This book attempts to reinstate the importance of authorial intention by examining arguments against it from a variety of sources - American New Criticism, European Structuralism and various kinds of postmodernist theory. It enlists the aid of Kantian aesthetics and contemporary philosophy of language and action, as well as studying the play on intention in the manipulation of character and action in the work of Shakespeare and other English writers from 1600 to the present day.

First published in 1985, The Subject of Tragedy takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism - self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action - is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.

'Since at Least Plato...' and Other Postmodernist Myths surveys the fields of theories of postmodernism and criticizes some of the most common claims found in them about philosophy, science, and the relationship and literary techniques to metaphysics, epistemology, and political ideologies. Devaney finds the accounts offered by these theories of concepts ranging from the law of noncontradiction to relativity and the Uncertainty Principle to be as ill-informed as they are pervasive. Devaney shows how the use to which these accounts have been put in constructing the story of the progression from realism to postmodernism to modernism flattens out both the history of ideas and the history of literature.

This book traces shifting attitudes towards science and technology, nature and the environment in twentieth-century Germany. It approaches them through discussion of a range of literary texts largely new to English readers, in which practical environmental problems and underlying issues of ecological ethics are brought to life in (often semi-autobiographical) narratives. It explores the philosophical influences on them and their political contexts, and asks what part novels and plays, poems and essays have played in environmental debate. Technological disasters, living in the landscape, hunting and allotment gardens are among the topics discussed.

Poetry is composed of sensation: this Deleuze-Guattarian assertion is central to a Deleuzian poetics that provides a fruitful approach to the difficulties of innovative literature and poetry in particular. This book is a clear exposition of a Deleuzian approach to literature that treats the literary text, particularly the poem, as something that exists in its own right. As such poetry is presented as something that must be encountered, actualised and embodied by readers on its own terms, rather than providing access to something else that it represents. Far from being a hermetic, ivory tower encounter, the Deleuzian poetics of experimental reading reveals sensational significances that are not only philosophical and social but political. What's more, through a close examination of a range of contemporary innovative poems, Jon Clay suggests that a Deleuzian way of reading offers a firm purchase on notoriously difficult texts, providing concepts and a language that aids their understanding.

Starting from a comprehensive examination of current post-structuralist and socio-semiotic theories of narrative, this book formulates an interactive model of literary interpretation and pedagogy emphasizing process, critical self-awareness and strategies of re-reading/re-writing. A literary pedagogy premised on the concept of "rewriting", the author argues, will enable readers to experience the process of narrative and critical construction creatively.;The earlier chapters explore the implications of recent theories (reader-oriented, deconstructive, feminist and socio-semiotic) that bank on an interactive, recreative paradigm of criticism. The latter part of the book argues the advantages of a literary pedagogy that encourages critical reformulation and a focus on the reader's own articulatory strategies, thereby bridging critical theory and practice, production and reception of texts. This theoretical and methodological argument is organized around a cluster of post-structuralist readings of Henry James and two experimental seminars that have all foregrounded, though from different angles, the essential affinity between James' narrative and critical practice, and a literary pedag

This comprehensive account demonstrates how Hartman's commitment to the potency of aesthetic mediation informs a similar position in current debates about ethics, media, and memory. "Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust" offers the first comprehensive critical account of the work of the American literary critic Geoffrey Hartman. The book aims to achieve two things: first, it charts the whole trajectory of Hartman's career (now more than half a century long) while playing close attention to the place of his career in broader cultural and intellectual contexts; second, it engages with contemporary discussions about ecology, ethics, trauma, the media, and community in order to argue that Hartman's work presents a surprisingly consistent and original position in current debates in literary and cultural studies. Vermeulen identifies a persistent belief in the potency of aesthetic mediation at the heart of Hartman's project, and shows how his work repeatedly reasserts that belief in the face of institutional, cultural and intellectual factors that seem to deny the singular importance of literature. The book allows Hartman to emerge as a major literary thinker whose relevance extends far beyond the domains of Romanticism, of literary theory, and of trauma studies.

This varied set presents a rich selection of renowned and lesser-known treatments of the Russian masters - considered by some the greatest novelists of all time - from the 1920s through to the '90s. Routledge Library Editions: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky includes works of accessible biography, lucid literary criticism and insightful scholarship, investigating a wide range of themes: Tolstoy's aesthetic philosophy, Dostoevsky' curiously under-studied social and political views, Feminism, Nietzsche, and much else.

The classic realist text has long been derided by post-structuralist critics as an unsophisticated and reactionary form. In this study, first published in 1992, John Rignall makes a powerful case for the rehabilitation of realism as a self-aware and reflexive genre. Using the novels of Scott, Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert, James, Ford and Conrad, Rignall argues for an understanding of realism through the recurrent figure of the flaneur. The flaneur is the strolling spectator whose problematic vision both of and in the novel makes him the representative figure of the realist text. A significant contribution to the field, this title will be of particular view to students of realism, literary theory, and comparative literature.

This volume explores the relationship between the poetry of the mainstream and kinds of modernist poetry that have had to make their way outside it. Mainstream poets like Paul Muldoon, James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy multiply voices and so draw on resources from the novel - Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic is therefore used to explain their techniques. By contrast, Shklovsky's concept of "estrangement" is shown to be more useful in accounting for the radical experimentation of poets like Edwin Morgan, Christopher Middleton and Denise Riley. However, the book concludes by suggesting that - partly because of the influence of surrealism in women poets like Selima Hill and Jo Shapcott - the mainstream has recently been infiltrated by modernist and postmodernist estrangement effects.

