Product Description: This book seeks to work out literature s active role in shaping visual culture, thus demonstrating its relevance for image studies and emphasizing its participation in visual culture beyond its interaction with visual media. The essays focus on description, reader response and the materiality of literature...read more

Product Description: Roland Barthes – the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published...read more

Product Description: This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle...read more

Product Description: This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard’s axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form...read more

Product Description: The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what "monolingual” means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism...read more

Product Description: Was Ezra Pound the first theorist of world literature? Or did he inaugurate a form of comparative literature that could save the discipline from its untimely demise? Would he have welcomed the 2008 financial crisis? What might he say about America's economic dependence on China? Would he have been appalled at the rise of the “digital humanities,” or found it amenable to his own quasi-social scientific views about the role of literature in society? What, if anything, would he find to value in today's economic and aesthetic discourses? Ezra Pound in the Present collects new essays by prominent scholars of modernist poetics to engage the relevance of Pound's work for our times, testing whether his literature was, as he hoped it would be, “news that stays news...read more

Product Description: There has been much philosophical speculation on the potential failure of language as well as the search for a presentation of the "thing itself" beyond representation. Words Fail pursues the writings of a trio of philosophers--Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben--as prime examples of how modern poetry presents us with a profitable vantage point from which to survey the ongoing struggle of living in a highly fragmented world...read more

Can we truly claim that Metaphysics is over? Through a close reading of Levinas's masterpiece Totality and Infinity and a careful elaboration of Levinas's concept of the "nocturnal event" that surpasses the light of understanding, Raoul Moati opens the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the "end of metaphysics".

Product Description: The discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the subsequent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics captured the imaginations of nineteenth-century American writers and provided a focal point for their speculations on the relationships between sign, symbol, language, and meaning...read more

Product Description: Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature...read more