Theory Criticism category: 49531 books

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet over a hundred-year period, beginning in 1573, that spans the late Renaissance and early baroque. Utilizing aesthetic and ideological criteria, author Mark Franko analyzes court ballet...

"The possibility of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual imagery, is fundamental to all writing about art, be it art criticism, theory or a passage in a novel. But there is no consensus concerning how such representation works. Some take it for granted that writing about art can result...

Taking aim at the mostly male bastion of art theory and criticism, Mira Schor brings a maverick perspective and provocative voice to the issues of contemporary painting, gender representation, and feminist art. Writing from her dual perspective of a practicing painter and art critic, Schor’s writing...

Ben and Stuart are old friends. Having known one another since school, they’ve grown up together and remained friends into adulthood. But now into their thirties, their lives have taken very different paths, and they’re now very different people, leading very different lives, following different...

In The Language of Literature, first published in 1971, Roger Fowler argues that the vitality and centrality of the verbal dimension of literature, and, read as a whole, the papers in this collection imply a consistent point of view on language in literature. The author focuses on the continuity of...

Since the 1960s, the literary critic Harold Bloom has been producing some of the most powerful criticism in the United States. This large body of work has, since the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, increasingly distanced itself from all critical vogues, be they psychoanalytic, post-structuralist...

Current Thought in Musicology covers a variety of topics, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present and touching on all the major disciplines of musicology: music history, theory and composition, music education, and performance. Taken together, the nine papers constitute a broad overview of the direction...

New Historicism has been one of the major developments in literary theory over the last decade, both in the USA and Europe. In this book, Wilson and Dutton examine the theories behind New Historicism and its celebrated impact in practice on Renaissance Drama, providing an important collection both for students of the genre and of literary theory.

Using Hannah Arendt’s account of the Greek polis to explain Milton’s fascination with the idea of public speech, this study reveals what is distinctive about his conception of a godly, republican oratory and poetics. The book shows how Milton uses rhetorical theory - its ideas, techniques and...

Adapting Philosophy looks at the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy adapts Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and in doing so creates its own distinctive philosophical position. Where previous work in the field has presented the trilogy as a simple ‘beginner’s guide’ to philosophy,...

Praise for Cole Swensen: "One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry." ---Library Journal "Engaging and delightful." ---Publishers Weekly    A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together...

The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new...

The novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte have become canonical texts for the application of twentieth century literary and cultural theory. Along with the work of their sister, Anne, their texts are regarded as a sources of diversity in themselves, full of conflictual material which different schools...

Disabling Characters provides detailed analyses of selected young adult (YA) novels and short stories. It looks at the relative agency of the disabled character, the behavior of the other characters, the environment in which the character must live, the assumptions that seem to be underlying certain...