People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind. And for this new edition, they supply an afterword both extending their arguments and offering a fascinating overview of the current state of thinking on the subject of the metaphor.

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.

In 1984 Fredric Jameson wrote that "everything in our social life-from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself-can be said to have become 'cultural' in some original and yet untheorized sense." The essays in this special issue track the status of this claim some thirty years later, inquiring into the relationship of art, aesthetics, and cultural production to political economy today. At a moment when interpretation (including "ideology critique" and "symptomatic reading") has been variously supplanted by descriptivism, empiricism, and the return of metaphysics, contributors here pursue the possibilities for an engaged cultural criticism that is attentive to form while rejecting a depoliticized formalism. Spanning a wide range of cultural sites-from recent Hollywood cinema to post-broadcast television, manufactured landscape photography, contemporary West African art, and "new materialism" in philosophy-they ask what the "formal tendencies" of contemporary cultural production (including theory itself) can tell us about the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. The collection includes a new interview with Jameson conducted by the editors. Contributors: Jennifer Bajorek, Nico Baumbach, Jonathan Beller, Alexander R. Galloway, Fredric Jameson, Sulgi Lie, Alberto Toscano, Amy Villarejo, Damon R. Young, Genevieve Yue

Metaphysics of Children's Literature is the first sustained study of ways in which children's literature confronts metaphysical questions about reality and the nature of what there is in the world. In its exploration of something and nothing, this book identifies a number of metaphysical structures in texts for young people-such as the ontological exchange or nowhere in extremis-demonstrating that their entanglement with the workings of reality is unique to the conditions of children's literature. Drawing on contemporary children's literature discourse and metaphysicians from Heidegger and Levinas, to Bachelard, Sartre and Haraway, Lisa Sainsbury reveals the metaphysical groundwork of children's literature. Authors and illustrators covered include: Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Mac Barnett, Ron Brooks, Peter Brown, Lewis Carroll, Eoin Colfer, Gary Crew, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Imme Dros, Sarah Ellis, Mem Fox, Zana Fraillon, Libby Gleeson, Kenneth Grahame, Armin Greder, Sonya Hartnett, Tana Hoban, Judy Horacek, Tove Jansson, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Elaine Konigsburg, Norman Lindsay, Geraldine McCaughrean, Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, Jill Paton Walsh, Philippa Pearce, Ivan Southall, William Steig, Shaun Tan, Tarjei Vesaas, David Wiesner, Margaret Wild, Jacqueline Woodson and many others.

Vacillating between the longue duree and microhistory, between ideological critique and historical sympathy, between the contrary formalisms of close and distant reading, literary historians operate with such disparate senses of what the term "history" means that the field risks compartmentalization and estrangement. The Romantic Historicism to Come engages this uncertainty in order to construct a more robust, more capacious idea of history. Focusing attention on Romantic conceptions of history's connection to the future, The Romantic Historicism to Come examines the complications of not only Romantic historicism, but also our own contemporary critical methods: what would it mean if the causal assumptions that underpin our historical judgments do not themselves develop in a stable, progressive manner? Articulating history's minimum conditions, Jonathan Crimmins develops a theoretical apparatus that accounts for the concurrent influence of the various sociohistorical forces that pressure each moment. He provides a conception of history as open to radical change without severing its connection to causality, better addressing the problem of the future at the heart of questions about the past.

Narrative theory goes back to Plato. It is an approach that tries to understand the abstract mechanism behind the story. This theory has evolved throughout the years and has been adopted by numerous domains and disciplines. Narrative therapy is one of many fields of narrative that emerged in the 1990s and has turned into a rich research field that feeds many disciplines today. Further study on the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of narrative therapy is vital to understand how it can be utilized to support society. Narrative Theory and Therapy in the Post-Truth Era focuses on the structure of the narrative and the possibilities it offers for therapy as well as the post-modern sources of spiritual conflict and how to benefit from the possibilities of the narrative while healing them. Covering topics such as psychotherapy, cognitive narratology, art therapy, and narrative structures, this reference work is ideal for therapists, psychologists, communications specialists, academicians, researchers, practitioners, scholars, instructors, and students.

