This book examines the conceptual, existential, and logical conditions under which the philosophical novel can be treated as a literary genre on a par with generally recognized literary genres, such as mystery, romantic, adventure, religious, or historical novel. Michael H. Mitias argues that the philosophical novel meets these conditions. He advances a detailed analysis of the concept of literary genre, and discusses the reasons which justify the claim that philosophical novel is a distinct literary genre. This is based on the assumption that philosophical ideas can be communicated metaphorically. An analysis of this assumption necessarily leads to a detailed discussion of the concept of metaphor and the extent to which it can be the vehicle of communicating philosophical truth.

The Wounded Researcher addresses the crises of epistemological violence when we fail to consider that a researcher is addressed by and drawn into a work through his or her complexes. Using a Jungian-Archetypal perspective, this book argues that the bodies of knowledge we create degenerate into ideologies, which are the death of critical thinking, if the complexity of the research process is ignored. Writing with soul in mind invites us to consider how we might write down the soul in writing up our research.

Adorno's aesthetics are one of the most important philosophical analyses of the 20th century, but their development remains unclear. Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance is the first book to provide a detailed study of how Adorno's thinking of aesthetics developed and to show the different dimensions that came together to make it uniquely powerful. Principal among these dimensions are his intense interest in music and his historical and materialist approach. In addition, by studying how Adorno's aesthetics arose through interactions with different thinkers, particularly Kracauer, Horkheimer, and Schoenberg, it becomes clear that his thought changes in its relation to dialectics. As a result, Adorno's thinking comes to broaden the understanding of aesthetics to include the sphere of sensuality, and in doing so transforms both aesthetics and dialectics through a notion of dissonance, which in turn has substantial implications for the relation of his thinking to praxis.

Literary forgeries are usually regarded as spurious versions of genuine literature. Faking Literature argues that the production of a literary forgery is an act that reveals the spurious nature of literature itself. Literature has long been under attack because of its alliance with rhetoric (the art of persuasion) rather than with logic and ethics. One way of deflecting such attacks is to demonize literary forgery: literature acquires the illusion of authenticity by being dissociated from what are represented as ersatz approximations of the real thing.

Theory of Mind and Science Fiction shows how theory of mind provides an exciting 'new' way to think about science fiction and, conversely, how science fiction sheds light not only on theory of mind but also empathy, morality, and the nature of our humanity.

Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood - Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor - and the gay male fetishization of those faces. Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of "to-be-looked-at-ness" is countered by a hermeneutics of "to-be-seen-through-ness." The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. Classical Holly Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, and Suddenly, Last Summer in the context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. It includes, for instance, an analysis of D. W. Griffith and blackface, the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject, several major films by Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, and the emergence of rival standards of beauty, both female and male, in figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. This is an important study for students of queer theory, film theory and history, and gender and sexuality studies.

The lever appears to be a very simple object, a tool used since ancient times for the most primitive of tasks: to lift and to balance. Why, then, were prominent intellectuals active around 1800 in areas as diverse as science, philosophy, and literature inspired to think and write about levers? In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, readers will discover the remarkable ways in which the lever is used to model the construction of knowledge and to mobilize new ideas among diverse disciplines. These acts of construction are shown to model key aspects of the human, from the more abstract processes of moral decision-making to a quite literal equation of the powerful human ego with the supposed stability and power of the fulcrum point.

This collection shows students of English and applied linguistics ways in which language and literary study can be integrated. By drawing on a wide range of texts by mainly British and American writers, from a variety of different periods, the contributors show how discourse stylistics can provide models for the systematic description of, for example, dialogue in fiction; language of drama and balladic poetry; speech presentation; the interactive properties of metre; the communicative context of author/reader. Among the texts examined are novels, poetry and drama by major twentieth-century writers such as Joyce, Auden, Pinter and Hopkins, as well as examples from Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Each chapter has a wide range of exercises for practical analysis, an extensive glossary and a comprehensive bibliography with suggestions for further reading. The book will be particularly useful to undergraduate students of English and applied linguistics and advanced students of modern languages or English as a foreign language.

This volume overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel of a "Cathy" comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and subjectivity do not exist in isolation, but are manufactured by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day. They call for a critical practice that, through the fracturing of texts, can alter the grounds of knowledge and interpretation. This study should interest critics of narrative and culture, as well as students wanting to extend post-Saussurean theories to popular and canonical cultures, and to the dynamics of story-telling itself.

The concept of possible worlds, originally introduced in philosophical logic, has recently gained interdisciplinary influence; it proves to be a productive tool when borrowed by literary theory to explain the notion of fictional worlds. In this book Ruth Ronen develops a comparative reading of the use of possible worlds in philosophy and in literary theory, and offers an analysis of the way the concept contributes to our understanding of fictionality and the structure and ontology of fictional worlds. Dr Ronen suggests a new set of criteria for the definition of fictionality, making rigorous distinctions between fictional and possible worlds; and through specific studies of domains within fictional worlds - events, objects, time, and point of view - she proposes a radical rethinking of the problem of fictionality in general and fictional narrativity in particular.

The emergence of national education in France is often viewed as a struggle between spiritual and secular authorities, church and state. When one looks at the role of literature in education, however, a different picture appears. By assuming control over the teaching of French language and literature, the state claimed spiritual guardianship over the nation. The issue was therefore not so much of conflict between spiritual and secular forces, as the attempt by one institution to appropriate the spiritual authority of another. Situated at the intersection of history and literary criticism, this book casts new light on literary pedagogy, canon formation, and the relationship between culture and the modern French state.

