of Mark (1887) and Progress of a Race (1897) Claire Parfait; 20. Aztlan for the middle class: Chicano literary activism José Antonio Arellano; 21. The racial underground Kinohi Nishikawa; 22. Literature in Hawaiian pidgin and the critique of Asian settler colonialism Jeehyun Lim; 23. Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and the burning house of American literature Anna Brickhouse; Part VII. Reflections and Prospects: 24. What is missing? Black history, Black loss and Black resurrectionary poetics P. Gabrielle Foreman; 24. Traditions, communities, literature Siobhan Senier; 26. Children of the future Min Hyoung Song; 27 Presidential race Stephanie Li.

    2 in stock

    £29.99

  • Queer Shakespeare

    Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Queer Shakespeare

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisNow available in paperback, Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of the criticism of desire, body and sexuality in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare criticism and queer theory, this collection demonstrates the vibrancy of queer Shakespeare studies. Taken together, these essays explore embodiment, desire, sexuality and gender as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw critical energy from focused studies of time, language and nature. The Afterword extends these inquiries by linking the Anthropocene and queer ecology with Shakespeare criticism. Works from Shakespeare's entire canon feature in essays which explore topics like glass, love, antitheatrical homophobia, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, cTrade ReviewQueer Shakespeare engages with crucial yet subversive queerness throughout Shakespearean poetry and performance. Unifying past scholarship with vital queer theory, Stanivukovic’s collection reveals necessary insights into our evolving relationship with Shakespeare. -- Peter Kuling, University of Ottawa, CanadaTable of ContentsIntroduction: ‘Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality’, by Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada 1.‘Which is worthiest love’ in Two Gentlemen of Verona?, by David L. Orvis, Appalachan State University, USA 2. ‘Glass: The Sonnets’ Desiring Object’, by John Garrison, Carroll University USA 3. ‘The Sport of Asses: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, by Kirk Quinsland, Fordham University, USA 4. ‘As You Like It or What You Will: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus’, by Ian F. Moulton, Arizona State University, USA 5. ‘The Queer Language of Size in Love’s Labour’s Lost’, by Valerie Billing, Knox College, USA 6. ‘Locating Queerness in Cymbeline’, by Stephen Guy-Bray, University of British Columbia, Canada 7. ‘Desiring H: Much Ado About Nothing and the Sound of Women’s Desire’, by Holly Dugan, George Washington University, USA 8. ‘“Two lips, indifferent red:’ Queer Styles in Twelfth Night’, by Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada 9. ‘Queer Nature, or the Weather in Macbeth’, by Christine Varnado, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA 10. ‘Strange Insertions in The Merchant of Venice’, by Eliza Greenstadt, Portland State University, USA 11. ‘Male Femininity and Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems,’ by Simone Chess, Wayne State University, USA 12. ‘Held in Common: Romeo and Juliet and The Promiscuous Seductions of Plague’, by Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt University, USA 13. ‘Antisocial Procreation in Measure for Measure’, by Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania, USA Afterword by Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia, Canada

    2 in stock

    £27.54

  • Shakespeare and Textual Theory

    Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Shakespeare and Textual Theory

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisThere is no Shakespeare without text. Yet readers often do not realize that the words in the book they hold, like the dialogue they hear from the stage, has been revised, augmented and emended since Shakespeare's lifetime. An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, Shakespeare and Textual Theory traces the explanatory underpinnings of these changes through the centuries. After providing an introduction to early modern printing practices, Suzanne Gossett describes the original quartos and folios as well as the first collected editions. Subsequent sections summarize the work of the New Bibliographers' and the radical challenge to their technical analysis posed by poststructuralist theory, which undermined the presumed stability of author and text. Shakespeare and Textual Theory presents a balanced view of the current theoretical debates, which include the nature of the surviving texts we call Shakespeare's; the relationship of the author ShTable of ContentsSeries Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part One: Textual Studies Before ‘Theory’ 1 Shakespeare’s Texts From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century The progress of an early modern play The First Folio Successive Folios Early editions Part Two: Twentieth-Century Theories 2 The New Bibliography 3 The Advent of Poststructuralism 4 Textual and Other Theories Part Three: Current Debates 5 Authorship, Agency, and Intentionality 6 Attribution and Collaboration External evidence Internal evidence Enlarging the canon Theoretical implications 7 The (In)Stability of the Text What if the printer went to lunch? Why are some texts bad? Why – and how and when – do some texts change? 8 Editing and Unediting Editing Shakespeare Editing collaborations Unediting Shakespeare Deciding on intervention 9 Book History and the Text Shakespeare as literary dramatist The creation of ‘Shakespeare’ through books Readers, commonplacers and collectors Women and Shakespeare books Two material texts 10 Performance and the Text Traces of early performance Editing for performance 11 Textual Theories and Difficult Cases: Hamlet and Pericles Shakespeare’s texts and early editions Enter the New Bibliography The challenge of post-structuralism, or authorship, authority, and intention Textual and other theories Attribution and collaboration Printing unstable texts Editing and unediting Book history and the text Performance and the text Coda: The Immaterial Text 12 Textual Studies After the Digital Turn References Index

    1 in stock

    £21.84

  • The Future of Environmental Criticism

    John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Future of Environmental Criticism

