This book is a major new critical study of the greatest comic writer of ancient Greece. It relates Aristophanes' work to modern literature and modern theory. It offers a new theory of comedy. It will be essential reading for students and specialists of ancient Greek drama and poetry, and also many students and specialists of modern literature.

Through a professional story-teller's sometimes humorous commentary on culture and literature from The Odyssey on, Storytelling in the Digital Age suggests that literature is not an artifact to be studied but a living process. Often irreverent, crossing literary and scholarly lines, W.S. Penn aims to discover what literature does for an imaginatively engaged reader. Aimed to amuse, provoke, and propose ideas, this book makes bold new statements about what it means to be human through an interrogation of a variety of stories told and re-told over thousands of years.

For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.

'...a book which should be read by all students contemplating enrolment for a university course in modern English or European literary studies.' - Roy Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the specialist interpreter, from I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the vast industries which have grown up around `modernism' and `postmodernism'. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an exhilarating book.

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines. The author explores temporality's relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including: historiography psychology gender economics postmodernism postcolonialism Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.

The image of The Girl in contemporary fiction by women today stands in stark contrast to configurations of girlhood in earlier fiction. No longer banished to the realms of the Victorian "marriage or death" plots, girls in contemporary fiction embrace new challenges and freedoms while still struggling with plots centered on their bodies, societal limitations, and the price for freedom and escape. This unique collection tackles the contemporary forces at work on both the girls in fiction created by women and the writers themselves. The Girl investigates the legacies of expectation, competing cultural ideologies, and multiplicities of growing up female at the end of the 20th century as portrayed in contemporary fiction by women. The essayists show how new fictions of The Girl provide access to a constellation of themes and narrative patterns--including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, female subjectivity, and nationalism--in new ways, while also continuing to envision girlhood in relation to such themes as love, separation from the mother, and maternal loss or overprotection. The first collection of critical essays to examine the portrayal of girls in contemporary women’s fiction within the context of recent sociological and psychological analyses of girls, The Girl proposes that contemporary stories of girlhood constitute a new lens for literary and cultural study. Examining the work of authors such as Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Joyce Carol Oates for their revelations and representations in regard to girlhood, these essays speak to, complement, and contest one another in a compelling interrogation of what it means to grow up female at the end of the millennium.

Jane Gallop's book offers a clear-eyed and comprehensive history of feminist literary criticism. Why, she asks, have we so quickly buried 1970s feminist criticism? What lies buried there? Why do 1990s academic feminists accuse other academic feminists of being 'academic'? Gallop takes the novel approach of structuring her inquiry around anthologies of feminist criticism: twelve important texts that have had a wide impact on more than a decade of scholarship. In reading an anthology as a whole, she typically identifies a central, hegemonic voice (usually that of the editor/s) which would organise all the voices into a unity, and then explores the resistance within that volume to such a unity. Weight is placed behind these internal differences as a wedge against the centrist drive. Around 1981 addresses briefly 'french feminism' and psychoanalytic feminism before focusing on its principal subject: the mainstream of feminist literary criticism, before and after its general acceptance as part of the changing institution of literary studies. This brilliantly illuminates the dilemma of the feminist critic, divided by her allegiance to both feminism and literary studies.

These twenty autobiographical essays by eminent feminist literary critics explore the process by which women scholars became feminist scholars, articulating the connections between the personal and political in their lives and work. They describe the experiences that radicalised women within academia and without, as students, professors, scholars, political activists, women. From these diverse histories a collective history emerges of the development of feminism as an intellectual and social movement, as a heuristic tool, as the redefinition of knowledge and power. This book presents a history of the field through the eyes of those who have created it. Offering a spectrum of experiences and critical positions that engage with current debates in feminism, it will be valuable to teachers and students of feminist theory, women's studies, and the history of the women's movement. It will interest female writers and scholars in all disciplines and anyone who cares about feminism and its future.

Letters from Khartoum is a partial biography of Scottish educator, D.R. Ewen, who taught English Literature at the University of Khartoum from the time of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium through to Independence and the October 1964 Revolution. The administrative history of the then unified nation - North (Middle Eastern) and South (African) - makes the Sudan a unique setting to explore the workings of colonial education. The purpose of teaching English literature there was to remake the Muslim Sudanese of the North as the proxy agents of British culture who would administrate the first independent nation in Africa. But Ewen also was remade in the process - by his relationships with his students and colleagues, and by his own teaching innovations.

This book argues for the importance, and societal impact, of the study of the arts and humanities, and of literature in particular. The capacity of the arts and the humanities, and of literature in particular, to have a meaningful societal impact has been increasingly undervalued in recent history. Both humanists and scientists have tended to think of the arts as a means to represent the world via imagination. Mack maintains that the arts do not merely describe our world but that they also have the unique and under appreciated power to make us aware of how we can change accustomed forms of perception and action. Mack explores the works of prominent writers and thinkers, including Nietzsche, Foucault, Benjamin, Wilde, Roth, and Zizek, among others, to illustrate how literature interacts with both people and political as well as scientific issues of the real world. By virtue of its distance from the real world - its virtuality - the aesthetic has the capability to help us explore different and so far unthinkable forms of action and thereby to resist the repetition and perpetuation of harmful practices such as stereotyping, stigma, exclusion, and the exertion of violence.

Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focus on the spatial turn presenting a new approach to the traditional literary analyses of time and history.

Robert T. Tally Jr. explores differing aspects of the spatial in literary studies today, providing:

• An overview of the spatial turn across literary theory, from historicism and postmodernism to postcolonialism and globalization
• Introductions to the major theorists of spatiality, including Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Luk cs, and Fredric Jameson
• Analysis of critical perspectives on spatiality, such as the writer as map-maker, literature of the city and urban space, and the concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism.

This clear and engaging study presents readers with a thought provoking and illuminating guide to the literature and criticism of space .

Inventing Agency addresses some of the most central and pressing concerns in criticism, theory, and philosophy today. As new metaphysics of the realia of power and independently animated objects have replaced ancient conceptualizations of substance, being, and causation, the question of the "subject"-of the capability for just such conceptual change, for acting to any effect whatsoever-has reemerged with fresh critical urgency. Writing on theories and fictions of the subject from Aristotle to Althusser and Fielding to Flaubert, the contributors to Inventing Agency explore the unprecedented productions of the subject as agent-of cognition, aesthetic experience and judgment, imagination and representation, and moral and political action-that together define the "revolution" in reflection that Kant called "the Age of Critique." Informed by expertise in such interrelated fields as continental and analytic philosophy and literary history, Marxian and utopian theory, poetics and cultural criticism, moral theory and theory of sensibility, and feminist and disability studies, Inventing Agency addresses the invention of subjecthood by philosophical and literary conceptions of the specifically human capacities that continue to reveal the prospect of social-individual and historical-agency in action. This collection on the productions of the subject is vital reading for anyone engaged in thinking about where the categories of contemporary theory come from, and where they might lead next.

Herman Sinaiko is renowned for his gifts as a guide to exploring and appreciating the humanities. This book brings to general readers Sinaiko's thoughts on, and invitations to read or reread, a wide selection of major literary and philosophical works -- from ancient Greek to Chinese to modern. Taking a conversational approach, he deals with the perennial questions that thinking people have always raised and investigates how works of great art may provide answers to these questions.

Sinaiko reestablishes the notion that there is a canon of great works from the great traditions of the world and argues for the existence of permanent standards of excellence. He rejects most contemporary critical views of classical literature and philosophy, including those of "experts" who seek to monopolize access to great works, academics whose extreme emphasis on historical context disallows any current relevance, and theorists whose lenses distort with personal bias rather than sharpen focus on the works they discuss. Sinaiko reclaims the canon for all of us, opening up discussion on texts ranging from Plato to Tolstoy, Confucius to Mary Shelley, and encouraging each reader to listen and respond to the rich diversity of powerful views on the human condition that such great works offer.

"Sinaiko's essays are interesting, provocative, thick like a good pudding, and contain much original thought. Plato, Confucius, Yeats, Nietzsche, and others -- a gala and stimulating Humanities course." -- Bennett Simon, M.D., Harvard Medical School

"The more one knows and has studied a work that Sinaiko addresses, the more one appreciates the depth and significance of what he has to say." -- Bruce A. Kimball, University of Rochester

This book is an account of the history and continuation of plague as a potent metaphor since the disease ceased to be an epidemic threat in Western Europe, engaging with twentieth-century critiques of fascism, anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Oedipal legacy of psychoanalysis and its reception, and film spectatorship and the zombie genre.

Rebirth of Rhetoric brings together contributions from several fields to provide a forum in which a unifying theory for language and literature studies can be debated.The book does not aim to resurrect classical Renaissance rhetoric, but to remake it within a contemporary context. The context of texts (both spoken and written) is one of the main emphases of this collection, whether it is the ideology informing the text, or the way in which a text is transformed by its audience. The book also aims to present a range of practical approaches to the study of texts of all kinds: literary; televisual; film and photography. It also argues the case for developments in the Arts and Humanities which will bring together people working in Education, Linguistics, Composition, Literature and Cultural Studies.

This volume begins with a new essay by Julia Kristeva, 'The Adolescent Novel', in which she examines the relation between novelistic writing and the experience of adolescence as an 'open structure'. It is this blend of the literary with the psychoanalytic that places Kristeva's work central to current thinking, from semiotics and critical theory to feminism and psychoanalysis. The essays in this volume offer insight into the workings of Kristeva's thought, ranging from her analyses of sexual difference, female temporality and the perceptions of the body to the mental states of abjection and melancholia, and their representation in painting and literature. Kristeva's persistent humanity, her profound understanding of the dynamics of intention and creativity, mark her out as one of the leading theoreticians of desire. Each essay offers the reader a new insight into the many aspects that make up Kristeva's entire oeuvre.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource and textbook for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The volume traces the emergence and development of Queer Studies, presenting reproductions of the key critical essays crucial for any study, alongside more recent essays, exploring exciting new directions. Each section is individually edited and introduced by a prominent scholar, contextualizing the work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical boundaries. Section subject areas include 'Genealogies', 'Sex', 'Temporalities', 'Kinship', 'Affect', 'Bodies and Borders'. The book is edited by two of the leading scholars in the field and features valuable pedagogical tools, including discussion questions, an annotated bibliography and a glossary. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.

Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon intimately examines Caribbean writers who engage canonical Western texts and forms, while using humor to challenge Western representations of people of African descent.

This is a major new collection of essays on literary and cultural representations of migration and terrorism, the cultural impact of 9/11, and the subsequent 'war on terror'. The collection commences with analyses of the relationship between migration and terrorism, which has been the focus of much mainstream political and media debate since the attacks on America in 2001 and the London bombings in 2005, not least because liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have invoked such attacks to justify the regulation of migration and the criminalisation of 'minority' groups. Responding to the consequent erosion of the liberal democratic rights of the individual, leading scholars assess the various ways in which literary texts support and/or interrogate the conflation of narratives of transnational migration and perceived terrorist threats to national security. This crucial debate is furthered by contrasting analyses of the manner in which novelists from the UK, North Africa, the US and Palestine have represented 9/11, exploring the event's contexts and ramifications. This path-breaking study complicates the simplistic narratives of revenge and wronged innocence commonly used to make sense of the attacks and to justify the US response. Each novel discussed seeks to interrogate and analyse a discourse typically dominated by consent, belligerence and paranoia. Together, the collected essays suggest the value of literature as an effective critical intervention in the very fraught political aftermath of the 'war on terror'. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Contemporary Literature is among the most popular areas of literary study but it can be a difficult one to define. This book equips readers with the necessary tools to take an analytical and systematic approach to contemporary texts. The author provides answers to some of the critical questions in the field:

• What makes a literary text contemporary?
• Is it possible to have a canon of contemporary literature?
• How does a reader 's location affect their understanding?
• How do print, electronic, and audio-visual media impact upon contemporary literature?
• Which key concepts and themes are most prevalent?

Containing diverse illustrative examples and discussing the topics which define our current sense of the contemporary, this is an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to engage critically with contemporary literature anywhere.

Tang and Wijaya present a range of new and established scholarly voices, including local activists directly involved in developments in Southeast Asia. This groundbreaking collection presents the current state of play and longstanding LGBTQ+ debates in this often-overlooked region of Asia. The diversity of both the subject and the region is reflected in the broad scope of topics addressed, from the impact of Japanese queer popular culture on queer Filipinos, to the politics of public toilets in Singapore, and the impact of digital governance on queer communities across ASEAN. Taken in combination, these investigations not only highlight the operations of queer politics in Southeast Asia, but also present a concrete basis to reflect on queer knowledge production in the region. A vital resource for students and scholars of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia, or any Queer or LGBTQ+ studies looking beyond the West.

'What, in theory, is style? How has style been rethought in literary theory?' Drawing together leading academics working within and across the disciplines of English, philosophy, literary theory, and comparative literature, Style in Theory: Between Philosophy and Literature sets out to rethink the important but all-too-often-overlooked issue of style, exploring in particular how the theoretical humanities open conceptual spaces that afford and encourage reflection on the nature of style, the ways in which style is experienced and how style allows disciplinary boundaries to be both drawn and transgressed. Offering incisive reflections on style from a diverse and contemporary range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the essays contained in this volume critically revisit and challenge accepted accounts of style, and provide fresh and compelling readings of the relevance in any rethinking of style of specific works by the likes of Shakespeare, Petrarch, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, Cixous and Meillassoux.

Winner of the 2016 ESSE Junior Scholar Book Award in Literatures in the English Language The Literature of Reconstruction argues for the term and concept of 'postmillennial reconstruction' to fill the gap left by the decline of postmodernism and deconstruction as useful cultural and literary categories. Wolfgang Funk shows how this notion emerges from the theoretical and philosophical development that led to the demise of postmodernism by relating it to the idea of 'authenticity': immediate experience that eludes direct representation. In addition, he provides a clear formal framework with which to identify and classify the features of 'reconstructive literature' by updating the narratological category of 'metafiction', originally established in the 1980s. Based on Werner Wolf's observation of a 'metareferential turn' in contemporary arts and media, he illustrates how the specific use of metareference results in a renegotiation of the specific patterns of literary communication and claims that this renegotiation can be profitably described with the concept of 'reconstruction'. To substantiate this claim, in the second half of the book Funk discusses narrative texts that illustrate this transition from postmodern deconstruction to postmillennial reconstruction. The analyses take in distinguished and prize-winning writers such as Dave Eggers, Julian Barnes, Jennifer Egan and Jasper Fforde. The broad scope of authors, featuring writers from the US as well as the UK, underlines the fact that the reconstructive tendencies and strategies Funk diagnoses are of universal significance for the intellectual and cultural self-image of the global North.