Not a general dictionary of literary terms, the Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory treats seventy fundamental and overarching concepts from allegory and allusion to tragedy and unity. By "concepts" is meant broad terms that designate modes of thought about, approaches to, or major classifications of literature that are of central importance to the history or present pursuit of literary criticism and commentary. Particular attention has been given to distinguishing the different senses in which a term has been used or is presently used, to noting major questions that have been debated in relation to the concept, and to documenting points of view and specific aspects with full references. Additional sources of information are appended in each case. Useful especially to students and faculty in literature and to literary critics, the concepts are lucidly presented in essays that can enlighten any reader interested in more than superficial definitions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Description: The question of literature brings together essays by a number of distinguished theorists and academics on the changing cultural significance of literature as such. As literary theory has grown more influential, inter-disciplinary and sophisticated, it has come to concern itself with a much greater range of issues and objects than those traditionally considered literary. Literary theory now addresses philosophy, history, psychology, politics, the media, and potentially every other aspect of culture - but as a result the nature of its relation to literature itself has become less clear. The question of literature seeks to recontextualise literature and the literary within the diversity of post modern theory, showing how theory has changed our understanding literature and its questions, and affirming the ways in which literature remains valuable and transformative for present day culture. It relates literature importantly to the institution of the university, but also to ethical judgments and values, new media and computer technology, and the nature of the representative democracy. In the scope of its discussion The question of literature constitutes a major intervention in current literary-theoretical debates, and will be of great interest not only to academics and students in literary, social, and cultural studies, but to anyone concerned wit these debates or with the future of literature as such.

The retirement of the distinguished philosopher Jurgen Habermas from his chair at the University of Frankfurt signalled an important caesura in the history of Critical Theory: the transition from the Habermasian project, to different forms of inquiry in the work of the next generation. This change-over happens at a time when it has become clear that Habermas's systematic exploration of communicative rationality has reached the point where both its achievements and its limitations had become evident. The essays collected in this volume address the problems connected with this transition, partly by returning to the insights of the first generation (Adorno and Benjamin), partly by focusing on questions raised by Habermas's work. Whatever the difference in the authors' positions, this collection gains its unity through their common interest in the significance and value of Critical Theory today and in its future as a philosophical project.

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.

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.

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.

W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H. D., and David Jones, major poets of the early twentieth century, were fully involved in the historic conflict between religion and science. Jacob Korg's study illuminates the manner in which they attempted to overcome the division between the two cultures - by incorporating elements of religious ritual as well as scientific experiment in their poems. Known primarily as innovators who devised new methods of artistic expression, these poets also employed ritual, a form even more ancient than myth, side by side with their experimental ventures. Through close study of their major poems, Korg shows that the interplay between these apparently contradictory principles was a persistent theme of modern poetry that played an important part in the poetic revolution of the time.

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.

Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In "Modernist Patterns," Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith.

By placing the literary works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway within the context of the changes that occurred in the visual arts, "Modernist Patterns" expands our understanding of literature and identifies the cultural shifts that generated stylistic innovations within the visual arts.

The popularity of romance fiction is such that it constitutes nearly one quarter of new paperback fiction printed in the world. Its success depends on its ability to reflect and articulate the reader's aspirations for a better life and stands at the same time as a testament to her alienation. This fresh look at the romantic fiction seeks to discover the reason for its appeal by combining analysis of the poetics of the genre with a study of the real reader's intervention.

In High Theory/Low Culture , Brottman uses the tools of 'high' cultural theory to examine many areas of today's popular culture, including style magazines, sport, shopping, tabloid newspapers, horror movies and pornography. In doing so, she not only demonstrates the practical use of 'high' theory as it relates to our everyday world, but she also investigates the kinds of 'low' culture that are regularly dismissed by academic scholars. Through a close examination of these cultural forms, Brottman reveals how the kinds of popular culture that we usually take for granted are, in fact, far more complex and sophisticated than is normally assumed.

Romantic Visualities offers a culturally informed understanding of the literary significance of landscape in the Romantic period. Labbe argues that the Romantic period associated the prospect view with the masculine ideal, simultaneously fashioning the detailed point of view as feminised. An interdisciplinary study, it discusses the cultural construction of gender as defined through landscape viewing, and investigates property law, aesthetic tracts, conduct books, travel narratives, artistic theory, and the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Ann Francis, Dorothy Wordsworth and others.

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.

First published in 1970, this collection is made up of a selection of essays composed between 1962 and 1968, written by distinguished humanist and literary critic Northrop Frye. The book is divided into two parts: one deals largely with the contexts of literary criticism; the other offers more specific studies of literary works in roughly historical sequence. One of the essays is Frye's own elucidation of the development of his critical premises out of his early concern with the poetry of William Blake. Taken together, the essays offer a continuous and coherent argument, making a whole that is entirely equal to the sum of its parts.

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.

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.

Exploring the meaning of modernism, this work focuses on the journey taken by Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf towards unknown regions of the mind and the universe. In a discussion of these novelists, both individually and in relation to one another, a reconsideration of modernism is developed. It aims to show the hypothetical train of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf not following an existing track but tunnelling beneath surfaces.

'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.

Although the body has recently emerged throughout the humanities and social sciences as an object revealing the power and limits of representation, the study of narrative has almost entirely ignored human corporeality. As this book shows, attention to the body raises uncomfortable questions about the historicity of basic narrative concepts like character, plot, and narration--questions that critics would often prefer to ignore. Daniel Punday argues that narrative itself is a concept constructed by modern-day critics based on assumptions about identity, desire, movement and place that depend on modern ways of thinking about corporeality.