    1 in stock

    Book Synopsis* A critical summary of the emerging discipline of ecocriticism. * Written by one of the world's leading theorists in ecocriticism. * Traces the history of the ecocritical movement from its roots in the 1970s through to its diversification and proliferation today.Trade Review"Where did ecocriticism spring from? What directions has it taken on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond? What have been its key debates? What are its most radical strands that should take environmentally aware literary criticism into the future? Economically and elegantly, Lawrence Buell develops an astutely judged overview of a richly diverse but crucially important movement in literary studies. A leading practitioner in the field, Buell reveals how his own work has been influenced by the key debates and identifies the challenges for us all, writers and readers, local neighbours and global species, in facing the future our literary culture mediates and influences." Terry Gifford, author of Pastoral (1999) and The Unreliable Mushrooms (poetry, 2003). "A much needed overview of a vital new field, The Future of Environmental Criticism captures the ecocritical movement’s present state of dynamic metamorphosis as it opens into post-humanism and ecofeminism, engages poststructural theory and environmental justice, and tests out alliances with various scientific fields and critical science studies in an increasingly international context. Nobody could accomplish this task better than Lawrence Buell, whose earlier books The Environmental Imagination and Writing for an Endangered World have become defining works for the environmental turn in literary scholarship. The previous works were primarily American in focus, while the new one begins in an Anglo-American context and broadens to a global literary scope. This latest volume completes an indispensable trilogy." Louise Westling, University of Oregon “Buell (Harvard) is one of the US’s major voices on environmental criticism-.-a fairly recent area of literary and cultural studies known as “ecocriticism.” Several recent works have offered suggestions about how this movement or approach can be defined, but none addresses the subject so broadly, so authoritatively, and in such precise and carefully considered terms as this one does- Buell helped establish the terms for humanistic environmental writing with The Environmental Imagination (CR, Sep’95, 33-0121) and Writing for an Endangered World (CH, Nov01., 39-1386), and he perceives the present study as a “roadmap of trends, emphases, and controversies within green literary studies more generally.’ Comprising five brief chapters, all accessible and extraordinarily well informed, the book starts with a history of environmental criticism and writing; moves to a consideration of the relevant major writers involved in complicating its issues; considers its impact in terms of ethics and gender and of the judiciary and politics; and finally looks at its future, The glossary, full notes, and extended bibliography make it clear that the book’s main thrust is definitional, though Buell sees the study as more ‘essayistic” than definitive, Summing Up: Essential: All academic libraries.” T. Loe, SUNY Oswego “Buell’s survey, framed by chapters about the emergence and possible future development of ecocriticism, organizes its material through a focus on issues of literary realism and representation in their relation to nature (chapter 2); the central role of place, space, and imagination for ecocritical thought (chapter 3); and a discussion of politics and ethics in ecocriticism that ranges from deep ecology to ecofeminism and environmental justice (chapter 4). These broad but well chosen categories allow Buell to cover an enormous range of creative and theoretical material that he discusses with the encompassing mastery and insight that readers of his two earlier works on ecocriticism … have come to expect.” Contemporary Literature "This is an important beginning that shows how the future of the book lies in the past." Travis V. Mason, Canadian Literature 191 “An extremely methodical, accessible, and timely introduction to the field of environmental criticism for specialists and non-specialists alike, a teasing insight into ecocriticism at work, and an excellent exposition of the development and evolution of the discipline in its most recent manifestations.” Ruth Glynn, University of Bristol, Modern Language ReviewTable of ContentsPreface. Acknowledgments. 1 The Emergence of Environmental Criticism. 2 The World, the Text, and the Ecocritic. 3 Space, Place, and Imagination from Local to Global. 4 The Ethics and Politics of Environmental Criticism. 5 Environmental Criticism’s Future. Glossary of Selected Terms. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

    1 in stock

    £25.60

  • Course in General Linguistics

    Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Course in General Linguistics

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisFerdinand de Saussure is commonly regarded as one of the fathers of 20th Century Linguistics. His lectures, posthumously published as the Course in General Linguistics ushered in the structuralist mode which marked a key turning point in modern thought. Philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan, the anthropologist ClaudeLevi-Strauss and linguists such as Noam Chomsky all found an important influence for their work in the pages of Saussure''s text. Published 100 years after Saussure''s death, this new edition of Roy Harris''s authoritative translation is now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series with a substantial new introduction exploring Saussure''s contemporary influence and importance.Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the Third Edition Editor's Introduction, Roy Harris Introduction 1. A Brief Survey of the History of Linguistics 2. Data and Aims of Linguistics: Connexions with Related Sciences 3. The Object of Study 4. Linguistics of Language Structure and Linguistics of Speech 5. Internal and External Elements of a Language 6. Representation of a Language by Writing 7. Physiological Phonetics Appendix: Principles of Physiological Phonetics 1. Sound Types 2. Sounds in Spoken Sequences Part One: General Principles 1. Nature of the Linguistic Sign 2. Invariability and Variability of the Sign 3. Static Linguistics and Evolutionary Linguistics Part Two: Synchronic Linguistics 1. General Observations 2. Concrete Entities of a Language 3. Identities, Realities, Values 4. Linguistic Value 5. Syntagmatic Relations and Associative Relations 6. The Language Mechanism 7. Grammar and Its Subdivisions 8. Abstract Entities in Grammar Part Three: Diachronic Linguistics 1. General Observations 2. Sound Changes 3. Grammatical Consequences of Phonetic Evolution 4. Analogy 5. Analogy and Evolution 6. Popular Etymology 7. Agglutination 8. Diachronic Units,Identities and Realities Appendices Part Four: Geographical Linguistics 1. On the Diversity of Languages 2. Geographical Diversity: Its Complexity 3. Causes of Geographical Diversity 4. Propagation of Linguistic Waves Part Five: Questions of Retrospective Linguistics Conclusion 1. The Two Perspectives of Diachronic Linguistics 2. Earliest Languages and Prototypes 3. Reconstructions 4. Linguistic Evidence in Anthropology and Prehistory 5. Language Families and Linguistic Types Index

    1 in stock

    £21.84

  • Literary Theory A Complete Introduction

    John Murray Press Literary Theory A Complete Introduction

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisLiterary theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create new interpretations of the text that would not otherwise be possible. In your own reading and writing, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. It allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of literature, but also about the core themes - concepts such as gender, sexuality, the self, race, and class - which a text might explore.Literary theory gives you an almost limitless number of texts to work into your own response, ensuring that your interpretation is truly original. This is why, although literary theory can initially appear alienating and difficult, it is something to get really excited about. Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circul

    2 in stock

    £13.49

  • Us Modernism at Continents End

    Edinburgh University Press Us Modernism at Continents End

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisThis book is first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production.

    2 in stock

    £81.00

  • The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the

    Edinburgh University Press The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisThis book includes twenty-eight innovative chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence's relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical contexts.

    2 in stock

    £153.00

  • D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace

    Edinburgh University Press D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisExamines how D. H. Lawrence established a professional writing career.

    2 in stock

    £81.00

  • The Edinburgh History of Reading

    Edinburgh University Press The Edinburgh History of Reading

    5 in stock

    Book SynopsisCommon Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people.

    5 in stock

    £94.50

  • The Edinburgh History of Reading

    Edinburgh University Press The Edinburgh History of Reading

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisSubversive Readers explores the strategies used by readers to question authority, challenge convention, resist oppression, assert their independence and imagine a better world.

