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.

Major study in literary theory, criticism and psychology.

This set of 37 volumes is a revival of the original Critical Idiom series. First published between 1969 and 1979, the volumes in this series provide concise and accessible introductions to a range of critical terms which are key to the study of literature. This set will be a valuable resource for students working with complex literary terminology.

C. G. Jung understood the anima in a wide variety of ways but especially as a multifaceted archetype and as a field of energy. In Anima and Africa: Jungian Essays on Psyche, Land, and Literature, Matthew A. Fike uses these principles to analyze male characters in well-known British, American, and African fiction. Jung wrote frequently about the Kore (maiden, matron, crone) and the "stages of eroticism" (Eve, Mary, Helen, Sophia). The feminine principle's many aspects resonate throughout the study and are emphasized in the opening chapters on Ernest Hemingway, Henry Rider Haggard, and Olive Schreiner. The anima-as-field can be "tapped" just as the collective unconscious can be reached through nekyia or descent. These processes are discussed in the middle chapters on novels by Laurens van der Post, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. The final chapters emphasize the anima's role in political/colonial dysfunction in novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Chinua Achebe/Nadine Gordimer, and Aphra Behn. Anima and Africa applies Jung's African journeys to literary texts, explores his interest in Haggard, and provides fresh insights into van der Post's late novels. The study discovers Lessing's use of Jung's autobiography, deepens the scholarship on Coetzee's use of Faust, and explores the anima's relationship to the personal and collective shadow. It will be essential reading for academics and scholars of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies, and postcolonial studies, and will also appeal to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists in practice and in training.

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.

Edward Tomarken's previous book, Filmspeak, was a study of literary theory in relation to contemporary mainstream films. Some of the abstruse ideas of early literary theorists (1950-70) had in fact permeated our thinking to such an extent that both films and theories enriched and shed light upon one another. One early response to Filmspeak was the question 'Why theory?', a remark that provides the title of this new and exciting exploration of literature. In pursuit of an answer, Tomarken turns to the 'second generation' of critics (1970-2000), and analyses television programmes as well as films. He considers scholars such as Clifford Geertz and Martha Nussbaum who saw themselves as working in the field of cultural studies. Why theory? thus has a dual focus - on both culture and literary theory. The result of integrating cultural ideas with media interpretation sees Tomarken grapple with the question of the title: theory has become a part of our cultural life. -- .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study uncovers a vital thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far-reaching use of humor. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

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.

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.

Kan wat vandag deurgaan as "kabaret" die toets met die verlede deurstaan? In Koffer in Berlyn ontleed Aucamp die talle fasette van kabaret: die integrasie tussen beeld, musiek en woord – met 'n tema en struktuur waarin ironie sentraal staan. Lesings, resensies, koerant- en tydskrifartikels ander letterkundige bydraes, sowel as uittreksels van sommige van Aucamp se kabarette word hier meesterlik byeengebring.

Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography is an eclectic and comprehensive collection of essays, exploring contemporary issues and debates concerning women's auto-biographical representations from a range of disciplinary perspectives. With authoritative contributions from a number of prominent figures in the field of women's auto/biography, as well as innovative new voices, this volume offers a broad and contemporary lens on the issues and debates relevant to the act of representing women's lives. Drawing on a variety of theoretical frameworks and discussing theatre, literature, popular culture and women in history, these essays help to map out some of the new intellectual spaces inhabited by feminist scholarship in the 1990s.

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.

This collection offers a reinterpretation of the history of British criticism by exploring the work of neglected as well as celebrated critics. It contextualizes the current crisis and shows how traditional criticism anticipates and to some extent parallels the concerns of postmodern critical theory. The issue of value is also addressed as is the question of the future direction of criticism making this volume an important contribution to contemporary critical debate.

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.

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.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Philosophers and political theorists have engaged Lacan's concept of the 'Real' in particular, with Slavoj i ek and Alain Badiou deriving profound philosophical and political consequences from what is the most difficult of Lacan's ideas. This is the first book in English to explore in detail the genesis and consequences of Lacan's concept of the 'Real', providing readers with an invaluable key to one of the most influential ideas of modern times.