Literary theory Books
Cornell University Press The Poetics of Perspective
Book SynopsisPerspective has been a divided subject, orphaned among various disciplines from philosophy to gardening. In the first book to bring together recent thinking on perspective from such fields as art history, literary theory, aesthetics, psychology, and the history of mathematics, James Elkins leads us to a new understanding of how we talk about...Trade ReviewI have rarely read a book as illuminating as this.... With great tact and inventiveness, Elkins offers two basic correctives to what has been taken as the foundational procedure underlying Italian Renaissance painting and, by extension, Renaissance culture: (1) Perspective was referred to not in the singular but in the plural—not a perspective, but perspectives; and (2) it was not about drawing a unified pictorial space, but about drawing objects—not a way of unifying a picture, but an often playful fashioning of the objects in a picture. -- Svetlana Alpers * Key Reporter *
£28.49
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Fat
Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavor. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion. Demonized in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs and nutritional faddists (and let's face it, most of us who eat), simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people fat is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Hanne Blank''s Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, feeling fat and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one anotherTrade ReviewThroughout Fat, Blank beautifully disrupts and destabilizes the notion of fat and, in doing so, challenged me to think deeper about the category as a whole. * Fat Studies *Hanne Blank's characteristically honest, creative, wickedly funny, and sharply insightful voice comes through on every page of this eminently readable book. Blank reveals fat as polysemic, at once mundane and hidden, sexually charged, and socially vexed. Fat is a scholarly ethnography of an everyday object that manages to be a genuine page-turner. * Quill Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, USA *Table of ContentsFrontispiece 1. Fact 2. Friend 3. Foe 4. Fetish 5. Figure Index
£9.49
Indiana University Press The Essential Peirce Volume 1
Book SynopsisFeatures important philosophical papers of the brilliant American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce. This volume presents twenty-five key texts, chronologically arranged, beginning with Peirce's "On a New List of Categories" of 1867, and ending with the systematic presentation of his evolutionary metaphysics in the "Monist Metaphysical Series".
£21.59
Cambridge University Press The Invention of Colonialism
Book Synopsis
£18.00
Johns Hopkins University Press Iliazd
Book SynopsisA captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre. The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary artistic circles of Russian futurism. By the end of his life, he was the publisher of deluxe limited edition books in Paris. The recent subject of major exhibitions in Moscow, his native Tbilisi, New York, and other venues, the work of Iliazd has been prized by bibliophiles and collectors for its exquisite book design and innovative typography. Iliazd collaborated with many major figures of modern artPablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst, Joán Miro, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov, among others. His 1949 anthology, The Poetry of Unknown Words, was the first international anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry ever published. The list of contributors is a veritable Who's Who of avant-garde writing and visual art. And ITable of ContentsPreface Note on Spelling1. Encountering Iliazd: The Biographical Project2. 1894–1916: Childhood and Formative Years3. 1916–1920: Futurist Poetics4. 1920–1921: Transition: Tbilisi, Constantinople, Paris5. 1921–1926: Paris6. 1927-1946: Family, Fabric, and Fiction7. 1947-1950: Lettrist Provocations and Poetry of Unknown Words (Poésie de Mots Inconnus)8. 1951-1975: The Editions: Collaborations and Projects9. 1971–1972: A Life in Reverse10. A Place in HistoryPostscript: Recovering the Project Appendix. A Note on Recent Scholarship about IliazdNotesBibliographyIndex
£27.45
HarperCollins Publishers The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.
£6.99
HarperCollins Publishers Middlemarch
Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbours'Rejecting the conventional narratives of the time, Middlemarch shows a realistic portrayal of Victorian village life. Peopling this ground-breaking work are Tertius Lydgate, a talented yet naive young doctor; Dorothea Brooke, stuck in a loveless marriage; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding shocking crimes from his past.An intricate story weaving together many lives, Middlemarch is described as one of the best-loved novels of all time and heralded as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people' by Virginia Woolf. It is a richly nuanced drama that is a quintessential English classic.
£8.99
HarperCollins Publishers The Time Machine
Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back . . . You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked those pale chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!An English scientist regales his dinner guests with the tale of his travels to the year 802,701, where he discovers that the human race has evolved into two distinct societies. The Eloi, elegant and peaceful, yet lacking spirit, are terrorised by the sinister, light-fearing Morlocks, who live underground, surrounded by industry. And when his time machine mysteriously vanishes, the scientist must descend to the realm of the Morlocks in order to find his only hope of escape . . .H. G. Wells is considered a founding father of modern science fiction, coining the term time machine' and popularising the idea of time travel in literature.
£8.54
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Art of the Novel
Book Synopsis“Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New RepublicEvery novelist''s work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels. — Milan KunderaKundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch.Kundera''s discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological nove
£13.49
HarperCollins The Art of Reading Poetry
Book Synopsis
£7.99
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Nom de Plume
Book Synopsis
£13.59
HarperCollins Publishers Inc You Cant Joke about That
Book SynopsisWhat happens when we can’t joke about some of the most important stuff in life?In a 2019 study, 40% of people reported censoring themselves out of fear that voicing their views would alienate them from the people they care about most. Those people should probably not read this book in public.In You Can’t Joke About That, Kat Timpf shows why much of the way we talk about sensitive subjects is wrong. We’ve created all the wrong rules. We push ourselves into unnecessary conflicts when we should feel like we’re all in this together. When someone says “you can’t joke about that,” what they really mean is “this is a subject that makes people sad or angry.”Hilariously and movingly, Timpf argues that those subjects are actually the most important to joke about. She shows us we can find healing through humor regarding things you probably don''t want to bring up in polite conversation, like traumatic break-ups, cancer, being broke, Dave Chappelle, rape jokes, aging, ostomy bags, religion, body image, dead moms, religion, the lab leak theory, transgender swimmers, gushing wounds, campus censorship, and bad Christmas presents. This book is Kat Timpf with her hair down, except since hers is mostly extensions, this book is Kat Timpf with her hair out. Read it because you want to get to know her better. Read it because it’s the best book on free speech and comedy in a generation. Read it because you want to laugh out loud… even at the kind of stuff we’re afraid to say out loud. Just read it, and you’ll be glad you did.
