Literary Criticism

This latest book from the well-known literary critic Robert Scholes presents his thoughtful exploration of the craft of reading. He deals with reading not as an art or performance given by a virtuoso reader, but as a craft that can be studied, taught, and learned. Those who master the craft of reading, Scholes contends, will justifiably take responsibility for the readings they produce and the texts they choose to read. Scholes begins with a critique of the New Critical way of reading (bad for poets and poetry and really terrible for students and teachers of poetry), using examples of poems by various writers, in particular Edna St. Vincent Millay. He concludes with a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the fundamentalist way of reading texts regarded as sacred.

In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. How to Read Literature is the book of choice for students new to the study of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity, and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on classicism, Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism along with spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling to Jane Austen and Samuel Beckett.

This book provides an insightful overview of the major cultural forms of 1930s America: literature and drama, music and radio, film and photography, art and design, and a chapter on the role of the federal government in the development of the arts. The intellectual context of 1930s American culture is a strong feature, whilst case studies of influential texts and practitioners of the decade - from War of the Worldsto The Grapes of Wrath and from Edward Hopper to the Rockefeller Centre - help to explain the cultural impulses of radicalism, nationalism and escapism that characterize the United States in the 1930s.

Discusses the recurring literary theme of rebirth and renewal in The Canterbury Tales, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and others. This title provides about 20 explanatory essays and critical analyses from which students studying literature can gain insights.

"With a biographical and critical commentary."

This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of nature and place.

In Ecocritical Explorations, Patrick D. Murphy explores environmental literature and environmental cultural issues through both theoretical and applied criticism. He engages with the concepts of referentiality, simplicity, the nation state, and virtual reality in the first section of the book, and then goes on to interrogate these issues in contemporary environmental literature, both American and international.

Ecocriticism, a theoretical movement examining cultural constructions of Nature in their social and political contexts, is making an increasingly important contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. Gabriel Egan's Green Shakespeare presents an overview of the concept of ecocriticism, detailed ecocritical readings of Henry V, Macbeth, As You Like It, Antony & Cleopatra, King Lear, Coriolanus, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

In Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from "Invisible Man" to "The Walking Dead," Lee Rozelle chronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II--creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy or rule the world, but to save it. The book asks what happens to these landscapes after the madness, havoc, and destruction. What monsters and magic surface then? Rozelle argues that zombiescapes and phantom zones depicted in the book become catalysts for environmental reanimation and sources of hope.

Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acquaintance. Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities.

Introducing students to the full range of approaches to the study of Renaissance poetry that they are likely to encounter in their course of study, Perspectives on Renaissance Poetry is an authoritative and accessible guide to the verse of the Early Modern period. Each chapter covers a major figure in Early Modern poetry and explores two different poems from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including: - Classical - Formalist - Psychoanalytic - Marxist - Structuralist - Reader-response - New Historicist - Ecocritical - Multicultural.

Series: Studies in rhetorics and feminisms

From Girl to Woman examines the coming-of-age narratives of a diverse group of American women writers, including Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, and explores the crucial role of such narratives in the development of American feminism.

In many fields, the body is the topic generating exciting new research and interdisciplinary inquiry. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, Writing on the Body explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class and sexual categories. Complemented by the editors' introduction, Writing on the Body is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.

Featuring essays by leading feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines, this key text explores the latest developments in autobiographical studies. The collection is structured around the inter-linked concepts of genre, inter-subjectivity and memory. Whilst exemplifying the very different levels of autobiographical activity going on in feminist studies, the contributions chart a movement from autobiography as genre to autobiography as cultural practice, and from the analysis of autobiographical texts to a preoccupation with autobiography as method.

The most comprehensive guide to the terminology and history of feminist theory available.This established and much admired dictionary provides succinct definitions of more than 600 terms, topics, movements and approaches as well as influential feminist thinkers, activists and critics withinfeminist theory. Entries cover a wide range of cross-cultural issues relating to family, work, sexuality, gender, race, imperialism and representation. There are also explanations of terms within Anglo-American and French feminist literary theory that have come into common usage, including 'Backlash', 'Postcolonialism', 'Postmodernism' and 'Queer Theory."

This unique reference offers alternate approaches to reading traditional literature, as well as suggestions for expanding the canon to include more gender sensitive works. Covering 96 of the most frequently taught works of fiction, essays offer teachers, librarians, and students fresh insights into the female perspective in literature.