Authorship's Wake examines the aftermath of the 1960s critique of the author, epitomized by Roland Barthes's essay, "The Death of the Author." This critique has given rise to a body of writing that confounds generic distinctions separating the literary and the theoretical. Its archive consists of texts by writers who either directly participated in this critique, as Barthes did, or whose intellectual formation took place in its immediate aftermath. These writers include some who are known primarily as theorists (Judith Butler), others known primarily as novelists (Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace), and yet others whose texts are difficult to categorize (the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner; the autotheory of Maggie Nelson). These writers share not only a central motivating question - how to move beyond the critique of the author-subject - but also a way of answering it: by writing texts that merge theoretical concerns with literary discourse. Authorship's Wake traces the responses their work offers in relation to four themes: communication, intention, agency, and labor.

In the second half of the last century, the teaching of English literature was very much influenced and, in some places, entirely dominated by the ideas of F. R. Leavis. What was it like to be taught by this iconic figure? How and why did one become a Leavisite? In this unique book, part memoir, part study of Leavis, David Ellis takes himself as representative of that pool of lower middle class grammar school pupils from which Leavisites were largely recruited, and explores the beliefs of both the Leavises, their lasting impact on him and why ultimately they were doomed to failure. At the heart of this book are questions about what English should and can be that are by no means finally settled.

Part literary history, part personal memoir, Alice Brittan's beautifully written The Art of Astonishment explores the rich intellectual, religious, and philosophical history of the gift and tells the interconnected story of grace: where it comes from and what it is believed to accomplish. Covering a remarkable range of materials-from The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the tragedies of Classical Greece, through the brothers Grimm and Montaigne, to C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jhumpa Lahiri-Brittan moves with ease from personal story to myth, to theology, to literature and analysis, examining the nature of social and communal obligation, the role of the intellectual in times of crisis, and the pleasures of reading. In the 21st century, we might imagine grace as a striking and refined quality that is pleasurable to encounter but certainly not fundamental to anyone's existence or to the beliefs and practices that hold us together or drive us apart. For millennia, though, it has been recognized as essential to the vitality of inner life, as well as to the large-scale shifts in perspective and legislation that improve the way we live as a society. Grace is also astonishing-always-as the enormously insightful readings in The Art of Astonishment show. Brittan reveals the concept's breadth as sacred and secular, ancient and recent, lived and literary. And in so doing, she shows us how the act of reading is like grace-social but personal, pleasurable and essential.

Francophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation were faced with an impossible dilemma. How could they redefine their culture, and the 'humanity' they felt had been denied by the colonial project, in terms that did not replicate the French thinking by which they were formed? Figures such as Senghor, Cesaire, Fanon, Amrouche, Feraoun and Kateb were all educated, indeed immersed, in French culture and language, yet they intervened forcefully in political debates surrounding decolonisation and sought to contribute to the reinvention of local cultures in a gesture of resistance to the ongoing French presence. Despite their pivotal role during this period of upheaval, then, their project was fraught with tensions that form the focus of this study. In particular, these writers reflected on the relation between universality and particularity in intellectual work, and struggled to avoid the traps associated with an over-investment in either domain. They also all learned from metropolitan French humanist thought but strove continually to reinvent that humanism so as to account for colonised experience and culture. Their work also readdresses the ongoing question of the relation between literature or culture and politics, and testifies to a moment of intense dialogue, and potential conflict, between contrasting but complementary spheres of activity.