£22.49
Vintage Publishing On Writing
Book SynopsisAfter six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books it's just a wonder she's found the time. These are missives from the authorial front line urgent and vivid, full of the excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for the Guardian and we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of our contemporary authors.Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on chTrade ReviewIt’s a pleasure to gain access to the thoughts of someone so unashamedly committed to the importance of stories. Written largely as blogs, these memorable, often very funny snapshots of Kennedy’s life also contain much better advice for would-be writers than more overtly practical guides. -- Nick Rennison * Sunday Times *Observations, both lucid and passionate, on the general state of the book trade and literary culture... Yet it’s the manoeuvres she uses and the structures she creates in order to let art happen in her own life that form the kernel of the book. -- Keith Miller * Daily Telegraph *Invaluable advice to authors...her humour – often sardonic, never malicious – is deployed to great effect. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *On Writing is wit, sadness and aphorism for the writer, reader, and human alike. -- Richard Elins * The List *The life-saving blog is the jam in the sandwich of her book, the sweetener before her revealing stand-up comic routine/memoir and more considered essays that give it professional literary substance. -- Iain Finlayson * The Times *
£15.29
Penguin Books Ltd Poetics
Book SynopsisOne of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history In his near-contemporary account of classical Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the Poetics introduced into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (''imitation''), hamartia (''error'') and katharsis (''purification''). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals. The Poetics has informed thinking about drama ever since.Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Malcolm HeathTable of ContentsTranslated with an Introduction and Notes by Malcolm HeathIntroduction1. Human culture, poetry and the Poetics2. Imitation3. Aristotle's history of poetry4. The analysis of tragedy5. Plot: the basics6. Reversal and recognition7. The best kinds of tragic plot8. The pleasures of tragedy9. The other parts of tragedy10. Tragedy: miscellaneous aspects11. Epic12. Comedy13. Further reading14. Reference conventionsNotes to the IntroductionSynopsis of the PoeticsPOETICSNotes to the translation
£9.49
Penguin Books Ltd Classical Literary Criticism Penguin Classics
Book SynopsisThis anthology brings together core classical texts for understanding literature. The selections from Plato illustrate the poetic philosopher's surprising exclusion of poets from his ideal republic. In his response, Poetics, Aristotle draws on the works of the great Greek playwrights to defend the value of the art. Horace's The Art of Poetry is a vivid practitioner's guide that promotes a style of poetic craftsmanship rooted in wisdom, ethical insight, and decorum. Longinus's On the Sublime explores the nature of inspiration in poetry and prose. This volume is a work of great value and interest to classicists, students, and writers.In her Introduction, Penelope Murray compares and contrasts the viewpoints of these formidable critics as well as their impact on the Western tradition. This edition also includes a new bibliography and chronology and comprehensive notes to each of the texts.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Homer and the Early Greek Poets2. Aristophanes3. Gorgias and the Sophists4. Plato5. Aristotle6. The Alexandrians7. Horace8. Longinus9. EpilogueFurther ReadingLiterary ChronologyPlatoIonRepublic 2Republic 3Republic 10AristotlePoeticsHoraceThe Art of PoetryLonginusOn the SublimeNotes
£10.44
Penguin Books Ltd The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory David
Book SynopsisAccessing the huge selection of critical theory can be an intimidating experience. This acclaimed dictionary is an invaluable introduction to the theories and theorists in the field and will prove an authoritative resource for all students.Trade Review'extremely good...Bravo!' Professor Jonathan Culler 'This is an unusual instance of an academic reference book that I do believe doubles quite effectively as a textbook for students and I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in theoretical matters, or just in the history of ideas.' Dr Duncan Wu, University of Cambridge
£11.69
Penguin Books Ltd Portable Magic
Book Synopsis''A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn''t encountered before'' Val McDermid, The TimesMost of what we say about books is really about the words inside them: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ''a uniquely portable magic''. Here, Emma Smith shows us why.Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium''s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals Trade ReviewIf you love books, you'll love Portable Magic -- Val McDermidFor many of us, books are the life we chose without thinking about it too much. Emma Smith's terrifically knowledgeable and thoughtful Portable Magic helps us understand every aspect of what our beloved books stand for. I for one am very grateful. What a delight this book is. -- Lynne TrussIrresistibly fascinating -- John CareyBrilliant... amusing, darkly sobering, and consistently fascinating ... a combination of deep scholarship and down-to-earth wit * Telegraph *Fun, playful, learned and accessible... Smith is herself a magical writer * BBC History Magazine *Smith's genius is to question as well as to value and register every contradiction - to make you, the reader, think without even suspecting that you are ... for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose -- Lucasta Miller * The Critic *Joyous ... thrilling ... A brilliantly written account of the book-as-material-object, and the slightly seedy pleasures of "bookhood" -- Kathryn Hughes * Guardian (Book of the Week) *Wildly entertaining ... This fascinating, slyly amusing book carries an undertow of personal affection for the curious, rectangular, multileaved objects with which we're so familiar * Sunday Times *Smith's enchanting book sparkles with gems of trivia that often conceal deeper truths about the evolution of reading and publishing. Fascinating, enlightening, funny and touching, this is indeed portable magic * Sydney Morning Herald *Emma Smith's history of the physical book is a thing to cherish ... witty and ingenious ... Smith reads with all her senses alert ... A wise, funny, endearingly personal book -- Peter Conrad * Observer *Anyone who's ever enjoyed the feel or indeed smell of a book should read Emma Smith's delightful and informative Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers -- Lucasta Miller * Spectator Books of the Year *From bullet-stopping Bibles to tomes bound in human skin, Smith's history of books revels in their magic and malignity. It skewers our faith in the written word yet repays it handsomely * Telegraph *
£10.44
Penguin Putnam Inc J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing
Book Synopsis
£14.45
Houghton Mifflin Lectures on Russian Literature
Book SynopsisThe acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, and Chekhov.In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov's teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov's famous lectures on nineteenth-century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls and The Overcoat; Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorky's On the Rafts; Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, including Crime and Punishment, The
