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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie's female poisoners in the context of Christie's own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver well-deserved comeuppance for gendered and classed wrongdoing ordinarily accepted in everyday life. While critics have long recognized male outlaws, like Robin Hood, who use crime to oppose a corrupt system, this book contends that female outlaws - witches and poisoners - offer a similar heritage of empowered femininity. Far from cozy and formulaic, Agatha Christie's outlaw poisoners offer readers the surprising pleasures of comeuppance, and they set the stage for contemporary detective fiction writers, more recent films depicting poisoning as empowering, and even poison gardens, which are tourist destinations that offer visitors the guilty pleasure of poison.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This interdisciplinary project is situated at the boundary between literary studies and philosophy. Its chief focus is on American Romanticism and it examines work by a number of prominent writers and philosophers, from Whitman and Thoreau to Barthes and Rorty.

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.

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.

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.

Edward F. Mooney takes us into the lived philosophies of Melville, Kierkegaard, Henry Bugbee, and others who write deeply in ways that bring philosophy and religion into the fabric of daily life, in its simplicities, crises, and moments of communion and joy. Along the way Mooney explores meditations on wilderness, on the enigma of self-deception, the role of maternal love and the pain of separations, and the pervasiveness of "difficult reality" where valuable things are presented to us under two (or more) aspects at once.

The first collection focused on the writing of provocative author and performance artist Sapphire, including her groundbreaking novel PUSH that has since become the Academy-award-winning film Precious.

Shakespeare and Emotional Expression offers an exciting new way of considering emotional transactions in Shakespearean drama. The book is significant in its scope and originality as it uses the innovative medium of colour terms and references to interrogate the early modern emotional register. By examining contextual and cultural influences, this work explores the impact these influences have on the relationship between colour and emotion and argues for the importance of considering chromatic references as a means to uncover emotional significances. Using a broad range of documents, it offers a wider understanding of affective expression in the early modern period through a detailed examination of several dramatic works. Although colour meanings fluctuate, by paying particular attention to contextual clues and the historically specific cultural situations of Shakespeare's plays, this book uncovers emotional significances that are not always apparent to modern audiences and readers. Through its examination of the nexus between the history of emotions and the social and cultural uses of colour in early modern drama, Shakespeare and Emotional Expression adds to our understanding of the expressive and affective possibilities in Shakespearean drama.

Through a broad-ranging survey of the allegory, utopia, the historical novel and the epic in post-colonial literature, Jean-Pierre Durix proposes a critical reassessment of the theory of genres. He argues that, in the New Literatures which are often rooted in hybrid aesthetics, the often decried mimesis must be viewed from a completely different angle. Analysing texts by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant, he pleads for the redefinition of 'magic realism' if the term is to retain generic relevance.

This book gives an in-depth and invigorating analysis of reflexivity in recent British drama - the way drama comments on drama. The interplay of dramatic forms, the cross-fertilization of historical traditions are explored in relation to major contemporary authors and theatrical practices. When drama takes itself as its own object of study it paradoxically highlights the most vital issues of its time. Key questions are raised about the nature of theatricality in play-writing and performance in this the first full-length treatment of the subject.

How does literary production respond to processes of urbanization? What do literary and cultural representations tell us about urban practices?
Guided by these questions, "Urban Space and Late Twentieth-Century New York Literature" theorizes literary geography anew by examining writers' responses to the uneven development of New York City. Catalina Neculai offers a rich critique of literature written during the consolidation of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether it is about the culture industries, gentrification, housing movements, or the finance economy, here New York literature becomes akin to urban fieldwork that produces knowledge of space and engages with the politics of place. Interdisciplinary in conception and design, the book draws on fiction, non-fiction, grassroots narratives, archival material, radical Marxist geography, urban politics, and urban history.

The anti-sceptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey has attracted new attention in the context of late twentieth-century postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest across a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines in rhetoric itself: language use, writing and speaking, persuasion, figurative language, and the effect of texts. This book, written by leading scholars, explores the various ways in which rhetoric, sophistry and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, and demonstrates how they contribute both to a rethinking of the human sciences within the academy and to larger debates over cultural politics.