    1 in stock

    £94.50

  • The Hundreds

    Duke University Press The Hundreds

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint—each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long—amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What''s an encounter with anything once it''s seen as an incitement to composition? What''s a concept or a theory if they''re no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes in whichAndrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respondwith their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.Trade Review"In Berlant and Stewart’s hands, affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy. It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions." -- Hua Hsu * The New Yorker *"The seemingly arbitrary parameters Berlant and Stewart put in place act out an illuminating thought experiment for the reader. . . . A haunting and thought-provoking read that asks readers to slow down and take stock of what is in front of them." -- Julia Shiota * Ploughshares *"A roving adventure in critical prose. . . . Berlant and Stewart eschew a literary focal point for a broadly questioning spirit. . . . The point is not to 'track thing into their secret lairs,' or to place them in the 'so-called big picture,' rather, it is to look again, and encourage the reader look again too." -- Michael Caines * TLS *"The Hundreds is playful and loose, it roams and discovers, only to drift elsewhere, but it works: it grounds theory, makes it real." -- Casey Dawson and Christopher Schaberg * Los Angeles Review of Books *"The Hundreds focalizes an intrinsic desire to explore the world’s simplicities as the foundation for the potentiality of the extraordinary. Berlant and Stewart show that, indeed, ordinary life is ordinary and transformative, containing so many possibilities for thinking about who we are in the world, really." -- Matt Morgenstern * Cleveland Review of Books *"The Hundreds, by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, is at once a bold thought experiment and a radical exploration of reflexive ethnographic writing. . . . The Hundreds is a must read for scholars interested in affect as another register of human experience that exists alongside the psychological and phenomenological." -- Asha L. Abeyasekera * Feminism & Psychology *"As compositions, the hundreds illuminate and obscure, defamiliarize and refamiliarize, reflect and refract (tip of the cap to Volosinov 1973) both their authors and the cultural artifacts that appear in them, and offer a way of archiving cultural moments in ways that acknowledge, even foreground, their affective power." -- Seth Kahn * Anthropological Quarterly *"A speculative and seductive book. . . . The Hundreds asks us to pay attention to the capacious and crucial smallness of our everyday, to slow down and dial in to the richness and frustrations of ordinary encounters as a grounding and creative political practice." -- Elisabeth R. Anker * Theory & Event *

    1 in stock

    £18.99

  • Duke University Press Wild Things

    Book SynopsisIn Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity''s orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries—from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip''s Zong! to Maurice Sendak''s Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement—to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more bTrade Review“Where can the wild take you? With Jack Halberstam as guide, to places fabulous, cruel, soaring, undead, hilarious, dark, seductive, promising, nonprovidential. Wild Things is a brilliant phenomenology of the (more than) human condition of bewilderment. Its critique of invocations of wildness tethered to colonial, racist fantasies also marks how the figure can contribute to forms of desire bent toward the feral, the incipient, the otherwise. Wild Things is an awesome trip.” -- Jane Bennett, author of * Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman *“How does one learn about wildness? Coming from a longtime scholar of sexuality, the animal, desire, and anarchy, Jack Halberstam's Wild Things fosters a generous archive, favoring bewilderment over a ritual turn back to order and knowing. Following this book constitutes a kind of epistemological travel and culminates in a habit of sensation, a disorderly campaign, and a queer method that will stay with you.” -- Mel Y. Chen, author of * Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect *"[A] creative, discipline-smashing study exploring the human attraction to 'the wild.' . . . Halberstam’s approach is equal parts academic and poetic, making for a dense and, at times, beautiful text. This is a work that demands attention, which it rewards with both insight and entertainment." * Publishers Weekly *“In Wild Things Halberstam moves restlessly across literature, cinema, theater, music, and poetry, determining the various modes by which people have devoted themselves to, or been effectively written within, the incomprehensibilities of the wild, of wildness, and of bewilderment…. Wild Things (un)clarifies the wild as an always-present threat to modernity’s coherence, illuminating the anti-Black and heteronormative carceral logics at the heart of liberal democracy by unveiling those under common ways of knowing and being that liberalism seeks to obscure, incorporate, lock up, or destroy.” * Invisible Culture *"The limits of Halberstam's analysis are boundlessly educative and entertaining: one chapter calls out proto-queer male writers for their affinity and identification with feral falconry while another examines the nature of family pets. Within the realms of what the author himself calls a 'counterintuitive queer project,' Halberstam's intellectually engrossing phenomenology evokes thoughts of how the concept of 'wild' can be applied to creatures and concepts both great and small while inspiring spirited conversation and debate." -- Jim Piechota * Bay Area Reporter *"Wild Things offers readers and scholars working on environmental questions a vibrant archive for thinking histories of sexuality and desire alongside concepts of the “wild” and its disorders. . . . The text is especially rich as an archive of the ways wildness persists within and can be activated against modernist writers. Halberstam’s wildness is a morally ambivalent, non-identitarian invitation—one that might lead to bewilderment, zombies, children’s books, hawks, or any number of other queer, wild things." -- Julia Dauer * Edge Effects *“Through Halberstam’s examination of pop culture and political projects, his analysis is consistently brought back to racial tropes that define the socio-political state of colonialism today.... Wild Things is a reminder that critical scholarship’s penchant for world-making and un-making is a political imperative to thinking beyond our hegemonic constraints.” -- Jake Kyer Townsend * Cultural Studies *“The book’s first half is a remarkable example of ecstatic intellectual curiosity, flying high on seemingly perpendicular currents Halberstam teaches us to navigate with smooth and logical flow. . . . Halberstam wrote exactly the wild book he set out to write.” -- Nicholas Tyler Reich * Transgender Studies Quarterly *“With regard to queer topics, Halberstam has been an influential figure in modern queer theory and Wild Things attests to this status as it is steadfastly grounded in the scholarship of the field. . . . The author does not simply connect wildness with queerness, but braids the two strands of theory together thus expanding their discursive potential.” -- Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis * European Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xiii Part I. Sex in the Wild Introduction. Sex before, after, and against Nature 3 1. Wildness, Loss, and Death 33 2. "A New Kind of Wildness": The Rite of Spring and and Indigenous Aesthetics of Bewilderment 51 3. The Epistemology of the Ferox: Sex, Death, and Falconry 77 Part II. Animality Introduction. Into the Wild 115 4. Where the Wild Things Are: Humans, Animals, and Children 125 5. Zombie Antihumanism at the End of the World 147 Conclusions. The Ninth Wave 175 Notes 181 Bibliography 201 Index 211

