Literary Theory category: 45240 books
The Risk of Reading
How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 2014
The Risk of Reading is a defense of the idea that deep and close readings of literature can help us to understand ourselves and the world around us. It explores some of the meaning and implications of modern life through the deep reading of significant books. Waxler argues that we need "fiction"...
The Child in British Literature
Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2012
The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood.
Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel
Fielding to Austen
Language: English
Release Date: March 18, 2017
This book is about the empiricist challenge to literature, and its influence on eighteenth-century theories of fiction. British empiricism from Bacon to Hume challenged the notion that imaginative literature can be a reliable source of knowledge. This book argues that theorists of the novel, from...
Reading Orientalism
Said and the Unsaid
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2017
The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his 1978 book Orientalism. Said's seminal polemic analyzes novels,...
Yeats's Legacies
Yeats Annual No. 21
Language: English
Release Date: March 20, 2018
The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme. Hannah Sullivan’s brilliant history of Yeats’s versecraft...
by Katharine Cooke
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2016
First published in 1979, this book provides thorough a guide through Coleridge’s diverse body of work, looking not just his poetry but also his literary criticism and theories, plays, political journalism and theory, and writings on religion and philosophy. The author is careful to avoid emphasising...
Oedipus and the Sphinx
The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau
Language: English
Release Date: September 3, 2013
When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle—he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture’s central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown...
by Anthony J. Cascardi
Language: English
Release Date: November 19, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 19, 2011
What is the role of literature in the formation of the state? Anthony J. Cascardi takes up this fundamental question in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics, a comprehensive analysis of the presence of politics in Don Quixote. Cascardi argues that when public speech is constrained,...
The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy
Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity
Language: English
Release Date: March 5, 2010
In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for...
by
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2005
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2005
Both male and female poets cross the gender line: men assume a female voice and women a male voice.
The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse is a fascinating collection of such poems, beginning in the age of Chaucer and working its way through to the present day. Together these poems offer...
Medieval Boundaries
Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
In Medieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking...
Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers
Rethinking Subjectivity
Language: English
Release Date: May 30, 2014
This book attempts to deal with the problem of literary subjectivity in theory and practice. The works of six contemporary women writers — Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, Mahasweta Devi, Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison — are discussed as potential ways of testing and expanding the...
by Ania Loomba
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2015
Colonialism/Postcolonialism is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to the historical, theoretical and political dimensions of colonial and postcolonial studies.
This new edition includes a new introduction and conclusion as well as extensive updates throughout. Topics covered include globalization,...
The Postcolonial Short Story
Contemporary Essays
Language: English
Release Date: October 23, 2012
This book puts the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies and questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing on short fiction between 1975 and today – the period in which critical theory came to determine postcolonial studies – it argues for a sophisticated critique exemplified by the ambiguity of the form.