£14.39
OUP India IndoGerman Exchanges in Education
Book SynopsisIn 1930, when Rabindranath Tagore met Paul and Edith Geheeb in Germany, they formed a fruitful and long-term association resulting in the exchange of ideas and vision. Tagore''s Brahmacharya Ashram, founded in 1901 in Shantiniketan, and the Geheeb''s Odenwaldschule, established in Germany in 1910 (thereafter the Ecole d''''Humanité in Switzerland, established in 1934 after the couple fled Nazi Germany), emerged from vastly different cultural backgrounds and social exigencies. Yet, they recognized striking similarities between their educational endeavours. The meeting also initiated a close association between India and Germany, with the Geheebs attracting many Indian intellectuals and Indophile Germans to their schools. This book explores the areas where the lives of the Geheebs and Tagore, and their respective circles, overlap. Rather than being a biography, a history, or a comprehensive description, this study is a comparison of Tagore and the Geheebs and their schools. Making use ofTrade ReviewKämpchen's book is full of research insights that only come with years of experience. * Razak Khan, German Historical Institute London Bulletin *
£55.45
Oxford University Press Inc Toni Morrison
Book SynopsisWhen Toni Morrison declares that she can''t wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work, she raises an issue at the heart of modern political thought: How should we understand freedom? And what does freedom mean in the shadow of racial slavery and colonialism? In this study of Toni Morrison''s writing, Lawrie Balfour explores Morrison''s reflections on the idea of freedom in her novels and nonfiction. While Morrison''s literary achievements are widely celebrated, her political thought has yet to receive the same attention. Balfour shows how Morrison''s writing illuminates the meanings of freedom and unfreedom in a democratic society founded on both the defense of liberty and the right to enslavement. Morrison''s fiction and meditations on the power of language challenge wishful notions of color-blindness and complaints that it is time to move beyond thinking and talking about race. Her attentiveness to the experiences of people no one inquired of--esTrade ReviewToni Morrison is yet another brilliant contribution to Balfour's body of work examining the political thought of black intellectuals, DuBois, and Baldwin. It makes a tremendous contribution to Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Black Studies, and American Intellectual History. Morrison scholars will find it especially important as well. * Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Freedom and Word-Work 1.
£23.27
Oxford University Press Inc Inhospitable World
Book SynopsisIn recent years, environmental and human rights advocates have suggested that we have entered the first new geological epoch since the end of the ice age: the Anthropocene. In this new epoch, humans have come to reshape unwittingly both the climate and natural world; humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans, and irreversibly altered the atmosphere. Ironically, our efforts to make the planet more hospitable to ourselves seem to be driving us toward our inevitable extinction. A force of nature, humanity is now decentered as the agent of history. As Jennifer Fay argues, this new situation is to geological science what cinema has always been to human culture. Film, like the Anthropocene, is a product of the industrial revolution, but arises out of a desire to preserve life and master time and space. It also calls for the creation of artificial worlds, unnatural weather, and deadly environments for entertainment, scientific study, and devising military strategy. Filmmaking stages, quite literally, the process by which worlds and weather come into being and meaning, and it mimics the forces that are driving this new planetary inhospitality. Cinema, in other words, provides an image of nature in the age of its mechanical reproducability. Fay argues that cinema exemplifies the philosophical, political, and perhaps even logistical processes by which we can adapt to these forces and also imagine a world without humans in it. Whereas standard ecological criticism attends to the environmental crisis as an unraveling of our natural state, this book looks to film (from Buster Keaton, to Jia Zhangke, to films of atomic testing and early polar exploration) to consider how it reflects upon the creation and destruction of human environments. What are the implications of ecological inhospitality? What role might cinema and media theory play in challenging our presumed right to occupy and populate the world? As an art form, film enjoys a unique relationship to the material, elemental world it captures and produces. Through it, we may appreciate the ambitions to design an unhomely planet that may no longer accommodate us.Trade Review[A] stunningly original and deeply troubling book... Throughout the text, Fay makes astonishing and compelling connections between these films and the collapse of a once ecologically stable world. The result is a groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind book destined to be a classic. This is film criticism at its most urgent and impressive. Essential. * CHOICE *...[an] elegant new book... * Moira Weigel, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *Jennifer Fay beautifully writes a wide-ranging and suggestive theory of cinema in the atomic light of the Anthropocene. * William Brown, University of Roehampton, London, Film-Philosophy *Compelling and brilliant on every page, Inhospitable Worlds shows where film figures in the slow burn of the Anthropocene. In five clearly drawn and meticulously documented studies running from Keaton to noir, from China's three gorges to atomic testing sites in Nevada, and from the South Pole to the Yukon, Fay draws attention to contradictions and dilemmas at the core of cinema. Crafting a strategy of melancholy to rethink its condition past and present, Fay turns criticism in new and definitive directions. Anyone having concern about the condition of our planet must read Inhospitable Worlds. * Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University *At a time when much of the world is consumed with anxiety about the fate of the planet, Jennifer Fay shows us a way forward by traveling backward ironically and locating our future in the present. Inhospitable World reveals a history of cinema mobilized, as it were, for the purposes of rendering and conveying a world crisis as it unfolds. Cinema, in Fay's hands, is not only a vehicle, nor merely a medium, but a technology designed in part to capture this crisis invisible elsewhere. Not only a breath-taking feat of film scholarship, Inhospitable World is also a genuine contribution to the task of critical thought in a time of despair. It serves as an exhortation. * Akira Mizuta Lippit, T. C. Wang Family Endowed Chair in Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California *Inhospitable World teems with cinematic lessons in survival, from the 'survival burlesques' of Buster Keaton to Bill Morrison's chronicle of the Dawson City Film Find. But there's a catch: the survivors of the Anthropocene may not be human. In Fay's arresting account, cinema's profuse world-making hastens, even as it broods on, the unmaking of human futurity. The history of film is retold in these pages as a rehearsal for a world without us.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part One: On Location 1. Buster Keaton's Climate Change 2. Nuclear Conditioning 3. The Ecologies of Film Noir Part Two: At the End of the World 4. Still Life 5. Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer's Extraterrestrial Film Theory Conclusion: The Epoch and the Archive Notes Bibliography Index
