"Alterities" marks an advance to a new stage in critical theory. Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary with cinema from popular to art-film and with political theory from Marx to Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Badiou, Thomas Docherty intervenes in the major contemporary cultural debates to propose and practise a new literary criticism, with theoretical foundations rooted in a postmodern ethics, ecopolitics, and an austere attention to the radical difficulties of art.

1. This book is a complete, one-stop-guide to the study of English Literature, offering an introduction and approach that could be applied to any text or theory. 2. There are thousands of students of English Literature around the world and introductory courses often cater for hundreds of students. Though there are many introduction to literature books available, this complete methodology to literary analysis is unique 3. The approach to this book is unique to most other introductions that tend to simply provide a description of histories and theories. This book introduces the approaches and theories and then provides practical applications so that students can pursue their studies with complete confidence in their literary analysis abilities

This book: * Examines popular texts from syllabi to apply literary theory * Looks at major schools in critical theory - structuralism, poststructuralism, myth criticism, queer theory, feminism, Marxist critical thought, new historicism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, deconstruction * Includes Western and non-Western texts * Will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and critical theory, culture studies and postcolonialism

Ever since comedies were first performed in the ancient world, the definition of the term 'comedy' has been debated by both playwrights and critics. Originally published in 1978, this volume does not attempt a precise definition, but reviews the various interpretations that have been put forward through the ages, taking as evidence important theoretical writings as well as the plays themselves, and pointing out not only common features but also notable exceptions. The comic drama of Western Europe since the Renaissance is here surveyed in a series of chapters devoted principally to the tradition of European comedy as it developed in the major national literatures. The perspective is expanded to include, on the one hand, the origins in classical Greece and Rome and, on the other, the influence of cinema, radio and television comedy at the time - American as well as European. A structural basis for the volume as a whole is provided in an analytical introduction, where the essential problems are defined: such issues as the relationship between comedy and satire, comedy and farce; the distinction between laughter and smile; the respective claims of realism and fantasy; the role of plot and of dialogue; the place of sentiment and of moral teaching; and the possibility of comic catharsis. In this way the nature and evolution of European comedy is presented in an original and coherent form, not only offering an invaluable aid to students seeking guidance in literature of which they are not making a specialist study, but stimulating the more experienced reader to think again about familiar plays.

First published in 1939, the original blurb reads: We have learned much lately concerning theories of laughter, yet laughter is only what we do about comedy. What is comedy itself? In this work the history of comic instances is combed in the search for the truth about comedy. Today, when laughter is stifled in so many countries, an exposition of comedy shows it to have a universal and necessary character. Comedy, as its natures reveals, is one criterion of the state of human culture; it is highly contemporary and requires freedom - but freedom for adventure, not for routine. After a chapter devoted to the explanation of a logical theory of comedy, the modern comedians are examined, and the humour of every one, from the Marx Brothers to surrealism, from Gertrude Stein to Mickey Mouse, from James Joyce to Charlie Chaplin, is shown to be a constant, inherent in the same set of unchanging conditions.

The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure-Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault-are wholly consistent with Saussure's foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in Saussure's wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate-despite themselves and often hilariously so-the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today is actually dependent upon on the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure's structuralism, not its foils. Saussure's sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one and the same-history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It concludes with a coda in life writing on the author's epileptic disability.

1. Offers a new approach to teaching/thinking and analysing in literary studies 2. Responds to the key concerns of most researchers and students right now - global social justice and sustainability and the value of literature/humanities 3. There are no other books that tie together systems thinking, wisdom, literary studies and social justice - it is unique

This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905-1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group - much like Beethoven's piano sonatas or Keats's great odes - in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward's novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.

Originally published in 1986, this book subverts an attitude towards the moral dimension of life which the author terms 'ethical cynicism'. It discusses a theory of moral powers - a theory which shows that moral values are immensely potent sources of power. The author argues that there is a conceptual affinity between the Wittgensteinian account of language and the Marxist theory of history such that the two complement and even require one another in various aspects.

Originally published in 1986, this book explores the animating qualities of human character and moral thought and discusses how they place constraints on the adequacy of moral theories. It evaluates some of the major theories in the history of ethics, notably the moral thoughts of Sidgwick, Kant, Aristotle and Hume. The book examines questions of fundamental importance to all of us and broadens the scope and wisdom of analytical philosophy by conveying the excitement of original philosophical research.

Locating Classed Subjectivities explores representations of social class in British fiction through the lens of spatial theory and analysis. By analyzing a range of class-conscious texts from the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first centuries, the collection provides an overview of the way British writers mobilized spatial aesthetics as a means to comment on the intricacies of social class. In doing so, the collection delineates aesthetic strategies of representation in British writing, tracing the development of literary forms while considering how authors mobilized innovative spatial metaphors to better express contingent social and economic realities. Ranging in coverage from early-nineteenth-century narratives of disease to contemporary writing on the working-class millennial, Locating Classed Subjectivities offers new perspectives on literary techniques and political intentions, exploring the way class is parsed and critiqued through British writing across three centuries. As such, the project responds to Nigel Thrift and Peter Williams's claim that literary and cultural production serves as a particularly rich yet unexamined access point by which to comprehend the way space and social class intersect.

