Fresh, original and compelling, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘the beginning’ and concluding with ‘the end’, the book covers topics that range from the familiar (character, narrative, the author) to the more unusual (secrets, pleasure, ghosts). Eschewing abstract isms, Bennett and Royle successfully illuminate complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works – so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, whilst Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literary laughter. Each chapter ends with a narrative guide to further reading and the book also includes a glossary and bibliography. The fourth edition has been revised to incorporate two timely new chapters on animals and the environment. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of both reading and studying literature.

Book by Rawson, Edna May, Rawson, Dorothy

Product Description: Focused on the relation between processes of globalization and literary genres, this volume intervenes in the prevalent notions of globalization, literary history, genre, and the novel. Using both close reading and world history, both literary criticism and political theory, the book is a timely intervention in the debates about world, postcolonial, and transnational literature as they have been intensified by critical globalization studies, world-systems analysis, Bourdieuan sociology, and cosmopolitanism studies...read more

This incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical response, Pelagia Goulimari examines: major thinkers and critics from Plato and Aristotle to Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Said and Butler; key concepts, themes and schools in the history of literary theory: mimesis, inspiration, reason and emotion, the self, the relation of literature to history, society, culture and ethics, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory; genres and movements in literary history: epic, tragedy, comedy, the novel; Romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. Historical connections between theorists and theories are traced and the book is generously cross-referenced. With useful features such as key-point conclusions, further reading sections, descriptive text boxes, detailed headings, and with a comprehensive index, this book is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching literary theory for the first time or unfamiliar with the scope of its history.

The etymological affinity between ‘criticism’ and ‘crisis’ has never been more resonant than it is today, when social life is increasingly understood as defined by a succession of overlapping global crises: financial and economic crises; environmental crises; geopolitical crises; terrorist crises; public health crises. But what is the role of literary and cultural criticism in conceptualizing this atmosphere of perpetual crisis? If, as Paul de Man maintained, criticism necessarily exists in a state of crisis, in what ways is this condition intensified at a time when the social formations within which criticism operates and the cultural artefacts that it takes as its objects are themselves pervaded by actual and imagined states of emergency? This book, the first sustained response to these questions, demonstrates the capacity of critical thought, working in dialogue with key narrative texts, to provide penetrating insights into a contemporary landscape of global, manufactured risk. Written by an international team of specialist scholars, the essays in the collection draw on a wide variety of contemporary theoretical, fictional, and cinematic sources, ranging from Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson to Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and Lauren Beukes to Ghost and the James Bond and National Treasure series. Appearing in the midst of a phase of extraordinary turbulence in the fabric of our interconnected and interdependent world, the book makes a landmark intervention in debates concerning the cultural ramifications of globalization.