Product Description: Has Western man, to quote Foucault, become a confessing animal? Drawing on new critical theory, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, this study argues that the impulse to confess produces people as subjects with the need to narrate and lay bare the secrets of their lives and to define themselves in relation to their sexuality and to a presumed norm...read more

Product Description: Explores why it matters that texts exist in the form of stories, and how they rest upon cultural and social assumptions (how narratives are always ideological).

Product Description: E. M. Forster's novels have always been popular, but he does not belong to the heavyweight category of a 'modernist' and his achievement has often been slighted or reduced as being a celebration of 'Englishness' and the Edwardian era...read more

Product Description: In a radical reassessment of one of the greatest writers of all time, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State draws on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to Julia Kristeva and Edward Said, to situate Dickens within the discourses circulating within his society - in particular those associated with modernity...read more

It is in 'Bleak House' that Dickens the realist and Dickens the modernist are often thought to meet. The essays collected in this 'New Casebook' embody some of the approaches to Dickens, using deconstructive, feminist, Marxist and post-structuralist methods.

In this volume, Jeremy Tambling has selected ten recent essays from the mass of Dante studies, and put the Divine Comedy into context for the modern reader. Topics such as Dante's allegory, his relationship to classical and to modern poetry, his discussion of love and of sexuality, his attitudes to Florence and to his contemporary Italy, are explored.

Product Description: This new study of Henry James draws on novels and short stories from throughout his career. Jeremy Tambling discusses James' importance as a theorist of the novel and argues for his importance as an American. He sees all James' work as a complex engagement with America and an attempt to find something in textual form that has been missed in the actual experience of America, in comparison with what he has imagined he has found in Europe...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Lost in the American City , Jeremy Tambling looks at European reactions to America and American cities in the nineteenth-century. Dickens visited America in 1842 and his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit set the agenda for future discussions of America...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Set against a backdrop of debates about the so-called 'end of history', 'the death of the subject' and 'the end of art', as well as the various forms of the 'post' that became prevalent in the late twentieth century, Jeremy Tambling introduces the idea of 'the posthumous' as a means of thinking about our relationship to the past, to death and to history...read more

This book shows two Chinese gay men in Buenos Aires and reflects on Hong Kong's past and future by probing masculinity, aggression, identity, and homosexuality. It also gives a reading of Latin America, perhaps as an allegory of Hong Kong as another post-colonial society.

Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun's Fiction attempts to put the short stories of this outstanding Chinese writer - whose work is central to understanding the May Fourth movement in China - into a broad context of Modernism.

Product Description: This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text, and comparing them with modern critical theories of hermeneutics and approaches to the text associated with the work of Derrida...read more

Product Description: This volume provides an advanced survey of Dante studies and offers a new, detailed, and accessible reading of his Purgatorio, making this very rich text freshly available to an English-speaking readership. Through analysis of a variety of emotional states across Dante's three major works - the Purgatorio, Inferno, and Paradiso, and in his minor works, such as the Rime and the Convivio, Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect contends that the emotions are historically constructed at different moments...read more

Product Description: Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city...read more

Literature and Psychoanalysis looks at Freud, Melanie Klein and Lacan, to explain their key concepts, and to suggest why they are essential in the study of literature. With a range of examples from Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, the Sherlock Holmes stories and Ibsen and from Surrealism, the book traces through the significance of literature in psychoanalysis, and why psychoanalysis is essential reading for those who are interested in literature. It looks fully at Freud on memory, and guilt, and on repression, and narcissism, and traces his key concepts as these morph into Melanie Klein's work on the mother, and into Jacques Lacan's studies of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Each of these concepts are illustrated through plentiful literary examples. Psychoanalysis is seen to be absolutely engaged with language in all its richness and power of ambiguity. All those who have wondered what Freud really said, and why he remains so important, and all those who want to follow the story of psychoanalysis through the twentieth century, will want to read this book, and to see how it intersects with, and is virtually identical with, the study of literature, and how both relate to writing as a kind of madness. The book is for students and teachers alike in literary and cultural studies, for those interested in gender studies and in feminism, and queer theory, and for all who are interested in what criticism and the study of texts means in University departments of the Arts.