Offering a vital, critical contribution to debates on gender, sexuality and schooling in South Africa, this book highlights how South African educational practices, discourses and structures normalize cisheteronormativity, along with how these are resisted within schools and through contemporary forms of activism. Not only does it add fresh insights to the existing research literature on gender, sexualities and schooling, it also underscores the valuable contributions of queer and transgender social movements, which have made influential legislative, teaching, learning and support contributions to education. Drawing on ethnographic research with queer and transgender activists, teachers, school managers, parents and school attending youth, the book provides everyday real-life quotes and observations offering a deeply critical contribution to the debates on gender and sexualities, education and activism. Using spatial and affect theories, it troubles the assumptions that frame this field of research to make a novel contribution to the national and international literature and research. The book provides research-based insights for thinking about and calls for informed action to challenging cisheteronormativity within and beyond schools.

Beginning with the insights of the "canonical criticism" of Brevard Childs and James Sanders, this book explores the canon of the Bible through readings in literature, art and cinema. It places the Bible within the concerns of contemporary feminist thought, postmodern anxiety and modern apocalyptic thought. It returns the reader to a sense of the centrality of the biblical canon, expanding the notion of "reading" to picture and film.

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual. With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines - history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory - this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

Auerbach was one of the foremost literary critics of the 20th century whose work has relevance within the fields of literary criticism, historiography and postcolonial theory. The opening chapter of this book explains how he understood the task of interpretation and his role as an interpreter. The following chapter outlines the important phases in his life with reference to the writers and thinkers who influenced him in his thinking and practice. The central chapters of the book focus on specific themes in his work: the historical grounding of the 'figural' imagination; the relation between the secular and the sacred; the emergence of tragic realism; and the notion of 'inner history' as a defining feature of early 20th-cenntury modernism. The final two chapters focus on broader issues relating to the development of Auerbach's understanding of the development of an educated readership within Europe and of his concerns regarding the emergence of what he terms 'a world literature'.

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.

Do not ask for the definition of deconstruction; ask for its history. What needs and desires did it meet at the time of its emergence? What kind of threat did it represent? How has our understanding of deconstruction changed over time? This book offers an account of the invention and reinvention of deconstruction in literary studies and the humanities more generally. Focusing on the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, it argues that the early impact of deconstruction was connected to its perceived assault upon truth. After de Man's death there is a steady insistence in Derrida's work on questions about time - invention, advent, event - and on the distance between them. This book tells the story of this transition from truth to time against a background of some of the most divisive debates of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century, about politics, history and ethics.

Anglophone postcolonial studies has been characterized by its secular nature. Yet as the first generation of scholars grapples with mortality, a yearning for spiritual meaning is emerging in many texts. This study synthesizes the sacred language used in these texts with critical theory in order to create a holistic frame for interpretive analysis.

The aphorism captures a huge amount of truth, meaning or wit in a very short statement. It has been used and studied from classical times to contemporary theory and takes on a new relevance when we look at today's communication media such as text messages and twitter. This concise guide offers an overview of: The history of the aphorism to the present day Its relation to other short forms, including the fragment, the proverb, the maxim, the haiku, the epigram and the quotation The use of the aphorism by authors such as Heraclitus, Bacon, La Rochefoucauld, Chuang Tzu, Blake, Schlegel, Emerson, Nietzsche, Wilde, Woolf and Barthes The interdisciplinary nature of the aphorism, bringing together science, philosophy, literature and religion Exploring all the key aspects of the form, Ben Grant guides readers through this large and lively area in a wide-ranging and critically informed study of the aphorism.

This book examines imperial and nationalist discourses surrounding three contemporaneous and unsuccessful mid-nineteenth-century colonial uprisings against the British Empire: the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) in India, the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) in Jamaica, and the Fenian Rebellion (1867) in Ireland. In reading these three mid-century rebellions as flashpoints for the varying yet parallel attempts by imperialist colonialists, nationalists, and socialists to transform the oppressed colonized worker (the subjected laborer) into one whose identity is created and limited by labor (a laboring subject), this book also tracks varying modes of resistance to those attempts in all three colonies. In drawing from a range of historical, literary, and visual sources outside the borders of the Anglophone literary canon, this book contends that these texts not only serve as points of engagements with the rebellions but also constitute an archive of oppression and resistance.

Presents a unique Gestalt-oriented approach to the study of poetic metaphor. Focuses on the integral relationship among art, psychology and Rudolf Arnheim as a Gestalt psychologist.

This book foregrounds entanglement as a guiding concept in Derrida's work and considers its implications and benefits for ecocritical thought. Ergin introduces the notion of "ecological text" to emphasize textuality as a form of entanglement that proves useful in thinking about ecological interdependence and uncertainty. She brings deconstruction into a dialogue with social ecology and new materialism, outlining entanglements in three strands of thought to demonstrate the relevance of this concept in theoretical terms. Ergin then investigates natural-social entanglements through a comparative analysis of the works of the American poet Juliana Spahr and the Turkish writer Latife Tekin. The book enriches our understanding of complicity and accountability by revealing the ecological network of material and discursive forces in which we are deeply embedded. It makes a significant contribution to current debates on ecocritical theory, comparative literature, and ecopoetics.

In the middle years of the sixteenth century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the 'tyrant by entrie' or the usurper, who supplanted earlier 'tyrant by the administration' as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own 'virtu' and through an act of 'lawmaking' violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the sixteenth century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. In contrast, the historical and tragic plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods teem with illegitimate monarchs. Almost all of Shakespeare's history plays, at least four of his ten tragedies, and even a few of his comedies feature usurpation or potential usurpation of sovereign power as a crucial plot device. Why and how does usurpation emerge as a preoccupation in English theatre? What are the political, historical, legal, and dramaturgical transformations that influence and are influenced by this moment of emergence? As the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in sixteenth-century drama and politics, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.