The portentous terms and phrases associated with the first decades of the Frankfurt School - exile, the dominance of capitalism, fascism - seem as salient today as they were in the early twentieth century. The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School addresses the many early concerns of critical theory and brings those concerns into direct engagement with our shared world today. In this volume, a distinguished group of international scholars from a variety of disciplines revisits the philosophical and political contributions of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others. Throughout, the Companion's focus is on the major ideas that have made the Frankfurt School such a consequential and enduring movement. It offers a crucial resource for those who are trying to make sense of the global and cultural crisis that has now seized our contemporary world.

Beginning theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer readers the best single-volume introduction to the field. The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Beginning theory allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped. The book has been updated for this edition and includes a new introduction, expanded chapters, and an overview of the subject ('Theory after "Theory"') which maps the arrival of new 'isms' since the second edition appeared in 2002 and the third edition in 2009. -- .

Reading Contemporary Picturebooks takes a look at one of the most vibrant branches of children's literature - the modern picturebook. This exciting new book takes a sample of contemporary picturebooks and closely examines the features that make them distinctive and then suggests a way of characterising the 'interanimation' of words and pictures that is the essence of the form. The reasons for the picturebook's vitality and flexibility are also explored and the close bond between the picturebook and its readers is analysed. Advances in our understanding of how visual images are organised are examined and the book concludes with an attempt to redescribe the picturebook in such a way that pictures, readers and text may be drawn together. Picturing Text will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers interested in reading, children's literature and media studies.

Mieke Bal is one of Europe's leading theorists and critics. Her work within feminist art history and cultural studies provides a fascinating alternative to prevailing thinking in these fields. The essays in this collection include Bal's brilliant analyses of the:
Myth of Rembrandt
Imagery of Vermeer
Baroque of Caravaggio
Neo-Baroque of David Reed
Culture of the museum
Visual representation of rape
Closet in Proust
Bal brings a keen visual sense to these studies, as well as an understanding of how literature represents visuality and how the ethics and aesthetics present within museums affect the cultural artifacts displayed.
In his engaging commentary, eminent art historian Norman Bryson shows how Bal's original approach to the interdisciplinary study of art and visual culture has had wide- reaching influence.

Gloria E. Anzaldua, best known for her books "Borderlands/La Frontera" and "This Bridge Called My Back", is often considered as one of the foremost modern feminist thinkers and activists. As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, Anzaldua has played a major role in redefining queer, female and Chicano/a identities, and in developing inclusionary movements for social justice. In this memoir-like collection, Anzaldua's powerful voice speaks clearly and passionately. She recounts her life, explains many aspects of her thought, and explores the intersections between her writings and postcolonial theory. Each selection deepens our understanding of an important cultural theorist's lifework. The interviews contain clear explanations of Anzaldua's original concept of her work and her subsequent revisions of these ideas; her use of the term "new tribalism" as a disruptive category that redefines previous ethnocentric forms of nationalism; and what Anzaldua calls "conocimientos" - alternate ways of knowing that synthesize reflection with action to create knowledge systems that challenge the status quo. Highly personal, these interviews, arranged and introduced by AnaLouise Keating,

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with "the self" often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three sections, this text focuses on works of the 20th and 21st century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different ways in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African-American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this text includes analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the USA.

John Donne's Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical knowledge -- a rapidly changing field in early modern England -- on Donne's thinking and writing. This knowledge played a crucial role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and how he conveyed those experiences in his work. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it. He used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his ideas resonate with his original audience, and that can illuminate his ideas for readers today.

Author Biography:
Clara Calvo is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her publications include Power Relations and Fool-Master Discourse in Shakespeare, and she is a regular contributor to The Year's Work in English Studies.
Jean Jacques Weber is Professor of English at University Centre Luxembourg. His publications include Critical Analysis of Fiction, Twentieth-Century Fiction (co-edited, Routledge 1995) and The Stylistics Reader (co-edited for Routledge 1996).

In this engaging and accessible guidebook, Stephen Guy-Bray uses queer theory to argue that in many of Shakespeare's works representation itself becomes queer. Shakespeare often uses representation, not just as a lens through which to tell a story, but as a textual tool in itself. Shakespeare and Queer Representation includes a thorough introduction that discusses how we can define queer representation, with each chapter developing these theories to examine works that span the entire career of Shakespeare, including his sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, King John, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. The book highlights the extent to which Shakespeare's works can be seen to anticipate, and even to extend, many of the insights of the latest developments in queer theory. This thought-provoking and evocative book is an essential guide for students studying Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, gender studies, and queer literary theory.

