This book, first published in 1986, explores the allusions in Dickens's work, such as current events and religious and intellectual issues, social customs, topography, costume, furniture and transportation. Together with an analysis of Dickens's imaginative responses to his culture, and their place in the genesis and composition of the text, this book is a full-scale, thoroughgoing annotation that The Mystery of Edwin Drood requires.

This book is a major new critical study of the greatest comic writer of ancient Greece. It relates Aristophanes' work to modern literature and modern theory. It offers a new theory of comedy. It will be essential reading for students and specialists of ancient Greek drama and poetry, and also many students and specialists of modern literature.

'...a book which should be read by all students contemplating enrolment for a university course in modern English or European literary studies.' - Roy Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the specialist interpreter, from I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the vast industries which have grown up around `modernism' and `postmodernism'. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an exhilarating book.

The image of The Girl in contemporary fiction by women today stands in stark contrast to configurations of girlhood in earlier fiction. No longer banished to the realms of the Victorian "marriage or death" plots, girls in contemporary fiction embrace new challenges and freedoms while still struggling with plots centered on their bodies, societal limitations, and the price for freedom and escape. This unique collection tackles the contemporary forces at work on both the girls in fiction created by women and the writers themselves. The Girl investigates the legacies of expectation, competing cultural ideologies, and multiplicities of growing up female at the end of the 20th century as portrayed in contemporary fiction by women. The essayists show how new fictions of The Girl provide access to a constellation of themes and narrative patterns--including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, female subjectivity, and nationalism--in new ways, while also continuing to envision girlhood in relation to such themes as love, separation from the mother, and maternal loss or overprotection. The first collection of critical essays to examine the portrayal of girls in contemporary women’s fiction within the context of recent sociological and psychological analyses of girls, The Girl proposes that contemporary stories of girlhood constitute a new lens for literary and cultural study. Examining the work of authors such as Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Joyce Carol Oates for their revelations and representations in regard to girlhood, these essays speak to, complement, and contest one another in a compelling interrogation of what it means to grow up female at the end of the millennium.

Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focus on the spatial turn presenting a new approach to the traditional literary analyses of time and history.

Robert T. Tally Jr. explores differing aspects of the spatial in literary studies today, providing:

• An overview of the spatial turn across literary theory, from historicism and postmodernism to postcolonialism and globalization
• Introductions to the major theorists of spatiality, including Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Luk cs, and Fredric Jameson
• Analysis of critical perspectives on spatiality, such as the writer as map-maker, literature of the city and urban space, and the concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism.

This clear and engaging study presents readers with a thought provoking and illuminating guide to the literature and criticism of space .

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines. The author explores temporality's relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including: historiography psychology gender economics postmodernism postcolonialism Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.

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.

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.

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.

This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues-predominantly purpose-exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid. Accessibility across areas of expertise and experience is stressed in this book. Critics range from junior faculty to emeritus, and represent a broad spectrum of views on criticism. In this sense the book offers a snapshot of the views of a wide swath of successfully practicing, contemporary rhetorical critics.

This book argues for the importance, and societal impact, of the study of the arts and humanities, and of literature in particular. The capacity of the arts and the humanities, and of literature in particular, to have a meaningful societal impact has been increasingly undervalued in recent history. Both humanists and scientists have tended to think of the arts as a means to represent the world via imagination. Mack maintains that the arts do not merely describe our world but that they also have the unique and under appreciated power to make us aware of how we can change accustomed forms of perception and action. Mack explores the works of prominent writers and thinkers, including Nietzsche, Foucault, Benjamin, Wilde, Roth, and Zizek, among others, to illustrate how literature interacts with both people and political as well as scientific issues of the real world. By virtue of its distance from the real world - its virtuality - the aesthetic has the capability to help us explore different and so far unthinkable forms of action and thereby to resist the repetition and perpetuation of harmful practices such as stereotyping, stigma, exclusion, and the exertion of violence.

Herman Sinaiko is renowned for his gifts as a guide to exploring and appreciating the humanities. This book brings to general readers Sinaiko's thoughts on, and invitations to read or reread, a wide selection of major literary and philosophical works -- from ancient Greek to Chinese to modern. Taking a conversational approach, he deals with the perennial questions that thinking people have always raised and investigates how works of great art may provide answers to these questions.

Sinaiko reestablishes the notion that there is a canon of great works from the great traditions of the world and argues for the existence of permanent standards of excellence. He rejects most contemporary critical views of classical literature and philosophy, including those of "experts" who seek to monopolize access to great works, academics whose extreme emphasis on historical context disallows any current relevance, and theorists whose lenses distort with personal bias rather than sharpen focus on the works they discuss. Sinaiko reclaims the canon for all of us, opening up discussion on texts ranging from Plato to Tolstoy, Confucius to Mary Shelley, and encouraging each reader to listen and respond to the rich diversity of powerful views on the human condition that such great works offer.

"Sinaiko's essays are interesting, provocative, thick like a good pudding, and contain much original thought. Plato, Confucius, Yeats, Nietzsche, and others -- a gala and stimulating Humanities course." -- Bennett Simon, M.D., Harvard Medical School

"The more one knows and has studied a work that Sinaiko addresses, the more one appreciates the depth and significance of what he has to say." -- Bruce A. Kimball, University of Rochester

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.

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.

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 is a methodical study of the material and mental limits and possibilities of transferring information and media traits among dissimilar media. Ellestroem proposes a model for pinpointing the most vital conceptual entities and stages in intermedial transfers involving different media types such as speech, writing, music, films, and websites.

"Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950" brings together important new scholarship focused on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and its institutional presence in shaping and directing American print, film, and art culture. From Harlem to Hollywood, Hoover and his bureau workers were bent on decontaminating America's creativity and this collection looks at the writers and artists who were tagged, tracked, and in some cases, trapped by the FBI. Contributors detail the threatening aspects of political power and critique the very historiography of modernism, acknowledging that modernism was on trial during those years.

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.

Rebirth of Rhetoric brings together contributions from several fields to provide a forum in which a unifying theory for language and literature studies can be debated.The book does not aim to resurrect classical Renaissance rhetoric, but to remake it within a contemporary context. The context of texts (both spoken and written) is one of the main emphases of this collection, whether it is the ideology informing the text, or the way in which a text is transformed by its audience. The book also aims to present a range of practical approaches to the study of texts of all kinds: literary; televisual; film and photography. It also argues the case for developments in the Arts and Humanities which will bring together people working in Education, Linguistics, Composition, Literature and Cultural Studies.

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.

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.

Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation focuses on the process of translation and its implications. The volume explores the translation of works of science fiction (SF) from one language to another and the translation of SF tropes, terms, and ideas of SF theory into cultures outside the West. Providing a comprehensive examination of the state of translation into English, the essays consider how representative the body of translated work of SF is from the source language/culture. It also considers the social, political, and economic choices in selecting a work to translate. The book illustrates the dramatic growth both in SF production outside the Anglosphere, the translation of works from other languages into English, and the practice of translating English-language SF into other languages. Altogether, the essays map the theory, practice, and business of SF translation around the world.

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.