Theory Criticism category: 49531 books
My Silver Planet
A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch
Language: English
Release Date: December 23, 2013
Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally...
Just Looking (Routledge Revivals)
Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2009
The spectacular development of early consumer society in Britain, France and the United States had a profound impact on constructions of femininity and masculinity, and commercial and cultural values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on novels by Theodore Dreiser, George...
by Maria Nikolajeva
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2002
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2002
Now available in paperback! Until now, there was no theoretical research of character in children's fiction and very few comprehensive theoretical studies of literary characters in general. In her latest intellectual foray, the author of From Mythic to Linear ponders the art of characterization. Through...
by Kate Houlden
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2016
This book focuses on sex and sexuality in post-war novels from the Anglophone Caribbean. Countering the critical orthodoxy that literature from this period dealt with sex only tangentially, implicitly transmitting sexist or homophobic messages, the author instead highlights the range and diversity...
Facing It
AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author
Language: English
Release Date: November 10, 2009
For a generation or more, literary theorists have used the metaphor of "the death of the author" in considering the observation that to write is to abdicate control over the meanings one's text is capable of generating. But in the case of AIDS diaries, the metaphor can be literal. Facing...
Four British Fantasists
Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper
Language: English
Release Date: April 25, 2006
Four British Fantasists explores the work of four of the most successful and influential fantasy writers of the generation who rose to prominence in the "second Golden Age" of children's literature in Britain: Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Penelope Lively. Drawing on...
by Professor Antony Easthope
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2001
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2001
Difference, the key term in deconstruction, has broken free of its rigorous philosophical context in the work of Jacques Derrida, and turned into an excuse for doing theory the easy way. Celebrating variety for its own sake, Antony Easthope argues, cultural criticism too readily ignores the role of the...
English Revenge Drama
Money, Resistance, Equality
Language: English
Release Date: September 16, 2010
Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama - for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting...
by Anna Ball
Language: English
Release Date: November 27, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: November 27, 2012
Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective is the first sustained study of gender-consciousness in the Palestinian creative imagination. Drawing on concepts from postcolonial feminist theory, Ball analyses a range of literary and filmic works by major creative practitioners...
Voice of the Leopard
African Secret Societies and Cuba
Language: English
Release Date: January 16, 2009
In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross...
Masquerade and Gender
Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women
Language: English
Release Date: October 20, 1993
Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period—Addison, Steele,...
Shakespeare Studies Today
Romanticism Lost
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2011
The Romantics invented Shakespeare studies, and in losing contact with our origins, we have not been able to develop an adequate alternative foundation on which to build our work. This book asserts that among Shakespeareans at present, the level of conviction required to sustain a healthy critical...
Signs of the Signs
The Literary Lights of Incandescence and Neon
Language: English
Release Date: May 16, 2011
This book is a study of signs in American literature and culture. It is mainly about electric signs, but also deals with non-electric signs and related phenomena, such as movie sets. The 'sign' is considered in both the architectural and semiotic senses of the word. It is argued that the drama and...
Fictions of Authority
Women Writers and Narrative Voice
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
Drawing on narratological and feminist theory, Susan Sniader Lanser explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. She sheds light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining...