Translation Studies is currently one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary subjects in the world. Constructing Cultures brings together for the first time the work of the two translator/scholars who are regarded as founders of this major field of study. This collection of essays continues to develop some of the principal research lines that both have been pursuing in recent years, most specifically the cultural turn in Translation Studies. Among topics discussed are Chinese and Western theories of translation, the limits of translatability, when is a translation not a translation, why cultures develop certain genres at certain times, what is the relationship between Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. Some essays are genre specific, focusing on theatre translation or the translating of poetry, others are devoted to specific case studies, and consider the fortunes of such major writers as Virgil or Brecht in English. Written in the accessible, jargon-free style that characterises the work of Bassnett and Lefevere, this collection of essays will be invaluable to anyone interested in translation and comparative cultural studies.

Translation Studies is currently one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary subjects in the world. Constructing Cultures brings together for the first time the work of the two translator/scholars who are regarded as founders of this major field of study. This collection of essays continues to develop some of the principal research lines that both have been pursuing in recent years, most specifically the cultural turn in Translation Studies. Among topics discussed are Chinese and Western theories of translation, the limits of translatability, when is a translation not a translation, why cultures develop certain genres at certain times, what is the relationship between Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. Some essays are genre specific, focusing on theatre translation or the translating of poetry, others are devoted to specific case studies, and consider the fortunes of such major writers as Virgil or Brecht in English. Written in the accessible, jargon-free style that characterises the work of Bassnett and Lefevere, this collection of essays will be invaluable to anyone interested in translation and comparative cultural studies.

This book rethinks the origins and nature of magical realism and provides detailed readings of key novels by Asturias, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and Okri. Identifying two different strands of the mode, one characterised by faith, the other by irreverence, Warnes makes available a new vocabulary for the discussion of magical realism.

The Contracts of Fiction reconnects our fictional worlds to the rest of our lives. Countering the contemporary tendency to dismiss works of imagination as enjoyable but epistemologically inert, the book considers how various kinds of fictions construct, guide, and challenge institutional relationships within social groups. The contracts of fiction, like the contracts of language, law, kinship, and money, describe the rules by which members of a group toggle between tokens and types, between their material surroundings - the stuff of daily life - and the abstractions that give it value. Rethinking some familiar literary concepts such as genre and style from the perspective of recent work in the biological, cognitive, and brain sciences, the book displays how fictions engage bodies and minds in ways that help societies balance continuity and adaptability. Being part of a community means sharing the ways its members use stories, pictures, plays and movies, poems and songs, icons and relics, to generate usable knowledge about the people, objects, beliefs and values in their environment. Exposing the underlying structural and processing homologies among works of imagination and life processes such as metabolism and memory, Ellen Spolsky demonstrates the seamless connection of life to art by revealing the surprising dependence of both on disorder, imbalance, and uncertainty. In early modern London, for example, reformed religion, expanding trade, and changed demographics made the obsolescent courts a source of serious inequities. Just at that time, however, a flood of wildly popular revenge tragedies, such as Hamlet, by their very form, by their outrageous theatrical grotesques, were shouting the need for change in the justice system. A sustained discussion of the genre illustrates how biological homeostasis underpins the social balance that we maintain with difficulty, and how disorder itself incubates new understanding.

Transversal Subjects, now in paperback, proposes a combined theory of consciousness, subjectivity and agency stemming from analyses of junctures in Western philosophical and critical discourses that have greatly influenced the development of present-day understandings of perception, identity, desire, mimesis, aesthetics, education and human rights.

Nietzsche and Irish Modernism demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. These materials reveal a response to Nietzsche that created abiding tensions between Irish cultural production and reigning religious and nationalist orthodoxies, during an anxious period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. With its wealth of detail, the book greatly enriches our understanding of modernist culture as a site of convergence between art and politics, indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives. -- .

The concept of 'memory' has given rise to some of the most exciting new directions in contemporary theory.

In this much-needed guide to a burgeoning field of a study, Anne Whitehead:

Offering a clear and succinct guide to one of the most important terms in contemporary theory, this volume is essential reading for anyone entering the field of Memory Studies, or seeking to understand current developments in Cultural and Literary Studies.

