Theory Criticism category: 49531 books
Liberty of the Imagination
Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2012
In Liberty of the Imagination, Edward Cahill uncovers the surprisingly powerful impact of eighteenth-century theories of the imagination—philosophical ideas about aesthetic pleasure, taste, genius, the beautiful, and the sublime—on American writing from the Revolutionary era to the early nineteenth...
Dead Letters Sent
Queer Literary Transmission
Language: English
Release Date: June 20, 2015
Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms “thwarted transmission.” Such scenes, however, do not so much concede the impossibility of survival as...
Literature and Error
A Literary Take on Mistakes and Errors
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2018
Literature and Error comprises a series of essays by French scholars who seek to lay down the foundations of a theory that would argue for the productivity of errors and mistakes in literary works. While the "necessity of errors" has repeatedly been tackled from a philosophical angle, rarely...
by Adam Roberts
Language: English
Release Date: June 19, 2006
Language: English
Release Date: June 19, 2006
Science Fiction is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to one of the most popular areas of modern culture. This second edition reflects how the field is rapidly changing in both its practice and its critical reception. With an entirely new conclusion and all other chapters fully reworked...
The Tenth Muse
Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period
Language: English
Release Date: August 12, 2010
The Tenth Muse explores writings on the cinema in the first decades of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus examines the impact of cinema on early twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, aesthetic and cultural consciousness, by bringing together the study of the terms and strategies of early...
Binding Violence
Literary Visions of Political Origins
Language: English
Release Date: June 3, 2010
Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic...
Poetry for historians
Or, W. H. Auden and history
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2018
This is a book about the conflict between history and poetry and historians and poets - in Atlantic World society from the end of the seventeenth-century to the present day. Blending historiography and theory, it proceeds by asking: what is the point of poetry as far as historians are concerned? The...
The Terror of Natural Right
Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2009
Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right...
A Scholar's Tale
Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2009
For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies,...
Windows and Doors
A Poet Reads Literary Theory
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2014
Windows and Doors is a poetry handbook that places poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking alongside formalist modes, making explicit points of overlap and tension that are usually tacit. Each of Natasha Sajé’s nine essays addresses a topic of central concern to readers and writers of...
Narrative Fiction
Contemporary Poetics
Language: English
Release Date: December 16, 2003
What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? What featuers turn a discourse into a narrative text? Now widely acknowledged as one of the most significant volumes in its field, Narrative Fiction turns its attention to these and other questions.
In...
Christopher Smart's English Lyrics
Translation in the Eighteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: May 23, 2016
In the first full-length study of Christopher Smart’s translations and the place and function of translation in Smart’s poetry, Rosalind Powell proposes a new approach to understanding the relationship between Smart’s poetics and his practice. Drawing on translation theory from the early modern...
The Political Unconscious
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
Language: English
Release Date: April 11, 2014
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement...
The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry
A Novel
Language: English
Release Date: June 3, 2013
In his in-depth analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908--1997), Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a major mid-twentieth-century African American author and the sole female member of the "Wright School of Social Protest." He focuses on her innovative approaches to gender performance,...