"The Literature Workbook" is a practical introductory textbook for literary studies, which can be used either for independent study or as part of a class. Laying the foundation for the further study of literature, "The Literature Workbook" introduces the beginning student to the essential analytic and interpretative skills that are needed for literary appreciation and evaluation. It also equips the teacher with practical tools and materials for use in seminars or when assigning written assessments and projects. Arranged according to genre and chronology, the chapters acquaint the reader with a range of key figures in English literature and encourages the reader to think about them in their historical and cultural contexts. Adopting a user-friendly case-study approach each chapter contains exercises and activities, discussion hints, project work and suggestions for further reading. The workbook also includes a glossary and a subject and name index.

In Roland Barthes's eyes, Philippe Sollers embodied the figure of the contemporary writer forever seeking something new. Thirty-six years after Barthes produced his study Sollers Writer, Sollers has written a book on the man who was his friend and who shared with him a total faith in literature as a force of invention and discovery, as a resource and an encyclopaedia. They met regularly, exchanged many letters and fought many battles together, against every kind of academicism, every political and ideological regression. Barthes shed light on Sollers's work in a series of articles that are still of great relevance today. Sollers, in turn, assumed the role of Barthes's publisher at Le Seuil from the publication of his Critical Essays in 1964, and was left deeply shocked and saddened by Barthes's death in 1980. In short, they were very close to each other, despite their differences, and Sollers expresses here what this meant at the time and what it continues to represent, highlighting the themes that sustained their friendship. The book also contains some thirty letters from Barthes to Sollers, completing our image of one of the most extraordinary partnerships in French literary life.

This book by one of Latin America's leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories - what she calls the 'biographical space' - can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The 'I' who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch's own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina's last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.

If it is not generally known that the foundations of twentieth-century criticism of Shakespeare's imagery were laid over one hundred and fifty years ago, the explanation lies in the limited availability of the single original edition of Walter Whiter's Specimen of a Commentary on Shakspeare published in 1794. In an age in which the study of Shakespeare's characters was of prime interest and importance, Whiter - a classical scholar who took holy orders and ended his life as a country parson - developed a form of textual criticism closely linked to a study of the workings of the human mind: and his book offers a psychological survey of the creative imagination, following the principles laid down in Locke's Essay on Human Understanding and illustrated by examples from Shakespeare's plays. In his realization that Shakespeare provides the finest examples of the poetic imagination Whiter is of his time: but in his particular study of the associative powers of such a mind engaged in the process of creation, he is far in advance of his time and has no immediate disciples in the later nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, however, there was an increasing acknowledgement of Whiter's work and a more frequent appeal for the reissue of his book. Originally published in 1967, the present edition was started in response to that appeal more than ten years before Mr Alan Over's tragic death in 1964 and incorporates the revisions and additions made by Whiter for his own projected second edition.

"Language Through Literature" provides a definitive introduction to the English language through the medium of English literature. Through the use of illustrations from poetry, prose and drama, this book offers a lively guide to important concepts and techniques in English language study.
Among the many topics covered in the book are the form and meaning of words, the structure of narrative discourses and the organization of dialogue and conversation. Each chapter explores a specific aspect of the modern English language using a combination of exposition and practical activities. Each chapter also provides points for further discussion and includes project work for use individually, or as part of a group.
Readers will find the author's selection and presentation of topics helpful, as Paul Simpson progressively widens the scope of topics from single words to the structure of whole conversations. "Language Through Literature" is designed for the non-specialist who is new to the study of the English language and will be particularly relevant to anyone interested in the in the relationship between the English language and English literature.

1) This book presents a comprehensive account of the eminent Bengali writer and activist, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre in its full range and versatility. 2) It draws attention to Devi's role as a woman writer with a difference and her image outside Bengal. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK.

Mixing passion and humor, a personal work of literary criticism that demonstrates how the greatest books illuminate our lives Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor's life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person-and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature's knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters' lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge-and come to understand its cost. In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.

