Ousselin sets out to show that Europe is essentially a literary fiction and that the ongoing movement towards European unity cannot be understood without reference to the literary works that helped bring it about.

Drawing on Louis Althusser's concept of internal distantiation, " Reconstituting Americans" reads post-1960s U.S. literature to reveal the representational paradoxes of liberal multicultural subjecthood. This engaging study uses historicist and formalist methodologies within Marxist, psychoanalytic, and critical race frameworks to discuss the formal techniques in the work of Arturo Islas, Bharati Mukherjee, Jamaica Kincaid, Reginald McKnight, and Audre Lorde. Megan Obourn deftly looks at the historical and social realities of social identities, while simultaneously bringing to the fore the limitations of liberal multicultural ways of conceptualizing identity and difference.

Marxism initiated a new era not only for people to fight for socialist future, but also for each discipline of sciences to witness profound changes. In such a context, literature, which has always been closely related to politics, will inevitably move toward a new direction. This book is composed of two parts. Part One studies the development of literary theories in contemporary China from a Marxist perspective. It introduces the basic ideas of Marxist literary theories as well as their spread and development in China, such as the combination of the theories and Chinese revolutionary literature. Moreover, it discusses the challenges facing Marxist literary theories in the 21st century under the background of diversification of literature and art, in terms of theory and practice, and high technologies which brought about electronic writing and digital communication of literary works. The second part elucidates the author's insights into major issues concerning literary theories (e.g. the relationship between literature and people, literature and reality, perception and rationality in literary creation, etc.) This book will appeal to scholars and students of literary aesthetics and Chinese literary and cultural studies. People who are interested in history of contemporary Chinese literature will also benefit from this book.

This book charts the history of the concept of nihilism in some of the most important philosophers and literary theorists of the modern and postmodern periods, including Wyndham Lewis, Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, and Vattimo. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these thinkers produces a theory of the literary as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism, Weller offers the first in-depth analysis of nihilism's key role in the thinking of the aesthetic since Nietzsche.

"Queer Narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora: Exploring Tactics" combines the fields of queer and diasporic writing. It opens up an entire new domain where social and cultural meanings of sexuality within Caribbean space become objects of historical, colonial and literary investigations. By juxtaposing queerness, nation and belonging, this book unlocks both disciplines, making them permeable to other contexts and perspectives. Exploring the works of writers such as Shani Mootoo, Jamaica Kincaid and Lawrence Scott, this book investigates the Western notions of sexual identity and belongingness alongside postcolonial deployments of nation, diaspora and sexuality. The book adds to the abundant fields of queer and diaspora studies by intersecting them, in order not only to render their ability to work together but also to expose their weaknesses and highly contested underpinnings.

Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic "disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.

This ground-breaking study argues that literature and criminology share a common concern to understand modernity and that this project is often focused upon gender-specific criminality. Central to this concern is duplicity masquerade and performance. These subjects are explored for the first time in relation to criminality with reference to a range of literary and popular texts, from Dickens and Poe through to Toni Morrison and Easton Ellis, in which the traditional boundaries between different genders and sexualities are made more fluid and complex than in traditional criminal narratives.

Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life, essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as narrative, and applies theoretical frameworks in eco-phenomenology and ecosemiotics to literary, historical, and philosophical study of the relationship between text and landscape. It considers in particular examples and lessons to be drawn from case studies of medieval and Native American cultures, to illustrate in an applied way the promise of environmental humanities today. In doing so, it highlights an environmental future for the humanities, on the cutting edge of cultural endeavor today.

Major study in literary theory, criticism and psychology.

The polysemous German word Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new? Drawing on Barbara Cassin's transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of "philosophizing in languages," scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete "category problems" in literature, philosophy, media, cinema, politics, painting, theatre, and the performing arts with a range of indispensable excerpts from canonical texts -- by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Apter, Cassin, Cavell, Derrida, Irigaray, Malabou, and Nancy, among others -- the volume presents "the Geschlecht complex" as a condition to become aware of, and in turn, to companionably underwrite any interpretive endeavor. Historically grounded, yet attuned to the particularities of the present, the Geschlecht complex becomes an invaluable mode for thinking and theorizing while ensconced in the urgent immediacy of pressing concerns, and poised for the inevitable complexities of categorial naming and genre discernment that await in the so often inscrutable, translation-resistant twenty-first century.

They were homeless wanderers, prostitutes, orphans, and factory girls. They hurdled terrible obstacles, reinvented themselves as men, goddesses, witches, and princesses to become legends in their own right as England rose to world power. No other group of people rivaled their inventiveness or their grip on the nation's imagination. Debbie Lee unfolds the small stories of six women, with a cast of supporting characters such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, Stamford Raffles, and Napoleon, against the grand narrative of England's eighteenth-century empire building. "Romantic Liars: Obscure Women who Became Impostors and Challenged an Empire" is a meticulously researched, spellbinding tale of tragedy, transformation and triumph in the age of reason.

First published in 1962 and 1963, these two volumes bridge the gap between the study of classics and the study of literature and attempt to reconcile the two disciplines. The collection of essays offers a critical examination of Latin literature and aims to stimulate critical discussion of a selection of Latin poets. This experimental and ground-breaking set will be of particular interest to students of Roman Literature, Classics and Poetry.

