Practising Theory and Reading Literature provides an accessible introduction to the study of contemporary literary theories and their applications to a range of literary texts. This is an elementary introduction where the emphasis is on practice, and in this respect it complements A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory.

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.

If there is any English critic worth reading on Modernism it is Ford Madox Ford, whose Critical Essays remind us that he was one of the first to admire Joyce's Ulysses and one of the bravest to argue with E.M. Forster. --The Times (London) This collection contains more unexpected fun, more delighted, chatty wisdom, than any other book of criticism you could think of. --The Guardian In Critical Essays, a new selection of Ford's previously uncollected writings on literature and art, there are sweeping dicta aplenty. --The American Scholar Critical Essays showcases a critic whom Ezra Pound called in 1914, the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance. This volume provides access to the best of Ford Madox Ford's essays. The essays are arranged chronologically and span nearly forty years--covering most of Ford's writing life. Saunders and Stang have included essays, literary portraits, and book reviews that Ford published in the English Review, The Tribune, The Bystander, The Outlook, Piccadilly Review, the Transatlantic Review, and the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, among other places.

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.

This set reissues 27 books on literary theory originally published between 1965 and 1992. Top academics in the field examine different aspects of literary theory, including structuralism, post-structuralism, stylistics and semiotics, and approach these theories in a variety of ways. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature and literary theory.

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.

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.

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.

The Greek View of Poetry details critical theories and the appreciation of poetry by the ancient Greeks. Originally published in 1931, this text deals with a whole range of Greek critics from very early criticism to Longinus and his views on Homer in an attempt to provide a historical view of the importance of poetry to Greek society. This title will be of interest to students of Classics.

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.

Literary theory has been dominated by a mind/body dualism that often eschews the role of the body in reading. Focusing on reading as a physical practice, McLaughlin analyzes the role of the eyes, the hands, postures and gestures, bodily habits and other physical spaces, with discussions ranging from James Joyce to the digital future of reading.

This book provides a systematic framework for the emerging field of Mediterranean studies, collecting essays from scholars of history, literature, religion, and art history that seek a more fluid understanding of "Mediterranean." It emphasizes the interdependence of Mediterranean regions and the rich interaction (both peaceful and bellicose, at sea and on land) between them. It avoids applying the national, cultural and ethnic categories that developed with the post-Enlightenment domination of northwestern Europe over the academy, working instead towards a dynamic and thoroughly interdisciplinary picture of the Mediterranean. Including an extensive bibliography and a conversation between leading scholars in the field, Can We Talk Mediterranean? lays the groundwork for a new critical and conceptual approach to the region.

This handbook in English provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate 34 central terms. The articles present original research contributions and are all structured in a similar manner. Each contains a concise definition and a detailed explanation of the term in question. In a main section they present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research; they conclude with selected bibliographical references.

Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction provides an accessible overview of major figures and movements in literary theory and criticism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. It is designed for students at the undergraduate level or for others needing a broad synthesis of the long history of literary theory. An introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the major issues within literary theory and criticism; further chapters survey theory and criticism in antiquity, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century. For twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory, the discussion is subdivided into separate chapters on formalist, historicist, political, and psychoanalytic approaches.The final chapter applies a variety of theoretical concepts and approaches to two famous works of literature: William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The new edition has been updated throughout, including expanded coverage of Marxist theory, Disability Studies, and Critical Race Theory.

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.

By examining these competing depictions of combat that coexist in sixteenth-century texts ranging from Arthurian romance to early modern medical texts, this study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.

Roland Barthes was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, but why should the reader of today, or tomorrow, be concerned with him? Martin McQuillan provides a fresh perspective on Barthes, addressing his political and institutional inheritance and considering his work as the origins of a critical cultural studies.
This stimulating study:
- provides a biographical consideration of Barthes' writing
- offers an extended reading of his 1957 text Mythologies as a text for our own time, drawing Barthes' work into a historical relation to the present
- examines his connection to what we call cultural studies
- features an annotated bibliography of Barthes' published work.
Thought-provoking and insightful, "Roland Barthes" is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the writings of this key theorist and his continuing relevance in our post-9/11 world.

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.

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.

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.

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 new collection places the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies. In so doing, it also questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing upon short fiction from 1975 to the present day - the period during which critical theory came to determine postcolonial studies - it argues for a more sophisticated critique exemplified by the ambiguity of the short story form. Short fiction is discussed from India, New Zealand, Singapore, North America, the UK, Egypt, the Caribbean and Africa. Themes include trauma, diaspora, language, national identity, democracy, the

After theory and the new historicism, what might a self-conscious turn to formal analysis in Renaissance literary studies look like today? The essays address this question from a variety of critical perspectives, embodying a renewed engagement with questions of form.