£41.94
Oxford University Press Inc Sound Writing
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewShelley Trower's Sound Writing is a fascinating book. Arguing that the oral and the written are not binary opposites, she traces the relationship between the two in a series of provocative, sometimes confounding chapters that are part historiography, part bibliography, part literary criticism. There's a playful quality in the work as Trower, with obvious delight, takes the reader down intellectual by-ways revealing all sorts of surprising connections between talk and text. * Linda Shopes, Oral and public historian *Oral history's dream of letting people speak for themselves is given a fascinating new treatment in Shelley Trower's new book. Savouring rather than worrying about the interplay between writing and oral history, she illuminates an often-overlooked history of successful, poetic, and politically attuned transcribers-from Henry Mayhew to Zora Neale Hurston to Svetlana Alexievich. A final chapter on what 'sound writing' means in the age of #MeToo and online trauma advises us on our responsibilities where writing and sound have become interchangeable. This book is an excellent addition to the oral history repertoire. * Margaretta Jolly, University of Sussex *
£74.53
Oxford University Press Classical Mythology A Very Short Introduction
Book SynopsisFrom Zeus and Europa, to Diana, Pan, and Prometheus, the myths of ancient Greece and Rome seem to exert a timeless power over us. But what do those myths represent, and why are they so enduringly fascinating? Why do they seem to be such a potent way of talking about our selves, our origins, and our desires?This imaginative and stimulating Very Short Introduction goes beyond a simple retelling of the stories to explore the rich history and diverse interpretations of classical myths. It is a wide-ranging account, examining how classical myths are used and understood in both high art and popular culture, taking the reader from the temples of Crete to skyscrapers in New York, and finding classical myths in a variety of unexpected places: from arabic poetry and Hollywood films, to psychoanalysis, the bible, and New Age spiritualism. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized Table of ContentsForeword ; 1. Without bulls there would be no Europe ; 2. Contexts, then and now ; 3. Gods and heroes ; 4. Metamorphoses of mythology ; 5. On the analyst's couch ; 6. The sexual politics of myth ; 7. Mythology, spirituality, and the New Age ; Conclusion ; References and further reading ; Timeline
£9.49
Oxford University Press Why Read Marx Today
Book SynopsisThis fresh and timely book argues that we can detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of future society, and that he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. Wolff also shows that the value of the 'great thinkers' does not depend on their views being true, but on other features such as their originality, insight, and systematic vision. For these reasons, and more, Wolff shows us why Marx stillrichly deserves to be read.Trade ReviewAll too often, Karl Marx has been regarded as a demon or a deity - or a busted flush. This fresh, provocative, and hugely enjoyable book explains why, for all his shortcomings, his critique of modern society remains forcefully relevant even in the twenty-first century. * Francis Wheen, author of Karl Marx *an engaging read * Economist *This is an important and timely book, that deserves to be widely read, not just by philosophers, economists and political theorists, but by journalists, politicians, and anyone who wants to understand the world we live in today. The scholarship on which the book is based is impeccable, yet the presentation is accessible and engaging throughout. Wolff is clear and candid about where Marx was wrong, and direct and persuasive about where he was right and still important today. This may be the most important book on Marx in the last two decades, one that will mark a turning point in the public and intellectual reception of Marx's philosophy. * Brian Leiter, University of Texas at Austin *In splendidly lucid prose, Jonathan Wolff explores the continuing appeal of Marx today. Deftly sifting the living from the dead in Marx's thought, Wolff shows how his criticisms of capitalism and liberalism have lost none of their urgency, even if his communist solutions prove unconvincing. * Professor Richard Bellamy, University of Reading *Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION; 1: EARLY WRITINGS; 2: CLASS, HISTORY, AND CAPITAL; 3: ASSESSMENT; GUIDE TO REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING; INDEX
£11.39
Oxford University Press Marcel Proust My Reading
Book SynopsisA witty, refreshing, and fun book on the experience of reading Marcel Proust that allows author and reader to meet and perhaps quarrel, perhaps agree, to go wherever their collaboration leads them, with language itself acting as a conduit.Table of ContentsPreface 1: Impossible Music 2: That Evening 3: Dreyfus Time 4: The Scenery of the Event 5: Profound Albertine 6: Proust's Law School 7: After the Ball
£18.99
Oxford University Press Genetic Criticism Tracing Creativity in
Book SynopsisIn Genetic Criticism, Dirk Van Hulle introduces the study of creative processes to an Anglophone audience. As a method in the study of literary writing processes, genetic criticism is also a reading strategy. The idea behind this book is to introduce this strategy to a broader audience, from interested readers and graduate students to early career researchers and literary critics. In literary studies, it is often obvious that a particular work somehow seems to hit a nerve, but more challenging to pinpoint exactly why it ''works''. This book therefore starts from a clear, basic assumption: knowing how something was made can help us understand how and why it works. This strategy is at the basis of many disciplines, including art history. By means of X-ray technology or hyperspectral imaging, it is possible to look at a painting as a multilayered object with not only spatial dimensions, but also a temporal one. This temporal dimension is the core of the reading strategy introduced in this book. Note books, marginalia, manuscripts, and typescripts (even if one works with scans) give a concrete dimension to literature, which is a helpful reading strategy for many students. On the one hand, this involves concrete, transferrable skills such as aspects of transcription and digital scholarly editing. On the other hand, it also involves more abstract theoretical issues relating to matters of authorship, collaboration, authority, agency, intention and intertextuality.Trade ReviewVan Hulle's Genetic Criticism is an annotated handbook to the method, offering useful typologies of texts and variants, modes of classification, and a survey of interpretive strategies that can be used to engage manuscripts, drafts, and other traces of composition...this carefully constructed book provides the kind of up-to-date survey that has been missing from English scholarship. * Geoffrey Lokke, Columbia University, Textual Cultures *
£84.34
Oxford University Press Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American
Book SynopsisLyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire re-examines the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry.
