How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the Humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar.

Product Description: Insofar as literary theory has addressed the issue of literature as a means of communication and the function of literary fiction, opinions have been sharply divided, indicating that the elementary foundations of literary theory and criticism still need clarifying...read more

Product Description: What is the significance of writing in the wake of postmodernism? The previous decade has seen a growing interest in criticism of postmodern ethics and aesthetics from theorists and writers. This book begins to examine what art form or critical methodology might take its place...read more

Product Description: There has been a proliferation in recent scholarship of studies ofmonuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shedlight on aspects of their meanings. However, just as monuments marktheir territory by attempting to ensure the existence of boundaries, sothese discourses set a boundary between their authority as platforms onwhich the interpretation of monumental space occurs and, in thisrespect, the different authority of the novel...read more

Product Description: The Move Beyond Form focuses on works of art, music, literature, and film since 1960 that convey meaning through a creative undoing of form. Mary Joe Hughes suggests that cultural production of this time period conceived the world not so much as a series of separate entities, including art objects, but as an endless maze of relations and interconnections...read more

Mark J.P. Wolf’s study of imaginary worlds theorizes world-building within and across media, including literature, comics, film, radio, television, board games, video games, the Internet, and more. Building Imaginary Worlds departs from prior approaches to imaginary worlds that focused mainly on narrative, medium, or genre, and instead considers imaginary worlds as dynamic entities in and of themselves. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds―which are often transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial in nature―are compelling objects of inquiry for Media Studies. Chapters touch on: a theoretical analysis of how world-building extends beyond storytelling, the engagement of the audience, and the way worlds are conceptualized and experienced a history of imaginary worlds that follows their development over three millennia from the fictional islands of Homer’s Odyssey to the present internarrative theory examining how narratives set in the same world can interact and relate to one another an examination of transmedial growth and adaptation, and what happens when worlds make the jump between media an analysis of the transauthorial nature of imaginary worlds, the resulting concentric circles of authorship, and related topics of canonicity, participatory worlds, and subcreation’s relationship with divine Creation Building Imaginary Worlds also provides the scholar of imaginary worlds with a glossary of terms and a detailed timeline that spans three millennia and more than 1,400 imaginary worlds, listing their names, creators, and the works in which they first appeared.

Product Description: In the first book to use fiction as theory, Barbara L. Estrin reverses chronological direction, beginning with contemporary novels to arrive at a re-visioned Shakespeare, uncovering a telling difference in the stories that script us and that influence our political unconscious in ways that have never been explored in literary-critical interpretations...read more

Product Description: How does narratology relate to narrative strangeness? This question is urgent for narratologists who share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using natural narratives as some kind of genetic model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for whom the distinction of fiction is important...read more

Product Description: Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction explores how fiction works in the brains and imagination of both readers and writers. Demonstrates how reading fiction can contribute to a greater understanding of, and the ability to change, ourselves Informed by the latest psychological research which focuses on, for example, how identification with fictional characters occurs, and how literature can improve social abilities Explores traditional aspects of fiction, including character, plot, setting, and theme, as well as a number of classic techniques, such as metaphor, metonymy, defamiliarization, and cues Includes extensive end-notes, which ground the work in psychological studies Features excerpts from fiction which are discussed throughout the text, including works by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Anton Chekhov, James Baldwin, and others...read more

Product Description: Jordan Stump had often contemplated the relationship between a translation and “the book itself,” ruminating on the intriguing inherent sameness and difference between the two. In The Other Book, Stump examines the “other” forms of a book and the ways in which they both mirror and depart from the original...read more

Product Description: Why do Americans read contemporary fiction? This question seems simple, but is it? Do Americans read for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation? To satisfy their own insatiable intellectual curiosities? While other forms of media have come to monopolize consumers’ leisure time, in the past two decades book clubs have proliferated, Amazon has sponsored thriving online discussions, Oprah Winfrey has inspired millions of viewers to read both contemporary works and classics, and novels have retained their devoted following within middlebrow communities...read more

Product Description: On trouve a propos du roman plusieurs philosophies: celle, marxiste, exposee par Lukacs, voit dans les peripeties romanesques autant d'elements permettant de mettre en evidence les causes en jeu dans le cours de l'histoire; une autre, structuraliste, renvoie le roman a la seule jouissance esthetique pure qu'il est appele a procurer...read more