This volume advances a comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to the affective lives of institutions - theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and critical. With this approach, the volume foregrounds the role of affect in sustaining as well as transforming institutional arrangements that are deeply problematic. As part of its analysis, this book develops a novel understanding of institutional affect. It explores how institutions produce, frame, and condition affective dynamics and emotional repertoires, in ways that engender conformance or resistance to institutional requirements. This collection of works will be important for scholars and students of interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies from a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, organizational and institution studies, media studies, social philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory.

Edward Said is perhaps best known as the author of the landmark study Orientalism, a book which changed the face of critical theory and shaped the emerging field of post-colonial studies, and for his controversial journalism on the Palestinian political situation.

Looking at the context and the impact of Said's scholarship and journalism, this book examines Said's key ideas, including:

• the significance of 'worldliness', 'amateurism', 'secular criticism', 'affiliation' and 'contrapuntal reading'
• the place of text and critic in 'the world'
• knowledge, power and the construction of the 'Other'
• links between culture and imperialism
• exile, identity and the plight of Palestine
• a new chapter looking at Said's later work and style

This popular guide has been fully updated and revised in a new edition, suitable for readers approaching Said's work for the first time as well as those already familiar with the work of this important theorist. The result is the ideal guide to one of the twentieth century's most engaging critical thinkers.

This multidisciplinary anthology discusses the problems and possibilities of digital culture and the information age. It focuses on media critical, analytical and philosophical approaches to contemporary media cultures, future technologies, and electronic utopias. The following topics are among those discussed: the textual theory of hypertext multimedia literature; phenomenology; Nelson Goodman's philosophy of languages; Jean-Luc Godard as media philosopher; American television discourse; Internet in Russia; tomorrow's media environments; and the controversial advertising of Benetton. The main disciplines shared by the contributors are philosophy, semiotics, and media and communication studies.

Temporality pervades the dynamic joint of existence, and the human being as such. As human beings unfold through ontopoiesis, each move of which punctuates the temporality of life, they, whose life experience, deliberation, planning, reflection and dreaming are permeated by temporal motivations and concerns, feel that they are engaged in the spinning of a common thread. Attributing to that involvement universal laws, constant existential validity and power, they absolutise/hypostasise its rule as a cosmic/human factor: time. Yet today technologies are transforming the temporality of our existence by accelerating, intensifying, expanding our partaking in the world of life. Human communal and social involvement is being challenged in its personal significance to the core of our being. What happens to time? A basic reinvestigation of the nature of temporality is called for human creative endeavor - especially literature - may initiate it.

Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era undertakes a systematic study of postmodernism's responses to the polarized ideologies of the postwar period that have held cultures hostage to a confrontation between rival ideologies abroad and a clash between champions of uniformity and disruptive others at home. Considering a broad range of narrative projects and approaches (from polysystemic fiction to surfiction, postmodern feminism, and multicultural/postcolonial fiction), this book highlights their solutions to ontological divisions (real vs. imaginary, wordly, and other-worldly), sociocultural oppositions (of race, class, gender), and narratological dualities (imitation vs. invention, realism vs. formalism). A thorough rereading of the best experimental work published in the US since the mid-1960s reveals the fact that innovative fiction has been from the beginning concerned with redefining the relationship between history and fiction, narrative and cultural articulation. Stepping back from traditional polarizations, innovative novelists have tried to envision an alternative history of irreducible particularities, excluded middles, and creative intercrossings.

The articles in this collection focus attention on the concept of literature and on the relationship between this concept and the concepts of a literary work and a literary text. Adopting an analytic approach, the articles attempt to clarify how these concepts govern our thinking about the phenomenon of literature in various ways, exploring the issues which arise when these concepts are employed as theoretical instruments for describing and analyzing the phenomenon of literature.

Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.