£76.00
Oxford University Press Reading Novels During the Covid19 Pandemic
Book SynopsisDrawing on an ethnographic study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, this book provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history - showing what novels people turned to during the pandemic, how people experienced time during this period, and whether they chose to fill it with reading.Trade ReviewThis brilliantly written and meticulously researched book makes a major new contribution to literary studies. It demonstrates the value and importance of sociological approaches to reading in expanding the methods of the discipline and enabling new evidence-based insights into how lay readers read. It combines this with a sensitivity to text and temporality, narrative and nuance, that surely cannot but be approved of by even the most stalwart defenders of traditional literary critical methods. * Sarah Dillon, Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge *How did the pandemic change our relationship to books? This eagerly awaited study does a deep dive into the role of literature in a time of crisis, looking closely at what and how people read in 2020 and 2021 as well as the times and places in which they picked up a book. The results are fascinating, revealing, and often unexpected * Rita Felski, University of Virginia *Did anyone actually spend the pandemic reading Proust? Find out in this intimate and revealing account of all the ways books kept us company during a time of almost unbearable isolation * Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London *This is an extremely important book, mixing literary theory with qualitative and quantitive data in an innovative way in order to understand how and what we read during the pandemic, and what this means. It provides a vital insight into the life of literature during a crisis * Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway University of London *Overall, the book is a very timely contribution to discussions surrounding the seismic cultural and societal shifts triggered-or merely made visible-by the pandemic. The authors are well aware that their sample can shed light only on a slice of the reading public, but through their in-depth interviews and careful curation of the responses, we are treated to fascinating insights about readers and reading during the pandemic. Readers of the monograph will certainly think back to their own pandemic reading practices (and perhaps glance at their pandemic reading diaries?) as they peruse the pages of this tome. * Corinna Norrick-Rühl, University of Münster, Germany *Table of ContentsThe Readers Introduction 1: Time and What to Do in It 2: Plague Literature and the Question of Allegory 3: The Novel of Confinement 4: Old Books in New Times 5: Reading Outdoors 6: Reading Summer in Summer 2020 7: Reading the Romance 8: Reading About Race 9: Long Reads Appendix: The Surveys
£76.00
Oxford University Press Live Artefacts Literature in a Cognitive
Book SynopsisProvides a reflection on the relations between nature and culture as manifested by literary artefacts, and reframes literary study as a form of cognitive anthropology and archaeology.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Literary Artefacts: Orpheus' Head 2: Artefacts, Affordances, Constructions 3: Questions of Language: Strange Collocations 4: Questions of Language: Cognitive Ekphrasis 5: Questions of Time: Echoes, Iterations 6: Questions of Time: Simultaneity, Attunement 7: Capturing Cognitive Dissonance 8: Proust's Protozoa 9: Live Artefacts Afterthoughts Glossary Bibliography
£83.78
Oxford University Press Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry
Book SynopsisSeldom has a royal court invited such intensive study as that of Henry VIII, or become so prominent in popular culture. Nonetheless, Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII is committed to offering a fresh perspective on Tudor court culture, by using continental sources to contextualize, nuance, and challenge long-held perspectives that have been formed through the use of well-studied, Anglophone sources.Using a wide variety of textual sources, from ambassadorial correspondence, account books, household étiquettes, legal records, royal warrants, and marital contracts, to play texts and travel accounts, this study presents original research in history, literature, and cultural history.The case studies in Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII address specific questions that challenge what we know or think we know about Tudor court culture. For example: was it good taste to bring a jester to a royal deathbed? Was John Blanke really the first black musician Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Queen's Trumpet or Second Fiddle 2: Deathbed Foolery 3: Food for thought 4: Fashion Victims 5: Leaving an Impression Conclusion
£18.99
Oxford University Press Engagements with Aimé Césaire
Book SynopsisAimé Césaire is due a major critical reinterpretation and that is exactly what this book carries out. Through an in-depth grasp of the trajectory and core significance of Césaire''s work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between ''spirit,'' ''poetry,'' and ''knowing''. These explications, setting Césaire''s work in relation to a rigorously accounted for set of influences, reframe how we understand his writings, enhancing their philosophical, rather than merely political, aspects. Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits is about more than Negritude (which has come to mean something less than a deep poetic sensibility with its own aspirational aesthetics and metaphysics, and rather something more like a fantasy-ridden iteration of pan-Africanism). It shows an Aimé Césaire deeply relevant to today: to the crises of ecological collapse, capitalist dystopias, and ideologies predicated upon fear and the threat of foreigners; and to contemporary chatter arouTrade ReviewJason Allen-Paisant introduces us to a pedagogy of spirit in which the rigid divisions of Western thought, and the rigid Western interpretations of Aimé Césaire, are transformed into a homage to the daily inspirited materialities of African/diasporic social poiesis. The most original and inspiring reading of Césaire in decades. * Professor Stefano Harney, Academy of Media Arts Cologne - co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study *Stunning, sensuous, and urgent, Jason Allen-Paisant's poetic meditation on the ecopoetics of Aimé Cesaire is also a wholly original philosophical inquiry into the shifting ways of being human under conditions of coloniality and climate catastrophe. He gives us a vibrant new language, deeply rooted in the ancestral lands and Black vitality of his native Jamaica, to engage the vibrational intelligence of the earth, and open ourselves to a regenerative ethics of life. * Professor Kris Manjapra, Northeastern University - author of Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation *Beautifully written and propelled by a fascinating new approach and its direct intervention to Aimé Césaire's scholarship, Thinking with Spirits will cement Jason Allen-Paisant's reputation as a rigorous critical thinker. * Professor Frieda Ekotto, University of Michigan - author of Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical and Theater Discourse *