    £18.89

  • The Affect Theory Reader 2

    Duke University Press The Affect Theory Reader 2

    Book SynopsisBuilding on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future pTrade Review“The Affect Theory Reader 2 surveys the burgeoning field whose development its predecessor did so much to catalyze. In the intervening thirteen years, the study of affect has spread its capillaries across an ever-growing spectrum of disciplines, while at the same time expanding the scope of its own problematics. This new anthology skillfully presents a much-needed digest of the state of the field today. The essays it brings together address a wide range of topics, opening new perspectives on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including, in a reckoning that is long overdue for the field, an emphasis on issues of race. This is an excellent and timely volume that readers interested in affect studies and allied areas will find indispensable.” -- Brian Massumi, author of * Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism *“The essays in The Affect Theory Reader 2 offer galvanizing, clarifying experiments with thought and form. Wholly reimagined from its previous incarnation, this ‘cluster of attunings’ showcases the maturity of this line of inquiry and so many of its emergent conversations, while at the same time finding the mettle to rethink the origins and legacies of ‘affect theory’ as such. An exciting offering for anyone who imagines the minor registers of experience deserves an unmistakably major volume.” -- Jordan Alexander Stein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Introduction: A Shimmer of Inventories / Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell 1 Part One. Tensions, In Solution 1. The Elements of Affect Theories / Derek P. McCormack 63 2. Ambiguous Affect: Excitements That Make the Self / Susanna Paasonen 85 3. Tomkins in Tension / Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson 103 4. Affect and Affirmation / Tyrone S. Palmer 122 5. Unfuckology: Affectability, Temporality, and Unleashing the Sex/Gender Binary / Kyla Schuller 141 Part Two. Minor Feelings and the Sensorial Possibilities of Form 6. Minor Feelings and the Affective Life of Race / Ann Cvetkovich 161 7. Resisting the Enclosure of Trans Affective Commons / Hil Malatino 179 8. Too Thick Love, or Bearing the Unbearable / Rizvana Bradley 191 9. Migration: An Intimacy / Omar Kasmani 214 Part Three. Unlearning and the Conditions of Arrival 10. Unlearning Affect / M. Gail Hamner 233 11. Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake / Nathan Snaza 255 12. The Feeling of Knowing Music / Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson 273 Part Four. The Matter of Experience, or, Reminding Consciousness of Its Necessary Modesty 13. Nonconscious Affect: Cognitive, Embodied, or Nonbifurcated Experience? / Tony D. Sampson 295 14. Catch an Incline: The Impersonality of the Minor / Erin Manning 315 15. Emotions and Affects of Convolution / Lisa Blackman 326 16. Haunting Voices: Affective Atmospheres as Transtemporal Contact / Cecilia Macón 347 Part Five. A Living Laboratory: Glitching the Affective Reproduction of the Social 17. The Affective Reproduction of Capital: Two Returns to Spinoza / Jason Read 367 18. Algorithmic Governance and Racializing Affect / Ezekiel Dixon-Román 384 19. Dividual Economies, of Data, of Flesh / Jasbir K. Puar 406 20. Algorithmic Trauma / Michael Richardson 423 Coda 447 A Note / Kathleen Stewart 449 Poisonality / Lauren Berlant 451 Contributors 465 Index 471

    £24.29

  • Earth

    Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Earth

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a blue marble, a blue pale dot, or, as Chaucer described it, this litel spot of erthe, the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade Review[An] alchemy of unlikely ideas ... [The authors] reflect on the geological history of the earth and humanity's understanding of it over the millennia. * Sydney Morning Herald *Earth is a magical, unusual, curious book … Cohen and Elkins-Tanton describe it as a “little book about an impossibly large subject.” This subject is made even larger by Cohen and Elkins-Tanton’s forays into discussions of beauty, creativity, and imagination (including my favorite question in the book: “Can you die from an overactive imagination?”) and how they connect to science and ultimately this planet. This makes Earth a book that is, ultimately, a testament to what can be discovered if we are brave enough to combine the unexpected. * PopMatters *Learning from this volume as a reader means … not only to participate in a conversation between specialists from two disciplines, but also to do so across different modes of expression, and experimenting together with the two authors in an innovative and completely unique creative space. Different readers (and reviewers) will learn different things from this handsome (it just about fits in an adult’s hand) and beautifully designed volume … What surprised me was how ‘realistic’ the object lesson became for me as a scholar because of the multiple narrative modes and tones in which it is written. The fragmentary mix of subjective impressions and scientific factoids all of us sedulously collect before we force them into linear narratives are all discernible as patterns in a rich and open ended fabric. * Medievally Speaking *Earth is ambitious, thought-provoking and inspirational, conversationally written between two dissimilar but very complementary viewpoints. In this great age of exoplanetary discovery, it makes me wonder how unique our wonderful home planet really is. * Scott Parazynski, MD, University Explorer and Professor at Arizona State University, USA, and NASA Astronaut (retired) *As much as the mindsets of a distinguished planetary scientist and a medieval studies professor differ, it is what they share in common when thinking about that object so dear to all of us, the Earth, that is so fascinating. What this delightful and informative book ultimately demonstrates is that the humanity of science itself offers untold fuel for the humanities to ponder our existence. The Object of this book, the Earth, is at once more interesting and better off because both of these scholars chose to write about it. * Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist and author of A Universe from Nothing and The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far *Gorgeous … The book’s words and images can’t quite banish scale’s disorienting shifts, but interweaving planet-sized ideas with human words and emotions opens doors … I’m struck not so much by the disparity of [the authors’] fields as their shared curiosity and commitment to generative and generous thinking. * The Bookfish *Table of Contents1. Prologue: Genesis 2. Orbit 3. Ground (Why Earth?) 4. Scale (Barriers to Understanding) 5. Radiance (Earth's beauty) 6. Gravity (Earth's Pull) 7. Interlude: A Hike Around Piestewa Peak 8. Imagination List of Illustrations Notes Index

    2 in stock

    £9.49

  • Alarm

    Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Alarm

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention and force us to attend to things we've preferred to ignore. But alarms also allow us to feel secure, to sleep and to retreat from alertness. Theytake over vigilance on our behalf. From the alarm clock and the air-raid siren to the doorbell and the phone alert, the history of alarms is also the history of work, security, technology and emotion. Alarm responds to culture's most urgent calls to attention by examining all kinds of alarms, from the restless presence of the alarm clock in modernist art to the siren the sound of the police in classic hip hop. More than just bells and whistles, alarms are objects that have defined sleeping and waking, safety and danger, and they have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the mind and its capacity for attention.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay seTrade ReviewBy revealing the uncanny ubiquity of alarms in our daily life, by making us smile about their profound ambivalence, Alice Bennett has written a pleasurable and soothing book. From burglary to belatedness, from house fires to climate change, this exemplary collaboration between literary studies and the social sciences sheds a reflexive, nuanced and joyful light on our darker anxieties. A most accessible, elegant and important lesson in attention ecology. * Yves Citton, Professor in Literature and Media, University Paris 8, France, and author of The Ecology of Attention *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction 1. Clock 2. Fire 3. Security 4. Siren 5. Failure, False, Fatigue 6. Future Image Credits Notes Index