"In combination this volume’s chapters open wide a door to discussion of the importance and the joy of historical fiction for readers at all levels. They also invite readers to compare fictional presentations of “true” events and persons to that of traditionally understood historical narratives. Such consideration may result in a clearer understanding of the nature of historical fiction on the part of readers and writers alike." -- From "About This Volume."

At a time when even much of the political left seems to believe that transnational capitalism is here to stay, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies refuses to accept the inevitability of the so-called 'New World Order'. By giving substantial attention to topics such as globalisation, racism, and modernity, it provides a specifically Marxist intervention into postcolonial and cultural studies.

See the chapter on New Historicism for more information on New Historicist Criticism.

In Death of a Nation, David Noble presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career.

'Radical, intrepid, compendious, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures, goes far toward restoring 'postcolonialism' to its historical premises by re situating that imperial project in its much changed and still controversial cartographies. It is Marlow's map of the 'heart of darkness' drastically redrawn: what was once the 'vast amount of red,' a 'deuce of a lot of blue,' a 'little green,' those 'smears of orange,' and the 'purple patch,' is here become a dense kaleidoscope that will of necessity rechart the itinerary of students and critical travellers across and around 'continental Europe and its empires.

This work takes eight important texts and gives students some of the most significant post-colonial readings of them published since the mid-1980s. Topics include cannibalism, slavery, the harem, missionary work, gender, nationalism and the Rushdie affair. The book offers practical examples of applying theoretical arguments to specific texts."

Contemporary postcolonial studies represent a controversial area of debate. This collection seeks a more pragmatic approach to the subject, taking into account its historical, social and political realities, rather than ignoring a consideration of material conditions.

Proposes an entirely new socially and politically conscious way of reading. Ato Quayson explores a practice of reading that oscillates rapidly between domains--the literary-aesthetic, the social, the cultural, and the political--in order to uncover the mutually illuminating nature of these domains. He does this not to assert the often repeated postmodernist view that there is nothing outside the text, but to outline a method of reading he calls calibrations: a form of close reading of literature with what lies beyond it as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradiction that inform both literature and society.

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have ledpoststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture.

This original study offers a comprehensive reappraisal of Freud's work from a literary-critical perspective.

The Critical Approaches series focuses on one type of literary criticism commonly studied in introductory literature classes. It defines the approach, introduces its genesis, and provides an overview of the leading practitioners within this area of scholarship. Essays then model the approach for students by examining a variety of works--novels, plays, films, and poems. Each volume contains an appendix, which provides prescriptive tools for what to look for when examining works using the particular approach. Volumes include a glossary of frequent terms, a list of works on that approach to literature, a bibliography and an index.

The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics. Covers all the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Expanded to include work from Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant.

This book uses concepts from A.-J. Greimas to analyze Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar as a discourse and as a definitive text for the Elizabethan "political unconscious." It reveals, along with an explanation of the libidinal and political functioning of the Calender, an "ideologeme" widely observable in the 1580s and 1590s, that of the captive/capturing woman.

See table of contents for a description.

See table of contents for description.

Innovative and thorough, Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry presents nine essays that reexamine the literary iconography of Middle English. Chaucer's work is the most well-known, and possibly the most significant, remnant of the Middle Ages; investigations into his writing and meanings are fruitful even today. The essays collected by John P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr. invite scholars to consider new interpretations of old symbols while acknowledging the intricacies of historical context. .

Semiotics is the theory of signs, and reading signs is a part of everyday life: from road signs that point to a destination, to smoke that warns of fire, to the symbols buried within art and literature. Semiotic theory can, however, seem mysterious and impenetrable. This introductory book decodes that mystery using visual examples instead of abstract theory. Read straight through or dipped into regularly, this book provides practical examples of how meaningis made in contemporary culture.

This revised second edition from our bestselling Key Guides includes brand new entries on some of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth- and twenty-first century: Zizek, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Butler and Haraway. With a new introduction by the author, sections on phenomenology and the post-human, full cross-referencing and up-to-date guides to major primary and secondary texts, this is an essential resource to contemporary critical thought for undergraduates and the interested reader.

See table of contents for details.

John Sturrock's classic explication of Structuralism represents the most succinct and balanced survey available of a major critical movement associated with the thought of such key figures as Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser theory. A classic work in literary and cultural theory. Reissued to coincide with calls for a return to structuralism. Includes a new introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté, which explores developments in the reception of structuralist theory in the past five to ten years.