Is poetry still relevant today, or is it merely a dwindling historical art? How have poets of the recent past dealt with challenges to poetics? Seeking to chart the poetic act in a period not so much hostile as indifferent to poetry, Language at the Boundaries outlines spaces where poetry and poetics emerge in migration, translation, world literature, canon formation, and the history of science and technology. One can only come so close to fully possessing or explaining everything about the poetic act, and this book grapples with these limits by perusing, analyzing, deconstructing, and reconstructing creativity, implementing different approaches in doing so. Peter Carravetta consolidates historical epistemological positions that have accrued over the last several decades, some spurred by the modernism/postmodernism debate, and unpacks their differences--juxtaposing Vico with Heidegger and applying the approaches of translation studies, decolonization, indigeneity, committed literature, and critical race theory, among others. What emerges is a defense and theory of poetics in the contemporary world, engaging the topic in a dialectic mode and seeking grounds of agreement.

A thought-provoking contribution to the renaissance of interest in Bergson, this study brings him to a new generation of readers. Ansell-Pearson contends that there is a Bergsonian revolution, an upheaval in philosophy comparable in significance to those that we are more familiar with, from Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, that make up our intellectual modernity. The focus of the text is on Bergson's conception of philosophy as the discipline that seeks to 'think beyond the human condition'. Not that we are caught up in an existential predicament when the appeal is made to think beyond the human condition; rather that restricting philosophy to the human condition fails to appreciate the extent to which we are not simply creatures of habit and automatism, but also organisms involved in a creative evolution of becoming. Ansell-Pearson introduces the work of Bergson and core aspects of his innovative modes of thinking; examines his interest in Epicureanism; explores his interest in the self and in time and memory; presents Bergson on ethics and on religion, and illuminates Bergson on the art of life.

Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people had to cope with isolation due to lockdown policies that forced them to engage in fewer social activities. People were confined to the small space of their dwellings and felt constrained and socially isolated and deprived of meaningful social interaction and affection, which caused stress and anxiety. Several initiatives were put in place to help diminish the effects of isolation, such as those involving literature either through writing or reading. Managing Pandemic Isolation With Literature as Therapy explains the positive medical and psychological effects of literature and writing during a pandemic at a time when isolation prevented people from engaging with others socially. Covering topics such as clinical psychology, brain neurology, and stress, this reference work is ideal for psychologists, medical professionals, policymakers, government officials, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Roland Barthes at the College de France studies the four lecture courses given by Barthes in Paris between 1977 and 1980. This study, the first full-length account of this material, places Barthes's teaching within institutional, intellectual and personal contexts. Analysing the texts and recordings of Comment vivre ensemble, Le Neutre and La Preparation du roman I et II in tandem with Barthes's 1970s output, the book brings together for the first time all the strands of Barthes's activity as writer, teacher and public intellectual. Theoretically wide-ranging in scope, Lucy O'Meara's study focuses particularly on Barthes's pedagogical style, addressing how his wilfully un-magisterial teaching links to the anti-systematic, anti-dogmatic goals of the rest of his work. Barthes's methodology sought to negotiate the balance between singularity and universality, and central to this endeavour are aesthetic thought and techniques of essayism and fragmentation. Barthes's strategies are here linked to broad intellectual influences, from the legacies of Montaigne, Kant, Schlegel and Adorno to the contemporary intellectual trends which Barthes sought to evade, and his attraction towards Eastern philosophies such as Zen and Tao. Barthes's lectures discuss ideal forms of community life, 'neutral' modes of discourse and behaviour, and the idea of writing a novel. His consideration of these fantasies involves a profound exploration of the nature of literary creation, social interaction, subjectivity, and the possibility of a universal particular. Roland Barthes at the College de France reassesses the critical and ethical priorities of Barthes's work in the decade before his death, demonstrating the vitally affirmative core of Barthes's late thought.

Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start indelibly marked by the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism. Chapters and sections address figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, Aime Cesaire, Rene Menil, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Conde, and Edouard Glissant, while an extensive theoretical introduction defines the essential parameters of 'Caribbean Critique.'

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.