An Introduction to Poetic Forms offers specimen discussions of poems through the lens of form. While each of its chapters does provide a standard definition of the form in question in its opening paragraphs, their main objective is to provide readings of specific examples to illustrate how individual poets have deviated from or subverted those expectations usually associated with the form under discussion. While providing the most vital information on the most widely taught forms of poetry, then, this collection will very quickly demonstrate that counting syllables and naming rhyme schemes is not the be-all and end-all of poetic form. Instead, each chapter will contain cross-references to other literary forms and periods as well as make clear the importance of the respective form to the culture at large: be it the democratising communicative power of the ballad or the objectifying male gaze of the blazon and resistance to same in the contreblazon - the efficacy of form is explored in the fullness of its cultural dimensions. In using standard definitions only as a starting point and instead focusing on lively debates around the cultural impact of poetic form, the textbook helps students and instructors to see poetic forms not as a static and lifeless affair but as living, breathing testament to the ongoing evolution of cultural debates. In the final analysis, the book is interested in showing the complexities and contradictions inherent in the very nature of literary form itself: how each concrete example deviates from the standard template while at the same time employing it as a foil to generate meaning.

This collection of essays reassesses a range of Shakespeare's plays in relation to carnivalesque theory. The plays discussed include: Henry IV; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Night's Dream; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Hamlet; Measure For Measure; The Winter's Tale; and Henry VIII. Contributors re-historicize the carnivalesque in different ways, offering both a developed application, or critique of, Bakhtin's thought."

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

This volume deploys theology in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism, to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and explanatory power of theological readings across various texts and literary genres. Theology and Literature after Postmodernity explores a reconstructive approach to reading and literary study in the university setting, with contributions from interdisciplinary scholars worldwide.

Interest in critical theory has grown enormously since the end of the 1960s and now seems to be fully integrated into most university programs. Leonard Orr has prepared a much needed historical and international dictionary of the language of critical theory. He includes terms that have appeared with great frequency in the indexes to anthologies of critical theory, either general or specific to a period or school; terms that have appeared in the indexes to standard histories of criticism; schools of criticism or broad types of criticism; and key terms from foreign-language critical theory. All definitions are written from the perspective of literary critical use. The entries generally include source information. Whenever possible, the reader is referred to sources in English. Cross-references are also provided as appropriate.

While the majority of readers of this work will be faculty members and graduate students in English, foreign literatures, or comparative literature, the definitions are accessible enough to be useful for undergraduates and non-academics.

Queering Medieval Genres proposes that, within the historical trajectory of many genres, certain agents are privileged while others are marginalized due to their understanding of heteronormative social codes. Examining the ways in which homosexuality disrupts generic and cultural expectations of heteronormativity, this book demonstrates that the introduction of the queer within medieval literature shatters the audience's expectations of textual pleasure and demands that they reconsider the effects of homosexuality on their constructions of sexual and spiritual identity. Scholars of medieval literature will appreciate the fresh insights that queer genre theory provides on critical texts of the period; additionally, Queering Medieval Genres outlines a hermeneutic device with which to analyze literature of other historical periods as well.

Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority, and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade-including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers-Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in the culture.

These four volumes are part of the forty-one volume set New Accents. First launched in 1977 the New Accents Series rapidly changed the face of literary studies.

Includes individual volumes on William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2 volume set), Robert Southey, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

This study shows how contemporary theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts. Bringing the resources of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory to bear on Chaucer's tales about women, this book addresses those registers of the Canterbury project that remain major concerns for recent feminist theory: the specificity of feminine desire, the cultural articulation of gender, the logic of sacrifice as a cultural ideal, the structure of misogyny and domestic violence. This book maps out the ways in which Chaucer's rhetoric is not merely an element of style or an instrument of persuasion but the very matrix for the representation of de-centered subjectivity.

Robert Browning both denied and affirmed the value of biography for an understanding of literature. This book narrates the development of his controversial creative life through responses to his work by five key 19th-century figures: John Stuart Mill, William Charles Macready, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. It also relates Browning's sense of literary vocation to Victorian publishing. Browning emerges as a writer vividly engaged with contemporary assumptions, yet deeply aware of the unaccountability of writing.