    2 in stock

    £9.49

  • Ecofeminism Second Edition

    Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Ecofeminism Second Edition

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisCarol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals, and The Pornography of Meat. Her work is the subject of two recent anthologies, Defiant Daughters: 21 Women of Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Art of the Animal: 14 Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which a new generation of feminists, artists, and activists respond to Adams' groundbreaking work. Lori Gruen is William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, USA, where she is also a professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Her work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and ethical practice, with a particular focus on ethical issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, non-human animals. She is the authTrade ReviewCarol J. Adams and Lori Gruen are two of the leading scholars in the field of animal studies. This is a pathbreaking book with current, relevant, and important insights for the entire field. It should be required reading for anyone concerned with animals, feminism, or the environment – which is to say, everyone. * Vasile Stanescu, Associate Professor of Communication Studies & Theatre, Mercer University, USA *This is a breakthrough collection of updated influential essays in the field and fresh and diverse animal-centered analyses addressing urgent questions of climate, care, and affect. Adams and Gruen have curated a superb text for readers new to ecofeminist thought as well as seasoned scholars. * Maneesha Deckha, Professor and Lansdowne Chair, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, Canada *Climate justice requires attention to the historical roots of our environmental crises, and transformative philosophies to help foster liberation, respect for other animals, and a flourishing Earth. The multicultural conversation woven together in this brilliant volume shows why ecofeminist praxis is crucial for understanding the manifold harms of oppression, and nurturing more powerful ethics of resistance, caring, and solidarity. * Christine J. Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies, University of Georgia, USA *With the growing interest in intersectional theories there has been a recent, renewed interest in ecofeminism. This book rises to meet this demand in the form of a collection of essays, which answers the concern of essentialism by embracing a wide range of scholarly voices from the field ... engaging and mind-opening ... a must-read for both feminists and also, no doubt, for meat-eaters. * Anna Maguire, U.S. Studies Online [on the 1st edition] *This provocative new anthology is to be warmly welcomed for the diversity of its voices and the breadth of its critical analyses and agenda. Ecofeminism encompasses theory and lived experience at the multiple and sometimes contested intersections of gender identity, disability rights, race, and animal advocacy. * Martin Rowe, Author of The Polar Bear in the Zoo: A Speculation [on the 1st edition] *The past three decades or so have seen the publication of a fair number of collections presenting feminist perspectives on human-animal relations. So when coming to a new volume that walks this well-traversed terrain, it's hard not to approach it with the thought that there had really better be something new here. Happily, Ecofeminism delivers the fresh goods. … What the collection as a whole conveys, primarily, is the roots-in-the-dirt entanglement of the various strands of social life with human and nonhuman animals. With animal studies now making the transition from applied ethics to social philosophy, Ecofeminism makes worthy contributions to an emerging and exciting literature. * Jason Wyckoff, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy [on the 1st edition] *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface Carol J. Adams (Independent Scholar, USA) and Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) 1. Ecofeminist Footings Carol J. Adams (Independent Scholar, USA) and Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) Part 1 Affect Introduction to Affect 2. Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals Josephine Donovan (University of Maine, USA) 3. Compassion and Being Human Deane Curtin (Gustavus Adolphus College, USA) 4. Ecology is a Sistah's Issue Too Shamara Shantu Riley (Independent Scholar) 5. Joy Deborah Slicer (University of Montana, USA) 6. Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense pattrice jones (Independent Scholar and Co-founder of Vine Sanctuary, USA) 7. Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethics of Care Sunaura Taylor (University of California at Berkeley, USA) 8. Facing Death and Practicing Grief Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) Part 2 Context Introduction to Context 9. Inter-Animal Moral Conflicts and Moral Repair: A Contextualized Ecofeminism Approach in Action Karen S. Emmerman (University of Washington, USA) 10. Michael Vick, Race, and Animality Claire Kim (University of California at Irvine, USA) 11. Caring Cannibals: Testing Contextual Edibility for Speciesism Ralph Acampora (Hofstra University, USA) 12. Ecofeminism and Veganism: Revisiting the Question of Universalism Richard Twine (Edge Hill University, UK) 13. Why a Pig? A Reclining Nude Reveals the Intersections of Race, Sex, Slavery, and Species Carol J. Adams (Independent Scholar, USA) 14. Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities Greta Gaard (University of Wisconsin-River Falls, USA) Part 3 Climate Introduction to Climate 15. Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies Susan Fraiman (University of Virginia, USA) 16. Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto Chelsea Mikael Frazier (Cornell University, USA) 17. The Animals Call It: Climate Crisis, Gender Crisis, and Ecofeminist Listening Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia) 18. Global Atmospheres of Exploitation: Shifting Terrains of Othering in Ecofeminist Kathryn Gillespie (University of Kentucky, USA) and Yamini Narayanan (Deakin University, Australia) 19. Maximum Plunder: The Global Context and Multiple Threats of Animal Agriculture Mia MacDonald (Policy Analyst, Executive Director and Founder of Brighter Green, USA) 20. Upsetting Boundaries: Trans Queer Interspecies Ecofeminisms Leah Kirts (Freelance Writer and Activist, USA) References Index

