This book combines contemporary ethical theory, literary interpretation, and historical narrative to defend a view of the humanities as a source of moral guidance. Peter Levine argues that moral philosophers should interpret narratives and literary critics should adopt moral positions. His new analysis of Dante's story of Paolo and Francesca sheds new light on the moral advantages and pitfalls of narratives versus ethical theories and principles.

The angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures. This book uses the angel to explore the relations between modernist literature and early twentieth-century debates over the secular and/or religious character of the modern age.

The construction of a new Latin library between the end of the Republic and the Augustan Principate was anything but an inhibiting factor. The literary flourishing of the Flavian age shows that awareness of this canon rather stimulated creative tension. In the changing socio-cultural context, daring innovations transform the genres of poetry and prose. This volume, which collects papers by influential scholars of early Imperial literature, sheds light on the productive dynamics of the ancient genre system and can also offer insightful perspectives to a non-classicist readership.

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.

Interdisciplinary by design and intent, this volume brings together nine essays by scholars from Russia, Britain, and North America, that explore the historical context, and current relevance of the work of the Bakhtin Circle for social theory, philosophy, history and linguistics. The articles argue that exploring the background of Bakhtinian thought is a better way of appreciating their influence on how social and cultural phenomena are analyzed at the end of the 20th century.

Herbert Read and Selected Works includes four of Herbert Read's most seminal works; A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays, The English Vision: An Anthology, The Tenth Muse: Essays in Criticism and The Politics of the Unpolitical. This collection also includes the title Herbert Read: A Memorial Symposium - a collection of essays that illustrates the many different aspects and achievements of Read's career.

Contemporary African Literature in English explores the contours of representation in contemporary Anglophone African literature, drawing on a wide range of authors including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aminatta Forna, Brian Chikwava, Ngug? wa Thiong'o, Nuruddin Farah and Chris Abani.

Anyone wishing to write short stories and novels will learn from The Art of Creating Fiction how some eminent writers, such as William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, created their art. By giving the new writer an understanding of fiction as it has been produced by the great novelists, The Art of Creating Fiction serves a double purpose: it is an implicit manual on how to write fiction and at the same time a work that provokes, challenges and inspires the new writer to cultivate an ambition for greatness.

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.

This book discusses literature, theory and history in close relation. Its main focus is on comparative literature and history, culture, poetics, rhetoric, theatricality, genre and gender, and balances close reading with theory and historical context.

This collection of essays illustrates various pressures and concerns-both practical and theoretical-related to the study of print culture. Procedural difficulties range from doubts about the reliability of digitized resources to concerns with the limiting parameters of 'national' book history.

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature is a major new reference work that provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on early American literature. Comprised of twenty-seven chapters written by experts in their fields, this work presents an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a crucial area within literary studies.
Organized primarily in terms of genre, the chapters include original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades, such as histories, promotion literature, and scientific writing. New interpretations are offered on the works of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Alexander Hamilton while lesser known figures are also brought to light. Newly vital areas like print culture and natural history are given full treatment. As with other Oxford Handbooks, the contributors cover the field in a comprehensive yet accessible way that is suitable for those wishing to gain a good working knowledge of an area of study and where it's headed.

"Reading as Belief" advances the provocative idea that the disruptive techniques of recent innovative poetry require readers to become believers, occupying the same philosophical ground as the religious faithful. Pairing the poets Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews with John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and drawing on the work of diverse thinkers such as Wendy Brown, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, William James, and Gilles Deleuze, this book demonstrates how belief, faith and language-attuned critical inquiry share an epistemology, one concerned with making meaning in the absence of certainty. Bettridge argues that recognizing such common ground helps overcome the cultural and philosophical impasse following the collapse of modernity's central narratives about language and liberal subjectivity.

In Southern Hyperboles: Metafigurative Strategies of Narration, Micha? Choi?ski confronts the often paradoxical and excessive elements of southern literature, focusing on dominant narrative modes and representation strategies in works produced from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. With renewed attention to renderings of the gothic and grotesque, Choi?ski argues that modernist literature from the U.S. South often deploys the trope of hyperbole, which escalates contrasts and disrupts the sense of the normal. By focusing on how writers processed the South via narratives of hyperbolic excess, Southern Hyperboles explores a mode of comprehension forged from the tensions of a segregated, patriarchal society driven by racial and social decorum. Moving chronologically, Choi?ski traces distinct manifestations of hyperbolic metalogic in the works of seven authors: Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee. The mode of hyperbole identified by Choi?ski relies on a clash of opposites, along with the rapid intensification of disharmonious ideas pushed to extremes, leading to an ultimate break in established decorum. The shock produced by hyperbole generates a momentary state of confusion that soon dissipates, allowing recipients to reach a new understanding of their surrounding world. Melding an innovative use of rhetorical theory with fine-grained analysis of literary texts, Southern Hyperboles elucidates contradictory and interlocking issues related to memory, social trauma, grotesquerie, and troubled mythologies that permeate the U.S. South.

First published in 1980, The Anatomy of Literary Studies provides students of English Literature with a clearer understanding of the significance and scope of the subject and a comprehensive background to its study. It gives pointers towards intellectual integrity and advice on independent study, libraries, essay writing and examinations. This reissue of Marjorie Boulton's classic work will be of particular value to students studying English at university or those applying to a course who would like a fuller understanding of what it might entail.

In one consequential volume, "Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West" presents the cross-section of a fast-changing and greatly expanded field. Through interdisciplinary essays, this volume on the post-national West challenges the idea of a unified national story sustained by strategic exclusions. Contributors analyze the economic and environmental exploitation depicted in working-class Western literature, emphasize the transnational by approaching both the North/South and cross-Atlantic axes grapple with the role of Mormons, and dissect the new masculinity of "Silicon Gunslingers." Each essay successfully and compellingly models a new and fruitful way of engaging the West.

Nathaniel Wallace's Scanning the Hypnoglyph chronicles a contemporary genre that exploits sleep's evocative dimensions. While dreams, sleeping nudes, and other facets of the dormant state were popular with artists of the early twentieth century (and long before), sleep experiences have given rise to an even wider range of postmodern artwork. Scanning the Hypnoglyph first assesses the modernist framework wherein the sleeping subject typically enjoys firm psychic grounding. As postmodernism begins, subjective space is fragmented, the representation of sleep reflecting the trend. Among other topics, this book demonstrates how portrayals of dormant individuals can reveal imprints of the self. Gender issues are taken up as well. "Mainstream," heterosexual representations are considered along with depictions of gay, lesbian, and androgynous sleepers.

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.