Literary Theory category: 45240 books

Veblen's landmark study of affluent American society exposes the 'pecuniary culture' and 'conspicuous consumption' that results when unessential goods are exploited at the expense of production of true value. This new edition examines Veblen's still pertinent arguments. - ;'Conspicuous consumption...

Frank Kermode is one of the pre-eminent practitioners of the art of criticism in the English speaking world. It has been his distinction to make a virtue – as all the best critics have done – of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident on every page of this collection...

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George...

Ways of Re-Thinking Literature creates a unique platform where leading literary thinkers and practitioners provide a multiplicity of views into what literature is today. The texts gathered in this extraordinary collection range from philosophy to poetry, to theater, to cognitive sciences, to...

Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Héctor Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized...

This critical study of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career, draws on archives, privately held unpublished Bukowski work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.

György Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of...

The 1890s, the Naughty Nineties, was an exciting and flamboyant time in British life and literature. First published in 1993, this title traces the genesis of the literary culture of the 1890s through some of the popular novels and literary texts of the period. By examining works by such writers as...

Through readings of iconic figures such as the cannibal, the child, the alien, and the posthuman, Gabriele Schwab analyzes literary explorations at the boundaries of the human. Treating literature as a dynamic medium that "writes culture"—one that makes the abstract particular and local,...

This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars...

Post-Mandarin offers an engaging look at a cohort of Vietnamese intellectuals who adopted European fields of knowledge, a new Romanized alphabet, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. This new generation of intellectuals established Vietnam’s modern anticolonial...

The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko...

This collection of writings by English Renaissance poets and essayists includes poems and essays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and Samuel Daniel. Excerpts from Francis Bacon, John Milton, William Drummond, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley. The book also surveys the origins, range...

'In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people' (The Times, 1873). The Art of Eloquence considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this 'Parliamentary people',...