£70.00
Oxford University Press The Idea of the Book and the Creation of
Book SynopsisThe Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature explores the intersection of literary history and the history of the book. For several millennia, books have been the material embodiment of knowledge and culture, and an essential embodiment for any kind of knowledge involving texts. Texts, however, do not need to be books-they are not even necessarily written. The oldest poems were composed to be recited, and only written down centuries later. Much of the most famous poetry of the English Renaissance was composed in manuscript form to circulate among a small social circle. Plays began as scripts for performance. What happens to a play when it becomes a book, or to a collection of poems circulated among friends when it becomes a volume of sonnets? How do essays, plays, poems, stories, become Works? How is an author imagined? In this new addition to the Oxford Textual Perspectives series, Stephen Orgel addresses such questions and considers the idea of the book not simply as a container for written work, but as an essential element in its creation.Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations 1: Introduction 2: Some Plays 3: Some Works 4: Poetry and Drama 5: How to be a Poet 6: What is a Book? Index
£55.10
Oxford University Press Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American
Book SynopsisSensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in Antebellum literature. It demonstrates how the "Sensational Jew" is a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary Antisemitism in the US.Trade ReviewAntisemitism has appeared in many times and places-and, as David Anthony shows in his informative, unsettling Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature, in many genres.... In exploring this seamy side of antebellum America, Anthony follows many critics who have examined nineteenth - century sensational culture over the past several decades. But he is the first to highlight Jewish characters. * David S. Reynolds, The New York Review of Books *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Money Laundering and the Sensational Jew 1: Region, Capitalism, and the Jew in the Post-Tom Plantation Novel 2: La Belle Juive, or "Jew"?: From Rachel Félix to The Marble Faun 3: Desire by Proxy: The Cosmopolitan Jew in Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme 4: Fagin in America Conclusion: Race, Money, and the Jew Coda: Charlottesville, "Molineux," and the Phantom Jew
£65.00
Oxford University Press The Mirror and the Lamp
Book SynopsisThis highly acclaimed study analyzes the various trends in English criticism during the first four decades of this century.Trade Review"One of the five works published within the last thirty years which in the opinion of representative scholars and critics have contributed most to the understanding of literature."--Contemporary Literary Scholarship "Abrams has written a remarkable book on the history of criticism, the most distinguished contribution of American scholarship in that field since the work of J.E. Spingarn."--Comparative Literature "The book is so rich in thought that it is invaluable for students of the romantic movement and indeed of the whole theory of criticism. I regard it as one of the most distinguished achievements of American literary scholarship of our day."--Modern Philology "With this book, M.H. Abrams has given us a remarkable study, admirably conceived and executed, a book of quite exceptional and no doubt lasting significance for a number of fields--for the history of ideas and comparative literature as well as for English literary history, criticism, and aesthetics."--Modern Language Journal "The past forty years have seen many attempts at ordering our ideas about literature; The Mirror and the Lamp stands out among them as a unique combination of rich historical scholarship and hard-won clarity of thought."--The Times Literary Supplement (London)
£18.89
Oxford University Press, USA The Birth of the Modern Mind
Book SynopsisThis revolutionary study presents new facts and an original theory about the source of the thought and literature which are termed `modern''.Using fifty-one new translations of sonnets from four languages spanning more than seven centuries, Oppenheimer argues that modern thought and literature were born with the invention of the sonnet in thirteenth-century Italy. In revealing the sonnet as the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire meant not for music or performance but for silent reading, the book demonstrates that the sonnet was the first modern literary form deliberately intended to portray the self in conflict and to explore self-consciousness.Professor Oppenheimer traces the influences of the sonnet, as invented by Giacomo da Lentino, combining historical fact with the history of ideas and literary criticism. He illustrates, in bilingual format, the sonnet''s growing appeal and variety during the centuries that followed, with translations from Italian, German, FrenchTrade Review'Paul Oppenheimer has written a learned, well-tempered and fascinating book about the sonnet. This book is a cunningly constructed homage to its ostensible subject. Oppenheimer, the poet and the scholar, join hands to translate a book and a sonnet.' Anthony Rudolf, Chapman 60'
£71.10
Oxford University Press Loves Knowledge
Book SynopsisThis volume brings together Martha Nussbaum''s published papers, some revised for this collection, on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. It also includes two new essays and a substantial Introduction.The papers, many of them previously not readily available to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical questions; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and style; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. The author investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rule.Trade ReviewThe lucid and penetrating essays in Love's Knowledge demonstrate that Martha Nussbaum is the finest philosophic mind of her generation. * Philosophy and Literature *one of the most original books published [in 1991], a hugely stimulating read, which returns us with thoughts refreshed to some of our best-loved authors and brings philosophy back to earth in the process * Mark Archer, Observer *Table of Contents1: Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature 2: The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality 3: Plato on Commensurability and Desire 4: Flawed Crystals: James's The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy 5: "Finely Aware and Richly Responsible": Literature and the Moral Imagination 6: Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory 7: Perception and Revolution: The Princess Casamassima and the Political Imagination 8: Sophistry About Conventions 9: Reading for Life 10: Fictions of the Soul 11: Love's Knowledge 12: Narrative Emotions: Beckett's Geneology of Love 13: Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration 14: Steerforth's Arm: Love and the Moral Point of View 15: Transcending Humanity