    1 in stock

    £23.74

  • The Geschlecht Complex

    Bloomsbury Publishing Plc The Geschlecht Complex

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe polysemous German word Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new? Drawing on Barbara Cassin''s transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of philosophizing in languages, scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete category problems in literature, philosophy,Trade ReviewAs someone who has followed untranslatability for many years, it is with great pleasure that Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca have brought this theme to a point of philosophical sophistication in The Geschlecht Complex—a brilliant, bold, and eccentric work. [...]themselves to a single (but impossibly complex) German word, a range of scholars from different fields of inquiry and analysis have nonetheless produced a collection that signals a new maturity in the approach to untranslatability. In that sense, it may (hopefully) be the first of many such works. This is a collection that bravely attempts to overcome the constraints of traditional scholarship in the hope of generating work that lives up to Apter and Cassin’s invocations to ‘philosophize with languages’. The very form of the book itself challenges and expands a series of preconceptions on this topic. It is a brave, well-rounded, and seismically significant publication insofar as it exercises what previous scholars have only prescribed and envisioned. * Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Review *Bristling with intellectual energy, The Geschlecht Complex brings together a number of brilliantly original essays and a carefully curated sample of theoretical excerpts in its exploration of the resonances and affordances of a singularly untranslatable notion. The Geschlecht Complex is many things: it is both syllabus and seminar, both a joyful intellectual exchange and a virtuoso homage to the examples of such thinkers/readers as Cassin, Cavell, Apter, and Derrida. Most of all, it is an exuberant performance of the key inspiration driving the thinking of the untranslatable: the conviction that the untranslatable is at once generated and redeemed by passionate ventures of translation-across genres, media, bodies, languages, and disciplines. In all these transpositions, this volume succeeds marvelously. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium *Geschlecht by any other name: that multifarious and ultimately untranslatable German word typifying in this volume a complexity and a syndrome alike -- its cultural semantics both vertical for generational kindred and horizontal for genre or kind; lineage on the one hand, typology on the other; now general species or genus, now specified gender. With this book’s erudite roundtable, we are invited to the second, collectively-edited installment of a productive -- make that generative -- seminar once convened to rethink the ramifications of such irresolvable inner difference: less as a definitional crux than as a blocked crossing, where impasse becomes surplus when confronted at the disciplinary interface of philology and philosophy, rhetoric and ontology. Giving new reach to trans-theory, the performative yield of category-hesitation in these essays is abundant, subtle, and bracing. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Deed of Reading: Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy *The Geschlecht Complex is a rare and undoubtedly important book in that it treats categorization as both problem and necessity for the production of knowledge. Indeed, utilizing and developing the notion of the ‘uncategorizable’ as an analytical tool, it collects a multitude of contemporary problems into a stereoscopic perspective (albeit in a non-unitary manner and necessarily hesitant of its own limits) on the age-old aesthetic problem of the sublime and the monstrous -- and furthermore, on the ontological consequences of those seemingly impossible categories. * Isak Hyltén-Cavallius, Chief Editor, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap/Swedish Journal of Literary Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor of Literary Studies. Linnæus University, Växjö, Sweden *Table of Contents1. Contending with Untranslatable Categories; or, Inducing the Nervous Condition of the Geschlecht Complex (Oscar Jansson, Lund University, Sweden, and David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA) Appendix I: Unfinished Definitions (Jansson/LaRocca) Apter | Cassin | Cavell | Crépon 2. Antitheatricality as Critical Idiom (Caro Pirri, University of Pittsburgh, USA) 3. The Cruel Beast: Settler Sovereignty and the Crisis of American Zoopolitics (Brian W. Nail, Florida State College at Jacksonville, USA) 4. Between the Body and Language: Narratives of the Moving Subject in Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic (Lauren DiGiulio, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) Appendix II: Indefiniteness, Geschlechtlosigkeit, Undoing (Jansson/LaRocca) Butler | Cassin | Crépon | David-Ménard | Derrida | Deutscher | Heller-Roazen | Irigaray | Malabou | Nancy | Preciado | Sandford | Spillers | Weheliye 5. Collapsing the Gender/Genre Distinction: On Transgressions of Category in Woolf’s Orlando (Oscar Jansson, Lund University, Sweden) 6. Gazing at the Untranslatable Subject: From Velázquez’s Las Meninas to Ellison’s Invisible Man (Richard Hajarizadeh, SUNY Binghamton, USA) 7. From Lectiocentrism to Gramophonology: Listening to Cinema and Writing Sound Criticism (David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA) Appendix III: Genre Unlimited/Genre Ungenred (Jansson/LaRocca) Apter | Barthes | Cavell | Chartier | Crimmins | Croce | Derrida | Jauss | Wells Afterword: Trans-Ontology and the Geschlecht Complex (Emily Apter, New York University, USA) Bibliography Acknowledgments Contributors Index

    2 in stock

    £90.25

  • 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know

    Quercus Publishing 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn a series of 50 accessible essays, John Sutherland introduces and explains the important forms, concepts, themes and movements in literature, drawing on insights and examples from both classic and popular works.From postmodernism to postcolonialism, William Shakespeare to Jane Austen , 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know is a complete introduction to the most important literary concepts in history.

    1 in stock

    £9.49

  • The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were not

    Verso Books The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were not

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisIf Greek tragedies are meant to be so tragic, why do they so often end so well? Here starts the story of a long and incredible misunderstanding. Out of the hundreds of tragedies that were performed, only 32 were preserved in full. Who chose them and why? Why are the lost ones never taken into account? This extremely unusual scholarly book tells us an Umberto Eco-like story about the lost tragedies. By arguing that they would have given a radically different picture, William Marx makes us think in completely new ways about one of the major achievements of Western culture. In this very readable, stimulating, lively, and even sometimes funny book, he explores parallels with Japanese theatre, resolves the enigma of catharsis, sheds a new light on psychoanalysis. In so doing, he tells also the story of the misreadings of our modernity, which disconnected art from the body, the place, and gods. Two centuries ago philosophers transformed Greek tragedies into an ideal archetype, now they want to read them as self-help handbooks, but all are equally wrong: Greek tragedy is definitely not what you think, and we may never understand it, but this makes it matter all the more to us.Trade ReviewWilliam Marx doesn't take anything for granted. Here, his thoughts take us to the most established concept in literature, "Greek tragedy", and then undermines it. His tools: the integration of in-depth historical analysis, detailed understanding of the antique plays, studying the traces of lost plays, and a rethinking of what always seemed obvious but is in fact anachronistic. He questions the very concept of the tragic, revises other basic concepts such as catharsis, and offers a fresh reading of those texts that re-become vital for the history of literature and our contemporary world. -- Mieke BalThis is an immensely enjoyable book on Athenian tragedy, written in lyrical prose and elegiac mode. -- Johanna Hanink * The Classical Review *Thus, from one book to the other, William Marx proposes a research path that will enjoy a bright future: "Catching literature by using what escapes literature." -- Jean-Louis Jeannelle * Le Monde *As a faraway, but irrevocable echo of Duras' "You saw nothing in Hiroshima", the reception of Greek tragedy makes with The Tomb of Oedipus its definite entrance into the postmodern era. -- Guillaume Navaud * Critique d’art *William Marx is one of the most original scholars of our time. The Tomb of Oedipus is a revolutionary rethinking of our relationship to the ancient world: its myths, its literature, its outlook. With this slim book, Oedipus's curse has been lifted at long last. -- Alberto Manguel, Director of Espaço Atlântida, The Centre for Research into the History of Reading, LisbonThis is an original and eye opening book. Its fundamental idea is quite simple. Only 32 Greek tragedies from the 5th century BCE have been preserved, which corresponds to less than 5% of the tragedies that had been put on stage. Can we consider this sample to be representative? The selection has been the product of a judgments about what constituted a good, a typical tragedy, a tragedy that should be read by children at school; but these were judgments from Roman imperial times, that are possibly and likely very different from the taste of the original Athenian audience. Has the tragedy of the 5th century really been tragic in the sense that Roman school teachers seem to imply? Marx's attempt to answer this question is intellectually sophisticated, wonderfully readable - and full of surprising insights. -- Luca GiulianiMarx, a comparative literature professor at the Collège de France, refreshes ancient literature and the concept of tragedy in this intelligent work of criticism....Elliott's translation is smooth and elegant, matching the sophistication of Marx's thought as he reinvigorates Greek tragedy. * Publishers Weekly *

    2 in stock

    £18.99

  • Literary Theory: A Beginner's Guide

    Oneworld Publications Literary Theory: A Beginner's Guide

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisRescuing the subject from deadly dry theorists and -isms, Clare Connors focuses on the real questions that emerge when we read and study literature - such as how we find meaning and how literature relates to its historical context - before exploring the response of theorists. Using selections from works including poetry by Christina Rossetti and Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Connors unites theory with practice, revealing how enjoyable it is to think about reading.

