From "Murphy "to "Rockaby" to "Worstward Ho," "Beckett's Masculinity" illustrates how Samuel Beckett's work functions as a testament to the site of memory for the historically erased twentieth-century Protestant, Anglo-Irish community. Jennifer Jeffers ably shows how Beckett converted his own personal traumatic loss of a masculine, patriarchal national identity into a sustained group of obsessive images in his texts. As Beckett's work matured, he utilized the strategies of emasculation and gender distortion to dismantle Western masculinity. "Beckett's Masculinity" shows that Western hegemonic masculinity was a source of private trauma and anxiety for Beckett; yet, he eventually transformed the twentieth-century literary landscape by harnessing the power of parodied masculinity and perverted gender in his work.

The book deals with Pound's literary criticism as a whole, and discusses his critical tenets and concepts as well as his critical evaluations of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, Cavalcanti, Villon, Chancer, Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Yeats, Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. Singh also comments analytically on Pound's critical credo, his poetics of imagism, his letters in criticism, his theory and craft of poetic translation and his views on modem French poets and prose writers. The conclusion is followed by a selection of Poundian maxims and aphorisms.

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.

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.

A century of American history reflected in the iconic private eye. Steadfast in fighting crime, but operating outside the police force-and sometimes even the law-is the private detective. Driven by his own moral code, he is a shadowy figure in a trench coat standing on a street corner, his face most likely obscured by a tilted fedora, a lit cigarette dangling from his hand. The hard-boiled detective is known by his dark past, private pain, and powers of deduction. He only asks questions-never answers them. In his stories he is both the main character and the narrator. America has had a love affair with the hard-boiled detective since the 1920s, when Prohibition called into question who really stood on the right and wrong side of the law. And nowhere did this hero shine more than in crime fiction. In Detectives in the Shadows, literary and cultural critic Susanna Lee tracks the evolution of this truly American character type-from Race Williams to Philip Marlowe and from Mike Hammer to Jessica Jones. Lee explores how this character type morphs to fit an increasingly troubled world, offering compelling interpretations of The Wire, True Detective, and Jessica Jones. Suddenly, in the present day, the hard-boiled detective wears his-or her-fatigue outwardly, revealing more vulnerability than ever before. But the detective remains resolute in the face of sinister forces, ever the person of honor. For anyone interested in crime fiction and television, or for those wanting to understand America's idolization of the good guy with a gun, Detectives in the Shadows is essential reading.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

This book explores the ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about personality formation and the extent to which it can be influenced either by the subject or by others. Innovative readings of seven sensation novels explore how they employ and challenge Victorian theories of heredity, degeneration, inherent constitution, education, upbringing and social circumstance. Far from presenting a reductive depiction of 'nature' versus 'nurture', Braddon and Collins show the creation of character to be a complex interplay of internal and external factors. Drawing on material ranging from medical textbooks, to sociological treatises, to popular periodicals, Creating character shows how sensation authors situated themselves at the intersections of established and developing, conservative and radical, learned and sensationalist thought about how identity could be made and modified. -- .

Did Shakespeare really join John Fletcher to write Cardenio, a lost play based on Don Quixote? With an emphasis on the importance of theatrical experiment, a script and photos from Gary Taylor's recent production, and essays by respected early modern scholars, this book will make a definitive statement about the collaborative nature of Cardenio.

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.

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.

Metaphor is a central concept in literary studies, but it is also prevalent in everyday language and speech. Recent literary theories such as postmodernism and deconstruction have transformed the study of the text and revolutionized our thinking about metaphor.

In this fascinating volume, David Punter:

• establishes the classical background of the term from its philosophical roots to the religious and political tradition of metaphor in the East
• relates metaphor to the public realms of culture and politics and the way in which these influence the literary
• examines metaphor in relation to literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies
• illustrates his argument with specific examples from western and eastern literature and poetry.

This comprehensive and engaging book emphasizes the significance of metaphor to literary studies, as well as its relevance to cultural studies, linguistics and philosophy.

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the gendered power relations in James's novels. Reading James's narrative form through the lens of relational sociology, specifically Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic domination, reconciles some of the most fiercely disputed positions in James studies of the past decades. The close readings focus on three novels, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, providing a systematic relational analysis into the specifically Jamesian method of narrating the socio-psychological, embodied responses to masculine power and oppression. James persistently narrates his characters as social agents whose perception, affects, and bodily practices are products of the social structures that they in turn continue to shape and reproduce. The chapters trace a development throughout James's career that reflects a growing sensitivity for the concealment and attendant misrecognition of gendered domination.

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.

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.