This is the first full commentary on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator,". the essay is very popular and widely taught at p/g level, but is also cryptic and misunderstood, hence the need for this detailed and nuanced treatment. It is also the only commentary on Benjamin's essay at book or article length ever to experiment with the mode of translating that he himself championed.

This book argues that Ann Leckie's novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice's exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.

Locating science fiction as its own distinct and increasingly important narrative form, this book explores how the genre challenges pervasive perceptions of society as presented in the conventional modern novel. Inspired by, and building upon, Georg Lukacs's criticism of the orthodox novel for its depiction of life as alienating and disjointed, Milner, Murphy and Roberts posit that science fiction steps beyond this contemporary form to be a more constructive literature, better able to conceive of society as complete, integrated and well-rounded. Taking stock of three kinds of science fiction which lie outside the scope of the modern novel - theological or ontological science fiction, the science fiction of future history and epic science fiction - this book demonstrates science fiction's unique capacity to encapsulate the whole world, persons and events, things and objects in a glance, and address the motive behind the wish for a meaningful totality. With reference to a vast array of works by authors such as Michel Houellebecq, Elias Canetti, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Marge Piercy, Iain M. Banks, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Dirk C. Fleck, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book offers a compelling argument for rethinking the position and potential of the science fiction novel and to challenge the way we perceive our culture.

Through close attention to the representation of the reader in 10 of Dickens novels, this study brings their specifically Victorian assumptions into direct confrontation with the insights of modern critical theory. In doing so, the study locates in Dickens a tendency to reanimate the ancient principle of mimesis that not only does the text become a mirror held up to its reader but, in a radical revision of our post-Saussurean understanding, language becomes not so much a decontructive system of differences as a reconstructive system of resemblances. In short, Schad is finally concerned with some new and quite mythical idea of language.

This book presents an intellectual history and theoretical exploration of black humanism since the civil rights era. Humanism is a human-centered approach to life that considers human beings to be responsible for the world and its course of history. Both the heavily theistic climate in the United States as well as the dominance of the Black Church are responsible for black humanism’s existence in virtual oblivion. For those who believe the world to be one without supernatural interventions, human action matters greatly and is the only possible mode for change. Humanists are thus committed to promoting the public good through human effort rather than through faith. Black humanism originates from the lived experiences of African Americans in a white hegemonic society. Viewed from this perspective, black humanist cultural expressions are a continuous push to imagine and make room for alternative life options in a racist society.  Alexandra Hartmann counters religion’s hegemonic grasp and uncovers black humanism as a small yet significant tradition in recent African American culture and cultural politics by studying its impact on African American literature and the ensuing anti-racist potentials. The book demonstrates that black humanism regards subjectivity as embodied and is thus a worldview that is characterized by a fragile hope regarding the possibility of progress – racial and otherwise – in the country.

How does literature work? And what does it mean? How does it relate to the world: to politics, to history, to the environment? How do we analyse and interpret a literary text, paying attention to its specific poetic and fictitious qualities? This wide-ranging introduction helps students to explore these and many other essential questions in the study of literature, criticism and theory. In a series of introductory chapters, leading international scholars present the fundamental topics of literary studies through conceptual definitions as well as interpretative readings of works familiar from a range of world literary traditions. In an easy-to-navigate format, Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis covers such topics as: *Key definitions - from plot, character and style to genre, trope and author *Literature's relationship to the surrounding world - ethics, politics, gender and nature *Modes of literature and criticism - from books to performance, from creative to critical writing With annotated reading guides throughout and a glossary of major critical schools to help students when studying, revising and writing essays, this is an essential introduction and reference guide to the study of literature at all levels. The companion website to the book litdh.au.dk focuses on digital humanities and literary studies. For each topic in the book you will find an introduction to computational aspects of the topic, approaches for both newcomers and advanced users, and references to tools, scripts and articles. The website also has a comprehensive and well-structured reference page.

This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin's early career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry, his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet. Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural world. It also highlights how Merwin's work presents our place in history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new century.

The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885-1910 draws on previously unseen archival material to explore the innovative and scholarly ways in which English literature was taught to extramural students in England during the fin de siecle. It begins by tracing the development of the subject from 1650 onwards, before looking at the impassioned debates surrounding the introduction of English as an honours degree at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1880s and '90s. The book then examines exactly how the subject was taught in various non-university settings such as novel-reading unions, the University Extension Movement, and informal literary advice columns written by Arnold Bennett for a popular Edwardian newspaper. At a time when the future of the humanities feels increasingly uncertain, this book sheds new light on the modern roots of tertiary-level English teaching.

This accessible and jargon-free book features readings of over 20 key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including Homer, Plato, Beowulf , Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau. Simon Haines presents a thought-provoking and theoretically aware account of Western literature and philosophy, arguing that the history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different conceptions of the self: the 'romantic' (or dualist) vs the 'realist' or ('extended').

Fantasy provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the study of this fascinating field. Covering literature, film, television, ballet, light opera and visual art and featuring a historical overview from Ovid to the Toy Story franchise, this book takes the reader through the key landmark moments in the development of fantasy criticism. This comprehensive guide examines fantasy and politics, fantasy and the erotic, quest narratives and animal fantasy for children. The versatility and cultural significance of fantasy is explored, alongside the important role fantasy plays in our understanding of 'the real', from childhood onwards. Written in a clear, engaging style and featuring an extensive glossary of terms, this is the essential introduction to Fantasy.