Abjection and Representation is a theoretical investigation of the concept of abjection as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980) and its application in various fields including the visual arts, film and literature. It examines the complexity of the concept and its significance as a cultural category.

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.

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.

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.

Dominic Rainsford examines ways in which literary texts may seem to comment on their authors' ethical status. Its argument develops through readings of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, three authors who find especially vivid ways of casting doubt on their own moral authority, at the same time as they expose wider social ills. The book combines its interest in ethics with post-structuralist scepticism, and thus develops a type of radical humanism with applications far beyond the three authors immediately discussed.

While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our time. The thesis of this book is that there are various ways to decolonize the representation of Amerindian peoples. Each chapter has its own decolonial thesis which it then resolves. Chapter 1 proves that there is coloniality in contemporary scholarship and argues that word choices can be improved to decolonize the way we describe the first Americans. Chapter 2 argues that literature in Latin American begins before 1492 and shows the long arc of Mayan expression, taking the Popol Wuj as a case study. Chapter 3 demonstrates how colonialist discourse is reinforced by a dualist rhetorical ploy of ignorance and arrogance in a Renaissance historical chronicle, Agustin de Zarate's Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Peru. Chapter 4 shows how by inverting the Renaissance dualist configuration of civilization and barbarian, the Nahua (Aztecs) who were formerly considered barbarian can be "civilized" within Spanish norms. This is done by modeling the categories of civilization discussed at length by the Friar Bartolome de las Casas as a template that can serve to evaluate Nahua civil society as encapsulated by the historiography of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a possibility that would have been available to Spaniards during that time. Chapter 5 maintains that the colonialities of the pre-Independence era survive, but that Criollo-indigenous dialogue is capable of excavating their roots to extirpate them. By comparing the discussions of the hacienda system by the Peruvian essayist Manuel Gonzalez Prada and by the Mayan-Quiche eye-witness to history Rigoberta Menchu, this books shows that there is common ground between their viewpoints despite the different genres in which their work appears and despite the different countries and the eight decades that separated them, suggesting a universality to the problem of the hacienda which can be dissected. This book models five different decolonizing methods to extricate from the continuities of coloniality both indigenous writing and the representation of indigenous peoples by learned elites.

Introducing students to the full range of critical approachesto the poetry of the period, Perspectives on World War I Poetry is an authoritative and accessible guide to the extraordinary variety of international poetic responses to the Great War of 1914-18. Each chapter covers one or more major poets, and guides the reader through close readings of poems from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including: . Classical . Formalist . Psychoanalytic . Marxist . Structuralist . Reader-response . New Historicist . Feminist Including the full text of each poem discussed and poetry from British, North American and Commonwealth writers, the book explores the work of such poets as: Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Alys Fane Trotter, Eva Dobell, Charlotte Mew, John McCrae, Edward Thomas, Eleanor Farjeon, Margaret Sackville, Sara Teasdale, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Teresa Hooley, Isaac Rosenberg, Leon Gellert, Marian Allen, Vera Brittain, Margaret Postgate Cole, Wilfred Owen, E.E. Cummings and David Jones.

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 Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light presents the latest research in animal perception and cognition in the context of rhetorical theory. Alex C. Parrish explores the science of animal signaling that shows human and nonhuman animals share similar rhetorical strategies-such as communicating to manipulate or persuade-which suggests the vast impact sensory modalities have on communication in nature. The book demonstrates new ways of seeing humans and how we have separated ourselves from, and subjectified, the animal rhetor. This type of cross-species study allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing a deeper and more inclusive history of rhetoric than ever before.

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.

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.

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.

This book demonstrates that theory in literary and cultural studies has moved beyond overarching master theories towards a greater awareness of particularity and contingency - including its own. What is the place of literary and cultural theory after the Age of Theory has ended? Grouping its chapters into rubrics of metatheory, cultural theory, critical theory and textual theory, the collection demonstrates that the practice of "doing theory" has neither lost its vitality nor can it be in any way dispensable. Current directions covered include the renewed interest in phenomenology, the increased acknowledgement of the importance of media history for all cultural practices and formations, complexity studies, new narratology, literary ethics, cultural ecology, and an intensified interest in textual as well as cultural matter.

- The first truly global study of adaptation – a rapidly growing area in courses and research so there is a market waiting for this book - Interdisciplinary focus means the book will appeal to a variety of area – literature, film studies, performance, media studies - Contemporary approach draws on the latest research so will appeal to researchers in the field

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.

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.

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.

This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism; postcolonial criticism, and ecocriticism. This new edition features: * A brand new chapter on ecocriticism, including sections on deep ecology, eco-Marxism, ecofeminism (including radical, Marxist, and vegetarian ecofeminisms), and postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice * Considerable updates to the chapters on feminist theory, African American theory, postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ theories, including the terminology and theoretical concepts * An extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and a variety of literary texts * A list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts * An interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory * A list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works * Updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.

God and Self in the Confessional Novel explores the question: what happened to the theological practice of confession when it entered the modern novel? Beginning with the premise that guilt remains a universal human concern, this book considers confession via the classic confessional texts of Augustine and Rousseau. Employing this framework, John D. Sykes, Jr. examines Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Percy's Lancelot, and McEwan's Atonement to investigate the evolution of confession and guilt in literature from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century.

Did colonialism, a world-historical catastrophe, inflict only material damage on the colonized, or did it cause psychic injury as well? What would it mean, then, to read postcolonial writings under the prism of trauma? In History, Trauma, and Healing in Post-Colonial Narratives, Ifowodo tackles these questions through a psycho-social examination of the lingering impact of imperialist domination. His hybrid method that encompasses historicism, psychoanalysis and a realist concept of linguistic reference stakes a bold, new ground in postcolonial studies. The focus is trans-continental and the analysis centered on primary texts that explore the African, African-American, and Caribbean experience of slavery/colonialism. The result is a refreshing and necessary complement to the cultural-materialist studies that dominate the field.

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.

This book explores thematic parallels between Max Weber's theory of the rationalisation and disenchantment of the modern world, and the critiques of contemporary culture developed by Lyotard, Foucault and Baudrillard. It is suggested that these three theorists, associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism, respond to Weber's account of the rise, nature, and trajectory of modern culture by pursuing highly imaginative and coherent strategies of affirmation and re-enchantment. Examining the work of these three key thinkers in this way casts new light on Weber's sociology of rationalisation and his theory of the crisis of modernity.