Product Description: This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call "dialogical poetics." This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a continual negotiation between readers...read more

Product Description: This book explains how, under the influence of the new 'mental materialism' that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Brontës and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology...read more

Eros in Mourning begins with a reading of the Iliad that shows how Homer, not yet influenced by the ideology of transcendence, analyzes the structure of unassuageable mourning in a way that is as up-to-date as the latest poststructuralism. Then, in readings of Dante, Hamlet, La Princess de Clèves, Heart of Darkness, and Lacan, Staten depicts the "thanato-erotic" hysteria that is set off by the specter of the dead and decomposing body that is also the body of sexual love and which, in the "transcendentalizing" tradition, is more female than male. Yet, St. John, certain troubadours, and Milton offer glimpses of a more affirmative relation to "eros in mourning."

Product Description: Henry Staten adopts an innovative "psychodialectical" approach to Nietzsche, drawn from Nietzsche's own doctrine that philosophical thought is governed by drives and instincts that―for Nietzsche as for Freud―are fundamentally sexual in nature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "By linking Wittgenstein with Derrida, Staten suggests that the intellectual relevance of deconstruction is wider than the English-speaking public has recognized."—Studies in the Humanities"This work is altogether first rate. It is informative, faithful, rigorous and completely original in its problematization...read more