Literary Theory category: 45240 books
Cultivation and Catastrophe
The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2017
At the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of black literary response to natural and agricultural experiences, whether the legacy of enforced agricultural labor or of the destruction and displacement brought about by a hurricane. In Cultivation and Catastrophe,...
by Jessica Straley
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2016
Evolutionary theory sparked numerous speculations about human development, and one of the most ardently embraced was the idea that children are animals recapitulating the ascent of the species. After Darwin's Origin of Species, scientific, pedagogical, and literary works featuring beastly babes and...
Ted Hughes and Trauma
Burning the Foxes
Language: English
Release Date: August 31, 2016
This book is a radical re-appraisal of the poetry of Ted Hughes, placing him in the context of continental theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek to address the traumas of his work. As an undergraduate, Hughes was visited in his sleep by a burnt fox/man who left a bloody...
American Hungers
The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2009
Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights...
Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America
Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies
Language: English
Release Date: September 14, 2017
This book examines temporal and formal disruptions found in American autobiographical narratives produced during the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that disruptions were primarily the result of encounters with new communication and transportation technologies. Through readings of major autobiographical...
Self Impression
Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2010
I am aware that, once my pen intervenes, I can make whatever I like out of what I was.' Paul Valéry, Moi. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of impersonality; a rejection of auto/biography. But most of the major works of European modernism and postmodernism engage in very profound and...
by Rebecca E. Biron
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2012
Blending cultural studies, literary analysis, and political and intellectual history, Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams shows how Elena Garro’s life and work expose the impasses inherent to the concept of Mexican modernity. While Garro is well known for the gossip and conflicts she created...
by A. Mohan
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2012
Shifting the postcolonial focus away from the city and towards the village, this book examines the rural as a trope in twentieth-century South Asian literatures to propose a new literary history based on notions of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia and how these ideas have circulated in the literary and the cultural imaginaries of the subcontinent.
by Kojin Karatani
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 1993
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 1993
Since its publication in Japan ten years ago, the Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has become a landmark book, playing a pivotal role in defining discussions of modernity in that country. Against a history of relative inattention on the part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory,...
Writing by Ear
Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel
Language: English
Release Date: June 26, 2016
Considering Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s literature as a case study and a source of theory, Writing by Ear presents an aural theory of the novel based on readings of Near to the Wild Heart (1943), The Besieged City (1949), The Passion According to G.H. (1964), Agua Viva (1973), The Hour...
Charles Darwins Looking Glass
The Theory of Evolution and the Life of its Author in Contemporary British Fiction and Non-Fiction
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2015
The book offers a comparative analysis of diverse Darwinism-inspired discourses such as post-modern novels, science fiction, popular science and nature films. Analysing the uses of the evolutionary discourse in recent literature and films, the study demonstrates how natural science influences the...
Dangerous Intimacies
Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Refuting commonly held beliefs within women’s and lesbian history, feminist theory, and histories of the novel, Dangerous Intimacies challenges the idea that sex between women was unimaginable in British culture before the late nineteenth century. Lisa L. Moore argues that literary representations...
by Brenda Beckman-Long
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 2016
Throughout her literary and critical career, Canadian writer Carol Shields (1935–2003) resisted simple categorization. Her novels are elegant puzzles that confront the reader with the ambiguity of meaning and narrative, yet their position within Shields’ critical feminist project has, until now,...
Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France
From Poetics to Aesthetics
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2012
Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France analyzes the work of several literary critics in France and England, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, who were inspired by the idea that literature – especially the literary sublime – might offer us the deepest kind...