Section 1 of this volume describes three major debates about voice. They include:
* the overarching debate: discourse as text vs. discourse as voice;
* the traditional debate in rhetoric: ethos as real virtue in the real person vs. ethos as the appearance of virtue; and
* the modern debate: voice as self vs. voice as role.
These debates involve large, ideological questions about the nature of self or identity and about the relation of the text to the writer. They are all the more troublesome and unresolvable because they tend to be cast in binary, either/or terms.
Section 2 responds to these debates by showing that they don't need to be resolved in either/or terms. Looking carefully at the term "voice" shows that it has some fairly noncontroversial meanings when applied to writing. Thus, most of this section is devoted to an extended exploration of a family of five meanings for the term "voice" in writing -- audible voice or information, dramatic voice, recognizable or distinctive voice, voice with authority, and resonant voice or presence. These meanings make the concept of voice solid and usable apart from the theoretical debates.
The two theoretical debates only come up in relatively circumscribed arenas and so don't muddy most uses of the concept of voice in writing. In short, Elbow's hope is that he can make descriptive "claims" about the meanings of voice in writing about which people from various ideological camps will be able to agree.

This book is an anthology of landmark essays in rhetorical criticism. In historical usage, a landmark marks a path or a boundary; as a metaphor in social and intellectual history, landmark signifies some act or event that marks a significant achievement or turning point in the progress or decline of human effort. In the history of an academic discipline, the historically established senses of landmark are mixed together, jostling to set out and protect the turfmarkers of academic specialization; aligning footnotes to signify the beacons that have guided thought and, against these "conservative" tendencies, attempting to contribute fresh insights that tempt others along new trails.
The editor has chosen essays for this collection that give some sense of the history of rhetorical criticism in this century, especially as it has been practiced in the discipline of speech communication. He also emphasizes materials that may illustrate where the discipline conceives itself to be going -- how it has marked its boundaries; how it has established beacons to invite safety or warn us from the rocks; and how it has sought to preserve a tradition by subjecting it to constant revision and struggle. In the hope of providing some coherence, the scope of this collection is limited to rhetorical criticism as it has been practiced and understood within the discipline of speech communication in North America in this century.

Contents:
Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Language, linguistics and literature 2. Structures of literature 3. Literature and history 4. Subjectivity, psychoanalysis and criticism 5. Reading, writing and reception 6. Feminism, literature and criticism 7. Cultural identity, literature, criticism. Bibliography. Index.

This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters, varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the contributors.
Researchers from six different countries contributed chapters to this book which is loosely organized around three main thrusts of Kintsch's work:
* text-based representations that explain how meaning in a text is constructed,
* situation models which represent what the text is about rather than what a text literally says, and
* the construction-integration model, Kintsch's most recent work in discourse comprehension.

"Metre, Rhythm, Free Verse" is designed to explain the most important component of verse--its sound. This book provides all of the tools necessary to understanding poetry and poetry criticism, while clarifying and making accessible a number of technical terms which could otherwise be both intimidating and confusing.
In a manner which is both unpretentious and enthusiastic, Philip Hosbaum defines the difference between metre and rhythm, and provides newer and more precise definitions for terms such as blank verse, sprung verse and free verse. From the bob-wheel stanza to the iambus, from the Spenserian sonnet to modern rap, this comprehensive yet succinct volume covers the many terms and ideas which are essential to a fuller appreciation of poetry. In addition to providing this indispensable foundation for further reading, "Metre, Rhythm, Free Verse" also introduces its readers to a selection of key poets from all ages. Awelcome remedy to the complexity of poetical terminology, this book proves an invaluable introduction and an essential guide.

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.

1. This book is the first to frame Tolstoy's life and work through a queer, psychoanalytical and historico-political lens 2. It uniquely blends literary theory, queer/gender studies, sexology and ethics 3. Using illustrations throughout, this book also draws on the work of Freud, Cervantes, Rousseau and Kant.

This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism; postcolonial criticism, and ecocriticism. This new edition features: * A brand new chapter on ecocriticism, including sections on deep ecology, eco-Marxism, ecofeminism (including radical, Marxist, and vegetarian ecofeminisms), and postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice * Considerable updates to the chapters on feminist theory, African American theory, postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ theories, including the terminology and theoretical concepts * An extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and a variety of literary texts * A list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts * An interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory * A list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works * Updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.

The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities to the patterns of thought which characterized the Victorian's views of race. Far from being marked by a separation from the racialized thinking of the past, "Colonial Desire" illustrates how we are operating "in complicity" with historical ways of viewing "the other," both sexually and racially.
"Colonial Desire" is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and "culture." Robert Young argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century. "Englishness," Young argues, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.