Theory Criticism category: 49531 books

Paul Cefalu argues that Shakespearean characters raise timely questions about the relationship between cognition and consciousness and often defy our assumptions about "normal†? cognition. The book will appeal to scholars and students interested in both the virtues and limitations of cognitive literary criticism.

Demonstrating and defending a method of close reading and historical contextualisation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this collection of essays by Tom McAlindon combines a number of previously published pieces with original studies. The volume includes six interpretative studies, all but one...

From Walt Whitman to the contemporary period, the long poem has been one of the more dynamic, intricate, and yet challenging literary practices of modernity. Addressing those challenges, Writing in Real Time combines systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics to interpret a broad...

The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis offers fresh insight into the fascinating and controversial works, both literary and visual, of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Accessible to students and scholars alike, this Companion illuminates key areas of Lewis's life and career. Written by a team of leading...

Basing his contention on two different lines of argument, Michael Bryson posits that John Milton-possibly the most famous 'Christian' poet in English literary history-was, in fact, an atheist. First, based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for...

Surprisingly, glimmerings of ecofeminist theory that would emerge a century later can be detected in women’s poetry of the late Victorian period. In Reconceiving Nature, Patricia Murphy examines the work of six ecofeminist poets—Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance...

This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations...

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that...

Metafiction is one of the most distinctive features of postwar fiction, appearing in the work of novelists as varied as Eco, Borges, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. It comprises two elements: firstly cause, the increasing interpenetration of professional literary criticism and the practice of writing;...

This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early film theorists and feminist critics are equally...

In Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat offers a comprehensive critique of the interrelated concepts of 'victim' and 'survivor' as they have been ideologically distorted in Western thought. Framed by the phenomenological perspective of Edmund Husserl, Nissim-Sabat...

Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought provoking volume that speculates on a range of textual works—poetic, novelistic, and programmed—as technical objects. With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving that include multimedia,...

The World of Failing Machines offers the first full-length discussion of the relationship between speculative realism and literary criticism. In identifying some of the most significant coordinates of speculative-realist thought, this book asks what the implications might be for the study of literature. It is argued that the first casualty might well be the form of the traditional essay.

The Analyst‘s Ear and the Critic‘s Eye is the first volume of literary criticism to be co-authored by a practicing psychoanalyst and a literary critic. The result of this unique collaboration is a lively conversation that not only demonstrates what is most fundamental to each discipline, but creates a joint perspective on reading literature that ne