    2 in stock

    £9.49

  • An Analysis of Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger:

    Macat International Limited An Analysis of Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger:

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisMary Douglas is an outstanding example of an evaluative thinker at work. In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, she delves in great detail into existing arguments that portray traditional societies as “evolving” from “savage” beliefs in magic, to religion, to modern science, then explains why she believes those arguments are wrong. She also adeptly chaperones readers through a vast amount of data, from firsthand research in the Congo to close readings of the Old Testament, and analyzes it in depth to provide evidence that traditional and Western religions have more in common than the first comparative religion scholars and early anthropologists thought.First evaluating her scholarly predecessors by marshalling their arguments, Douglas identifies their main weakness: that they dismiss traditional societies and their religions by identifying their practices as “magic,” thereby creating a chasm between savages who believe in magic and sophisticates who practice religion.Table of ContentsWays in to the Text Who Was Mary Douglas? What Does Purity and Danger Say? Why Does Purity and Danger Matter? Section 1: Influences Module 1: The Author and the historical Context Module 2: Academic Context Module 3: The Problem Module 4: The Author's Contribution Section 2: Ideas Module 5: Main Ideas Module 6: Secondary Ideas Module 7: Achievement Module 8: Place in the Author's Work Section 3: Impact Module 9: The First Responses Module 10: The Evolving Debate Module 11: Impact and Influence Today Module 12: Where Next? Glossary of Terms People Mentioned in the Text Works Cited

    1 in stock

    £8.58

  • We the Parasites

    UEA Publishing Project We the Parasites

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn her debut book, A. V. Marraccini explores how we inhabit works of art, and how our sense of longing informs and changes our relationship to them. Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity, We the Parasites both tells a strange love story and makes a slantwise argument about reading with the body, and what it ultimately means to know, and to want.‘We the Parasites is my new favourite book, a dazzlingly erudite disquisition of the erotics of criticism, riven with knockout sentences and a luxuriant sensibility. A.V. Marraccini stops you in your tracks, urges you to think with her a while about the delicious joy of art, how we grow huge and terrifying on it, and how this thievery, this parasitism is necessary both for its continuance and for our own.’ Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk The City‘In 1964, Sontag wrote: ‘In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’ Since then, many works of criticism have paid lip service to this desideratum, but few have managed to achieve it... In We the Parasites, encountering a work of art is not fixed as a safe looking at, but rather as an eating, a kissing, a being-seduced-by, a being-contaminated by, a being-infected-by that restores art and criticism to the dangerous adventure that it is.' Ryan Ruby

    2 in stock

    £11.69

  • Genius After Psychoanalysis

    Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) Genius After Psychoanalysis

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisK. Daniel Cho is Professor of Education at Otterbein University in Columbus, OH. Professor Cho works on psychoanalysis in a variety of disciplinary contexts. He is the author of Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education (2009) and co-editor of Marcuse's Challenge to Education (2008).

    2 in stock

    £24.75

  • The Social Construction of What

    Harvard University Press The Social Construction of What

    Book SynopsisLost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Ian Hacking’s book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality—especially regarding the status of the natural sciences.Trade Review[A] spirited and eminently readable book… Hacking’s book is an admirable example of both useful debunking and thoughtful and original philosophizing—an unusual combination of good sense and technical sophistication. After he has said his say about the science wars, Hacking concludes with fascinating essays on, among other things, fashions in mental disease, the possible genesis of dolomitic rock from the activity of nanobacteria, government financing of weapons research, and the much-discussed question of whether the Hawaiians thought Captain Cook was a god. In each he makes clear the contingency of the questions scientists find themselves asking, and the endless complexity of the considerations that lead them to ask one question rather than another. The result helps the reader see how little light is shed on actual scientific controversies by either traditionalist triumphalists or postmodern unmaskers. -- Richard Rorty * The Atlantic *Ian Hacking is among the best philosophers now writing about science… He discusses psychopathology, weapons research, petrology, and South Pacific ethnography with the same skeptical intelligence he brings to quarks and electron microscopy. It is not his aim to enter a partisan controversy, still less to decide it. Instead, he clearly explains what is at stake—nothing less than the intellectual authority of modern science. -- Barry Allen * Science *Hacking’s good humour and easy style make him one of those rare contemporary philosophers I can read with pleasure. -- Steven Weinberg * Times Literary Supplement *Hacking is a Canadian philosopher of science, with important studies of probability and psychology to his name. He is no less at home in Continental philosophy and social theory than in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. His ability to leap with enviable facility from one to the other qualifies him well to bring some order into this intellectual quagmire. -- Daniel Johnson * New York Times Book Review *The Social Construction of What? explores the significance of the idea of social construction, not simply in science but also in other arenas… Hacking’s arguments are important. -- Kenan Malik * The Independent *The commonplace idea of science as the construction of models caught fire in the 1970s. It became—as Ian Hacking notes in his intelligent miscellany, The Social Construction of What?—a rallying cry for the radical optimists who relished the thought that social forms are transient and resented any attempt to freeze them for eternity on the authority of something called ‘science’… [Hacking] prefers to explore the territory that lies between the banalities. He concentrates on phenomena such as ‘child abuse’ or ‘women refugees’, wondering in what sense they existed before they were conceptualised as such and noting the ‘looping effects’ through which objective realities can be moulded by intellectual artefacts and hence by transient political and conceptual interests or even facts. * Times Higher Education Supplement *A welcome and timely arrival. Both a philosopher of science and a contributor to constructionism, Hacking speaks across the great divide. As his book title implies, he finds that the terms of this intellectual engagement vary considerably from case to case, and that the terminology of this engagement has all too often been sloppily employed on both sides. Examining an eclectic range of examples, from a nasty ethnographic spat over Captain Cook’s murder on a Hawaiian beach to the influence of weapons research on the related hard sciences, he teases out the finer points that constitute the middle ground… By meting out credit while illuminating complexities, nuances, and missteps on both sides, Hacking’s work implicitly urges a truce in the science wars. -- Kenneth Gergen * Civilization *This book offers a helpful contribution to the discussion of social constructionism and its limits, both for hard scientists who feel threatened by it and for those who practice it. This is a fun book, as Hacking takes pokes at social constructionists and clarifies what they are about. -- Matthew P. Lawson * Health, Illness, and Medicine *An interesting and invaluable frontline perspective on the causes and results of the revolution from someone close enough to it to understand it and explain it to the rest of us. Its chief merits are its linguistic clarity, intellectual scope, and self-referentiality… Communication scholars who know little about social construction will find this a very readable introduction to the major ideas being debated. -- Scott R. Olson * Journal of Communication *While informed by a sophisticated grasp of the issues, [The Social Construction of What?] is accessible, witty, and good-humored in tone. There are fascinating discussions of social constructionist claims regarding subjects are diverse as gender, Zulu nationalism, quarks, and dolomite. -- T. A. Torgerson * Choice *Hacking is one of the best philosophers of science and society of our time. Here, as usual, he argues from carefully researched examples… This is a delightful book—evenhanded, fun to read, and packed with information on everything from nuclear physics, nanobacteria, and madness to the deification of Captain Cook. -- Leslie Armour * Library Journal *[Ian Hacking] dispute[s] the claims of leftist professors, who try to fight oppression by showing that race, gender and sexuality, far from being legitimate bases for discrimination, are hardly real at all and merely the results of ‘social construction.’ In The Social Construction of What? the distinguished philosopher looks at how this kind of argument works, and particularly at cases—in the natural sciences, and with social phenomena like child abuse in which it can endanger a clear sense of what ‘reality’ is. * Publishers Weekly *In his Preface, Hacking describes this book as a kind of primer for noncombatants in the culture wars, understood as being fought between the ‘social constructionists’ who hold that knowledge is constitutively and importantly a social product, and those who see knowledge as being importantly distinct from the social realm (scientists being the exemplary instances of the latter). I especially like his discussion of the social sciences and their peculiar relation to their objects—the discussion of ‘interactive kinds’ and the ‘looping effect’ through which people can reflexively react to social science descriptions by, for example, acting out and upon such descriptions. There is an interesting line of development here concerning the difference between the social and the natural sciences, and the different senses of ‘construction’ that might be appropriate to each. The book accomplishes its chosen task in clarifying what constructionism is about and why people get excited about it. I might add that besides noncombatants in the culture wars, the book should interest and inform some of the combatants, too—it should help the anticonstructionists get clearer on the actual contours of their enemy’s position. Hacking is one of the most important philosophers working today. -- Andrew Pickering, author of Constructing Quarks and The Mangle of Practice

    £26.06

  • On Beauty and Being Just

    Princeton University Press On Beauty and Being Just

    20 in stock

    Book SynopsisHave we become beauty-blind? This title not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. It offers a manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.Trade Review"Ms. Scarry's writing is evocative and lively... Her book is a bracing antidote to the glum puritanism of many opponents of beauty, and it makes some insightful observations about how beauty figures in our perceptual, emotional and moral lives."--Colin McGinn, The Wall Street Journal "She begins her defense of aesthetic pleasure with musings on the nature of beauty. Beauty begets, she argues. It constantly provokes copies of itself. That replication is not only in art, for example, but also in perception, as in the desire to continue beholding as long as possible. Beauty's link with truth requires no belief in an immortal realm. 'The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction,' she says. That mental state is so pleasurable 'that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction-to locate what is true.' The heightened perception that comes with beauty's life-affirming capacity to awaken us to our world is part of what alerts us to injustice, she writes."--Nina Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education Scarry persuades that there is an analogy between the recognition of beautyand the recognition of just or fair social arrangements ... [She]...does not preach and ... her short book [is] light and allusive and gentle and unpolemical [in] style... "--Stuart Hampshire, The New York Review of Books "This short book could change your life... Beauty makes us better, more honest, more judicious, more humble, nicer people. And dare I say, this little book, taken to heart, will do the same."--Tom D'Evelyn, The Providence Sunday Journal "Scarry makes a fascinating case that seeing beauty reminds us of our own marginality, and therefore our equalness to other people. And she very skillfully defies traditional political criticisms of beauty."--Meredith Petrin, Boston Review "Full of striking observations about beauty in and beyond the arts."--Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle "In the tradition of 19th-century aesthetics, On Beauty and Being Just describes, evokes and manifests the loving attention that beautiful objects provoke... [It] is fresh, eccentric and uncompromising."--Alexander Nehamas, London Review of Books "Any sophisticated reader not mummified beneath protective layers of irony will find this book not only pleasant to hold in the hand, but valuable to hold in the mind."--Paul J. Johnson, Religious Studies ReviewTable of ContentsPART ONE On Beauty and Being Wrong 1 PART TWO On Beauty and Being Fair 55 NOTES 125 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 133

    20 in stock

    £16.14

  • Comparing the Literatures

    Princeton University Press Comparing the Literatures

    4 in stock

    Book SynopsisTrade Review"How does globalism affect the books we read, and the way we read them? A leading scholar investigates." * New York Times Book Review *"Few scholars active today can claim to have done as much as David Damrosch to shape the discipline of comparative literature in the United States. . . . Damrosch writes with great clarity and care, vividly bringing individual figures and their ideas to life. . . . [He] not only displays the breadth of his own personal canon, but also argues compellingly for the idea that our understanding of a given text is always enhanced by comparing it with other texts, whether or not the pairings are conventional or expected."---Alexander Beecroft, Modern Philology

    4 in stock

    £19.80

  • All a Novelist Needs

    Johns Hopkins University Press All a Novelist Needs

    Book SynopsisToibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.Trade ReviewThe book does not disappoint. The essays may be incidental-reviews, introductions, lectures-but each conveys a sense of Toibin's deep engagement with his subject and his writer's way with words. Irish Times 2010 Anyone interested in Toibin's process of transforming the life of James into a novel of immense subtlety should look carefully at a recent volume of essays. -- Jay Parini Chronicle of Higher EducationTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction by Susan M. GriffinChapter 1. Henry James in Ireland: A FootnoteChapter 2. The Haunting of Lamb HouseChapter 3. A More Elaborate Web: Becoming Henry JamesChapter 4. Pure Evil: "The Turn of the Screw"Chapter 5. The Lessons of the MasterChapter 6. Henry James's New YorkChapter 7. A Death, a Book, an Apartment: The Portrait of a LadyChapter 8. Reflective BiographyChapter 9. A Bundle of LettersChapter 10. All a Novelist NeedsChapter 11. The Later JamesesAfterword: SilenceIndex

    £22.95

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