Ensayos (en inglâes) sobre importantes figuras literarias del siglo XX - Nancy Morejâon, Alejo Carpentier, Virgilio Piänera, Dulce Marâia Loynaz, Josâe Lezama Lima, y Severo Sarduy - y la creaciâon imaginativa de Cuba y su historia a travâes de sus textos. Los capâitulos finales contienen un apretada sâintesis histâorica que ayudan al lector no familiarizado con el paâis a situar a estos escritores y su obra dentro de su contexto"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Necromanticism is a study of literary pilgrimage: readers' compulsion to visit literary homes, landscapes, and (especially) graves during the long Romantic period. The book draws on the histories of tourism and literary genres to highlight Romanticism's recourse to the dead in its reading, writing, and canon-making practices.

If there is any English critic worth reading on Modernism it is Ford Madox Ford, whose Critical Essays remind us that he was one of the first to admire Joyce's Ulysses and one of the bravest to argue with E.M. Forster. --The Times (London) This collection contains more unexpected fun, more delighted, chatty wisdom, than any other book of criticism you could think of. --The Guardian In Critical Essays, a new selection of Ford's previously uncollected writings on literature and art, there are sweeping dicta aplenty. --The American Scholar Critical Essays showcases a critic whom Ezra Pound called in 1914, the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance. This volume provides access to the best of Ford Madox Ford's essays. The essays are arranged chronologically and span nearly forty years--covering most of Ford's writing life. Saunders and Stang have included essays, literary portraits, and book reviews that Ford published in the English Review, The Tribune, The Bystander, The Outlook, Piccadilly Review, the Transatlantic Review, and the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, among other places.

This work examines both the emergence of African literature and its institutionalization within nationalist African academies. Amoko analyzes the relationship between such institutions of literature and the processes of nationalist legitimization and between colonial and postcolonial school cultures and national cultures.

This is an original volume of critical and theoretical essays that seek to interpret the current philosophical, aesthetic, and literary thinking about African American literature and language. Some of the most significant writers and thinkers in the field have contributed to analyses, critiques, and theoretical developments in every genre of literature. The widespread debate over the canon in American literature, the issue of cultural diversity, and the need to have books with critical inquiry into African American culture make this collection suitable for scholars and students in such diverse fields as literature, linguistics, and African American Studies.

New historicism and cultural materialism emerged in the early 1980s as prominent literary theories and came to represent a revival of interest in history and in historicising literature. Their proponents rejected both formalist criticism and earlier attempts to read literature in its historical context and defined new ways of thinking about literature in relation to history. This study explains the development of these theories and demonstrates both their uses and weaknesses as critical practices. The potential future direction for the theories is explored and the controversial debates about their validity in literary studies are discussed.

Application is the process in which readers of literature focus on elements in a text and compare them with the outside world as they know it - an operation with cognitive and emotional consequences. This book demonstrates how and why this simple yet neglected mechanism is of profound importance for the understanding of literary art and experience.

Using three literary analyses to show what happens once we leave behind the theoretical poverty of celebratory readings of contemporary migration and hybridity literature, this book offers a way out of the theoretical deadlock of putting hybridity against purity or flux against fixity.

This text explores through theory and in-depth textual criticism how novelists from formerly colonized societies have exploited indigenous codes and conventions of aesthetic representation to transform the novel into an effective medium for cultural and political resistance to (neo)colonialism. Concentrating on novels written between the late 1940s and early 1990s in Africa, Polynesia, and the West Indies, it offers a fresh mode of postcolonial critique which takes account of the ideological impulses behind the novelists' interpretation of the colonial experience.

This set reissues 27 books on literary theory originally published between 1965 and 1992. Top academics in the field examine different aspects of literary theory, including structuralism, post-structuralism, stylistics and semiotics, and approach these theories in a variety of ways. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature and literary theory.

What makes one reader look for issues of social conformity in Kafka's "Metamorphosis" while another concentrates on the relationship between Gregor Samsa and his father?

"Self-Analysis in Literary Study" investigates how the psychoanalytic self-analysis enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of literature as well as themselves.

In the past scholars have largely ignored self-analysis as an aid to approaching literature. The contributors in "Self-Analysis in Literary Study" boldly explore how the psyche affects intellectual intellectual discovery in the realm of applied psychoanalysis.

Jeffrey Berman confronts a close friend's suicide through Camus and his student's diaries, kept for an English class. Language, family history, and an attachment to Kafka are addressed in David Bleich's essay. Barbara Ann Schapiro writes of her attraction to Virginia Woolf during her emotional senior year of college. Other essayists include Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Norman N. Holland, Bernard J. Paris, Steven Rosen, and Michael Steig.

Written for both scholars in the fields of psychology and literature and for a general audience intrigued by self- analysis as a tool for gaining insight, "Self-Analysis in Literary Study" answers traditional questions about literature and raises challenging new ones.

Abjection and Representation is a theoretical investigation of the concept of abjection as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980) and its application in various fields including the visual arts, film and literature. It examines the complexity of the concept and its significance as a cultural category.

With the canon debate, prominent in literary criticism since the early 1970s, as the sounding board, the study aims at investigating and discussing in critical perspective the function of considerations to do with canon for literary criticism at the formation stage. It focuses on the interaction between a critic's canonical preferences ('versions of the past') and his desire for improved cultural and/or aesthetic conditions ('visions of the future') in the criticism of Eliot, Leavis, Frye and Bloom.