This fascinating interdisciplinary study presents a critique of social constructionist identity politics, which is distinguished from specific identity-based political positions, from within and with social constructionist commitments. The first half of the book focuses on the conceptual aspect of such politics with regard to the humanities generally. In particular, the logic of embodiment, the nuances of institutionalization, and recent developments in this area are discussed. Gupta also examines the institutionalization of social constructionist identity politics in literary studies, considering the role of self-announcements in critical writing, theory textbooks, and notions of canonicity.

How does literature evoke reality? This book takes cues from the history of scientific observation to provide a new approach to this longstanding question of literary studies. It reconstructs a narrative technique of 'literary' observation in which reality appears by mimicking processes of visual perception, and it traces the functioning of this technique through a wide range of European fiction from the early 18th to the late 19th centuries.

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, including provocative speculation about how Proust might have responded to Deleuze and Beckett.

"Other Renaissances" is a collection of twelve essays discussing renaissances beyond the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian and then pan-European Renaissance. With a prologue by Giuseppe Mazzotta about the Italian Renaissance as a "world-making" epistemology, and an afterward by Sander Gilman to summarize the cogent points of the essays, the collection proposes an approach to reframing the Renaissance in which the European Renaissance becomes an imaginative idea, rather than a particular moment in time. Essays cover the Chinese, Harlem, Bengali, Tamil, Maori, Irish, Mexican, Arab, Hebrew, and Cold War Renaissance of the US in the 1950s.

This Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive guide yet both to the nature and content of literature, and to literary criticism. In ninety essays by leading international critics and scholars, the volume covers both traditional topics such as literature and history, poetry, drama and the novel, and also newer topics such as the production and reception of literature. Current critical ideas are clearly and provocatively discussed, while the volume's arrangement reflects in a dynamic way the rich diversity of contemporary thinking about literature. Each essay seeks to provide the reader with a clear sense of the full significance of its subject as well as guidance on further reading. An essential work of reference, The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism is a stimulating guide to the central preoccupations of contemporary critical thinking about literature. Special Features * Clearly written by scholars and critics of international standing for readers at all levels in many disciplines * In-depth essays covering all aspects, traditional and new, of literary studies past and present * Useful cross-references within the text, with full bibliographical references and suggestions for further reading * Single index of authors, terms, topics

Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an "ethics of the event." His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself--locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.

First published in 1977, this book was the first to map extensively the ideological typography of the Anglo-American tradition of literary theory. It interrogates, comprehensively and in detail, the assumptions and categorical development within critical ideas from I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot, through John Crowe Ransom and the New Criticism, to Northrop Frye and Marshall NcLuhan. This analysis reveals the Anglo-American tradition of literary-cultural theory is most properly intelligible within the overall field of social consciousness as an ideology of progressive cultural rationalization. Against a background of ideological development since nineteenth-century Romanticism, John Fekete illuminates the boundaries of literary ideology in relation to the shapes and changes of modern culture and society.

Tess O'Toole uncovers Hardy's career-long fascination with the points of intersection between genealogy and fiction and argues that this relationship fuels much of his writing. Hereditary patterns are the product of narrative compulsion; the circulation of the family story is necessary to reproduce the history it records. As well as analyzing Hardy's characteristic treatment of family history, this volume revises existing accounts of genealogical narrative, and in its conclusion considers the presence in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels of motifs foregrounded in Hardy's work.

First published in 1982, Images of Crisis explores the premise that literature and art exploit various images to present culturally prevalent ideas, and thus create their own form of iconology. George Landow shows how the tumultuous history of the past two hundred years has resulted in a plethora of metaphors associated with moments of human crisis. Avalanches and volcanoes emerge as focal images in an aesthetic that concerns itself increasingly with the vulnerability of humanity. However, it is in the transformation of traditional religious images that the ideas of the vacant universe are most dramatically presented. Associated with this central idea are ironic transformations of other images that formerly had been associated with Christianity as paradigms of belief: the journey of Odysseus, the rainbow of the Covenant and Robinson Crusoe. Combining close textual analysis with a theory of literary iconology, this fascinating reissue will be of particular value to students with an interest in literary images, and literary and cultural history.

Writing the Lives of Writers ponders that strange ventriloquized dialogue between biographers and their subjects, a dialogue all the stranger when the subject is a writer. It contains 22 essays by internationally distinguished scholars and biographers including Martin C. Battestin, Isobel Grundy, John Haffenden, Hermione Lee, Lawrence Lipking, Ray Monk, Hazel Rowley, Max Saunders, Martin Stannard and John Worthen. They tackle the lives of Chaucer, Tyndale, More, Fielding and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Wordsworth, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Yeats, Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, F.R. Leavis, Richard Wright and Brian Penton.

This volume makes a significant contribution to both the study of Derrida and of modernist studies. The contributors argue, first, that deconstruction is not "modern"; neither is it "postmodern" nor simply "modernist." They also posit that deconstruction is intimately connected with literature, not because deconstruction would be a literary way of doing philosophy, but because literature stands out as a "modern" notion. The contributors investigate the nature and depth of Derrida's affinities with writers such as Joyce, Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, and Walter Benjamin, among others. With its strong connection between philosophy and literary modernism, this highly original volume advances modernist literary study and the relationship of literature and philosophy.

This volume suggests that reading and writing about literature are ways to gain an ethical understanding of how we live in the world. Postmodern narrative is an important way to reveal and discuss who are society's victims, inviting the reader to become one with them. A close reading of fiction by Toni Morrison, Patrick Suskind, D.M. Thomas, Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee reveals a violence imposed on gender, race and the body-politic. Such violence is not new to the postmodern world, but reflects Western culture's religious traditions, as this book demonstrates through a reading of stories from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.

This topical study examines the 'novelizations' of radical literary theory in the work of A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, Richard Powers and many other leading novelists. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the 'post-theoretical novel', and traces an alternative history of the 'theory revolution' in recent literary fiction.