£44.00
Oxford University Press Inc Theres No Such Thing as Free Speech
Book SynopsisIn an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing - traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship - the terms `liberal'' and `politically correct'', are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as `reactionary'' and `fascist'' are by the left.In There''s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he takes both the left and the right equally to task. This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the outcome of America''s cultural wars.Trade ReviewMr Fish deflates anointed truths with joyful abandon, and he is at his best in exposing the often baleful effects wrought by mean-spirited defenders of traditional values * The New York Times Book Review *
£20.24
Oxford University Press Saint Foucault Towards a Gay Hagiography Towards a Gay Hagiography
Trade ReviewPassionate, comprehensive, and personal defence against attacks on the Franco-Californian sage's ideas and personal life - and on Halperin's own. Strongly recommended, both as a thorough introduction to Foucault and current issues, and for many intriguing ideas and observations by the author. * Alan Sinfield, Gay Times, October 1995 *Seeks to rescue Foucault from his critics and to portray him as a model of an engaged gay life, an attempt that requires a certain intellectual sleight of hand and close reading of the sort Halperin excels at. The book is remarkably engaging, combining elements of both brilliance and silliness. * Arena Magazine *a provocative read ... Halperin's book is highly engaging. * Times Higher Education Supplement *
£21.37
Oxford University Press The Literary Mind
Book SynopsisMark Turner makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. Using tools of modern linguistics, the recent work of neuroscientists, and literary masterpieces from Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante, Turner explains how story and projection are fundamental to everyday thought.Trade ReviewAn incredibly rich overview of Turner's newest ideas, offering scholars in both the humanities and cognitive sciences an excellent tutorial on the literary mind. * Raymond Gibbs, Jr., Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz *Outstanding. This book will be a marvellous way for people to get into cognitive science. * Suzanne E. Kemmer, Professor of Linguistics, Rice University *Turner's forceful book starts by showing how we use storying and metaphor to understand everything from pouring a cup of coffee to Proust. It ends with the splendidly bold claim that this storying, literary mind comes first, before all other kinds of thought, even language itself. Adventurous and convincing, Turner's work launches a new understanding, not only of literature, but of what it is to have a human brain. To read it is to think about thinking in a way you never have. * Norman N. Holland, Marston-Milbauer Professor of English, University of Florida *A garden of many delights to be enjoyed by literary and scientific minds? An elegant bridge between two worlds? Other mixed (blended) metaphors apply to this book provided they tell the reader that this is an intelligent text, equally valuable to literary scholars and cognitive scientists. * Antonio R. Damasio, Professor of Neurology, University of Iowa, and author of "Descartes' Error" *Table of Contents1: Bedtime with Shahrazad 2: Human Meaning 3: Body Action 4: Figured Tales 5: Creative Blends 6: Many Spaces 7: Single Lives 8: Language Notes Further Reading on Image Schemas Index
£17.57
Oxford University Press The Nature of Narrative 40th Anniversary Edition
Book SynopsisFor the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts. The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the pTrade ReviewPraise for the previous edition of The Nature of Narrative "A pioneer venture into one of the richest areas in literature, this volume is worthy of comparison with the classic studies of Harry Levin and René Wellek * Modern Language Journal "Attempts to put the novel in its place, to see it as only one of a number of narrative possibilities. The authors survey all kinds of narrative forms, written and unwritten from almost all literatures, with learning and insight. Also the traditional subjects of the theory of the novel, character, type, realism, etc., are illuminated from this wider international perspective."-René Wellek, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University *Table of ContentsPREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION BY ROBERT SCHOLES ; PREFACE BY JAMES PHELAN ; 1. The Narrative Tradition ; 2. The Oral Heritage of Written Narrative ; 3. The Classical Heritage of Modern Narrative ; 4. Meaning in Narrative ; 5. Character in Narrative ; 6. Plot in Narrative ; 7. Point of View in Narrative ; 8. Narrative Theory, 1966-2006: A Narrative ; WORKS CITED ; APPENDIX ; NOTES ; INDEX
£24.22
Oxford University Press The Nature of Narrative
Book SynopsisFor the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts. The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the pTrade ReviewA pioneer venture into one of the richest areas in literature, this volume is worthy of comparison with the classic studies of Harry Levin and René Wellek. * Modern Language Journal (review from previous edition) *Attempts to put the novel in its place, to see it as only one of a number of narrative possibilities. The authors survey all kinds of narrative forms, written and unwritten from almost all literatures, with learning and insight. Also the traditional subjects of the theory of the novel, character, type, realism, etc., are illuminated from this wider international perspective. * René Wellek, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University *Table of ContentsPreface to the Second Edition by Robert Scholes Preface by James Phelan 1: The Narrative Tradition 2: The Oral Heritage of Written Narrative 3: The Classical Heritage of Modern Narrative 4: Meaning in Narrative 5: Character in Narrative 6: Plot in Narrative 7: Point of View in Narrative 8: Narrative Theory, 1966-2006: A Narrative Works Cited Appendix Notes Index
£17.09
Oxford University Press Empathy and the Novel
