This book charts the history of the concept of nihilism in some of the most important philosophers and literary theorists of the modern and postmodern periods, including Wyndham Lewis, Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, and Vattimo. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these thinkers produces a theory of the literary as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism, Weller offers the first in-depth analysis of nihilism's key role in the thinking of the aesthetic since Nietzsche.

Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of 'Homo Economicus' provides a transhistorical account of homo economicus (economic man), demonstrating this figure's significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smith's seminal texts - Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations - and Henry Fielding's A History of Tom Jones, this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen's Sanditon; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens' engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloway's exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.

Ousselin sets out to show that Europe is essentially a literary fiction and that the ongoing movement towards European unity cannot be understood without reference to the literary works that helped bring it about.

The standard interpretation keeps repeating that Camus is the prototypical "absurdist" thinker. Such a reading freezes Camus at the stage at which he wrote The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. By taking seriously how (1) Camus was always searching and (2) the rest of his corpus, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary corrects the one-sided, and thus faulty, depiction of Camus as committed to a philosophy of absurdism. His guiding project, which he explicitly acknowledged, was an attempt to get beyond nihilism, the general dismissal of value and meaning in ordinary life. Tracing this project via Camus's works, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary, offers a new lens for thinking about the well-known author.

Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic "disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.

This volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to six examples of West Indian fiction, combining symbolic anthropology with traditional literary criticism. Focusing on works by George Lamming and Wilson Harris, two vastly dissimilar Caribbean writers, Joyce Jonas identifies an emerging West Indian aesthetic, stressing the conflict between oral and written communication, and between folk culture and imperialist domination. By applying post-modernist literary theories to the texts, Dr. Jonas explores colonization as a key metaphor for exploitation of gender, class, race, and environment. The six novels surveyed all describe a "plantation landscape" within which the action takes place, and which provides a context for a study of the polarized world of colonizer and colonized. Two icons are employed in the analysis: the Great House, a colonial world view of binary oppositions, and Anancy, a trickster-figure of West Indian folklore. The first of the three essays focuses on the collision between imperialist culture and the submerged folk heritage. The second explores the phenomenon of exile through the artist-in-the-text, a feature common to all six novels that places the artist at the crossroads of a colonized world. Finally, the third essay blends the anthropological concept of liminality with a feminist perspective, widening the discussion to embrace all types of oppressive exploitation. With its subtle literary readings and its philosophical commentary, this volume will be a significant resource for courses in West Indian and Third World literature, literature and culture, and race and gender in literature. It will also be an important addition to academic and public libraries.

With the diminished influence of intellectuals outside the academy and a marked decline in the quality of public discourse, many observers have called for the return of the "public intellectual." At the same time, religion is playing an increasingly public role in the modern world. This collection of essays examines the possibility that both religion and literature, in their complex interactions, are capable of reentering and renewing what the eminent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas refers to as "the public sphere."

Each scholar working in the field of Holocaust literature and representation has a story to tell. Not only the scholarly story of the work they do, but their personal story, their journey to becoming a specialist in Holocaust studies. What academic, political, cultural, and personal experiences led them to choose Holocaust representation as their subject of research and teaching? What challenges did they face on their journey? What approaches, genres, media, or other forms of Holocaust representation did they choose and why? How and where did they find a scholarly "home" in which to share their work productively? Have political, social, and cultural conditions today affected how they think about their work on Holocaust representation? How do they imagine their work moving forward, including new challenges, responses, and audiences? These are but a few of the questions that the authors in this volume address, showing how a scholar's field of research and resulting writings are not arbitrary, and are often informed by their personal history and professional experiences.

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.

This ground-breaking study argues that literature and criminology share a common concern to understand modernity and that this project is often focused upon gender-specific criminality. Central to this concern is duplicity masquerade and performance. These subjects are explored for the first time in relation to criminality with reference to a range of literary and popular texts, from Dickens and Poe through to Toni Morrison and Easton Ellis, in which the traditional boundaries between different genders and sexualities are made more fluid and complex than in traditional criminal narratives.

Major study in literary theory, criticism and psychology.

This is a highly original study, which offers an innovative new approach towards the study of early modern drama. This book examines the work of the Elizabethan playwright, Robert Greene, arguing that his plays are innovative in their use of spectacle. This study's most striking feature is the use of the one-to-one analogies between Greene's drama and modern cinema, in order to explore the plays' stage effects. While recent Shakespearean criticism interprets his drama through the lens of performance, criticism of non-Shakespearean drama continues to disconnect the plays from even the scarce performances of them today. This book aims to bring the study of performance into the realm of non-Shakespearean drama so that the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries might not descend further into obscurity. This innovative study advocates the rejection of a purely text-based interpretation of drama and emphasizes the powerful visual dimension of the early modern stage.

In 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. Was he right? After all, Whistler always denied that the true function of art was to represent anything. If a painting does not represent, what is it, other than mere paint, flung in the public's face? Whistler's answer was simple: painting is music - or it is poetry. Georges Braque, half a century later, echoed Whistler's answer. So did Braque's friends Apollinaire and Ponge. They presented their poetry as music too - and as painting. But meanwhile, composers such as Satie and Stravinsky were presenting their own art - music - as if it transposed the values of painting or of poetry. The fundamental principle of this intermedial aesthetic, which bound together an extraordinary fraternity of artists in all media in Paris, from 1885 to 1945, was this: we must always think about the value of a work of art, not within the logic of its own medium, but as if it transposed the value of art in another medium. Peter Dayan traces the history of this principle: how it created our very notion of 'great art', why it declined as a vision from the 1960s and how, in the 21st century, it is fighting back.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.