Book SynopsisDoes reading novels evoking empathy with fictional characters really cultivate our sympathetic imagination and lead to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers'' and authors'' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, Keen finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive (and exaggerated by defenders of literary reading). She offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. Empathy and the Novel engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies'' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, Keen brinTrade ReviewThis work's forte is its willingness to range across a series of disciplines and to locate itself at the interconnection between science and literature. Well illustrated...It is an extremely stimulating, clearly written and accessible work which will be of interest to scholars of literature, psychology and neuroscience alike. * Alison E. Martin, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Preface 1: Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 2: The Literary Career of Empathy 3: Readers' Empathy 4: Empathy in the Marketplace 5: Authors' Empathy 6: Contesting Empathy Appendix: A Collection of Hypotheses about Narrative Empathy Work Cited Index
£40.49
Oxford University Press Inc Marvelous Images
Book SynopsisThe twelve essays by Kendall Walton in this volume address a broad range of issues concerning the arts. Walton introduces an innovative account of aesthetic value, and explores relations between aesthetic value and values of other kinds. His classic ''Categories of Art'' is included, as is ''Transparent Pictures'', his controversial account of what is special about photographs. A new essay investigates the fact that still pictures are still, although some of them depict motion. New postscripts have been added to several of the reprinted essays.Trade ReviewThe collection is indeed a joy to read... Each essay gives the tangible impression hearing an outstanding philosopher in direct engagement with the issues... For all the freshness and directness of style, there is an extraordinary level of subtle nuance and fine distinction... It is a principal conclusion of the opening chapter, which gives the collection its title, that a distinctive mark of aesthetic pleasure is the fact we take pleasure, not just in the object itself, but also in our admiration for the object. Just such a pleasure will be occasioned by this admirable volume. Marvelous indeed. * Ian Ground, Philosophy *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Aesthetic and Moral Values 1: "How Marvelous": Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value Postscripts to "How Marvelous!" 2: The Test of Time 3: Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality 4: On the (So-Called) Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance Part II: Pictures and Photographs 5: Pictures & Hobby Horses: Make-Believe Beyond Childhood 6: Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism Postscripts to "Transparent Pictures" 7: On Pictures & Photographs: Objections Answered 8: Seeing In and Seeing Fictionally 9: Depiction, Perception, & Imagination: Responses to Richard Wollheim 10: Experiencing Still Photographs: What Do You See and How Long Do You See It? Part III: Categories and Styles 11: Categories of Art 12: Style and the Products and Processes of Art
£31.02
Oxford University Press Interdisciplinary Barthes
Book SynopsisInterdisciplinary Barthes addresses the enduring stimulus that Barthes offers to intellectually adventurous work across the human sciences. It contextualises his creative engagements with ethnology, historiography, philosophy, ethics, music, photography, and literature, and traces the distinctive ways which he unsettled disciplinary boundaries.Trade ReviewAs one might imagine in picking up any hardback publication from Oxford University Press, Interdisciplinary Barthes is a satisfying book to behold * Sunil Manghani, Barthes Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface Introduction 1: DIANA KNIGHT: Roland Barthes, An Interdisciplinary Subject Part I: Myths, History, and Images 2: PHILIPPE ROGER: Barthes's Frenchness 3: JONATHAN CULLER: Barthes's Myths of America 4: STEPHEN BANN: The Intelligible Versus the Real: Barthes's Historiographical Option 5: MARIA O'SULLIVAN: Time and Space: Barthes and the Discourse of History 6: ÉRIC MARTY: Barthes and the Visibility Turn: For a Non-Mimetic Image 7: KATHRIN YACAVONE: Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship Part II: Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics 8: MICHAEL MORIARTY: Barthes and Religion 9: LUCY O'MEARA: Barthes and the Lessons of Ancient Philosophy 10: MARIELLE MACÉ: Barthes and 'Subtle Forms of Living' 11: KRIS PINT: 'A Country Free by Default': Barthes and the Atmospheric Experience of Literature 12: FRANÇOIS NOUDELMANN: Barthes and Insignificant Music 13: PATRIZIA LOMBARDO: Barthes and the Emotions Part III: Writing, Criticism, and the Archive 14: ANTOINE COMPAGNON: Barthes and Commissioned Writing 15: ANDY STAFFORD: Barthes's Menippean Moment: Creative Criticism 1966-70 16: CLAUDE COSTE: From Fichier to OEuvre: Barthess 'Our Literature' project 17: ANNE HERSCHBERG PIERROT: Barthes, the Desire to Write, and the Prevision of the Work 18: TIPHAINE SAMOYAULT: Barthes's Ordinary Writing Index
£83.61
Oxford University Press Arabic Persian and Turkic Poetics
Book Synopsis
£113.05
Oxford University Press Thinking with Classical Matter
Book Synopsis
£79.80
Oxford University Press Inc Bohemians A Very Short Introduction VERY SHORT
Book SynopsisThe Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the patron system, the artist was free to move around, to seek an audience wherever fortune beckoned. This marketing model likening the artist''s vagabond career to the gypsy life helps to explain part of the bohemian myth, but not all of it. Most bohemians have scant interest in commercial gain and are not so itinerant after all, confining their movements to down-market urban neighbourhoods where the rent is cheap and the morals are loose.This Very Short Introduction traces the myth of Bohemia through its various fictional manifestations, from Henry Murger''s novel Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851) and Giacomo Puccini''s opera La Bohème (1896) to Aki Kaurismäki''s film La vie de Bohème (1992), and Jonathan Larson''s musical Rent (1996). It goes on to examine the history of different bohemian communities, including those in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the Schwabing section of Munich, and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. David Weir also considers the politics of Bohemia and traces the careers of the artists Gustave Courbet and Pablo Picasso and the great chanteuses Yvette Guilbert, Fréhel, and Edith Piaf in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, where a rich tradition of popular culture indebted to Bohemia also developed. Weir concludes with a discussion of the legacy of Bohemia today as something outworn and dying, an exhausted tradition that somehow continues.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1: Fictional Bohemias Chapter 2: Historical Bohemias Chapter 3: Political Bohemias Chapter 4: Artistic Bohemias Conclusion References Further reading Index
£9.49
