Product Description: Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare's Weird Sisters, Plato's Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts...read more

Product Description: The volume From Modern Theory to a Poetics of Experience contains a wide selection of essays, which were published during past decades in academic journal Teksty Drugie and were widely appreciated as significant contributions to the ongoing debate on principles and methods of literary studies...read more

Product Description: Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration...read more

Product Description: Where can theory go now? Where other voices concern themselves with theory's life or death, the contributors to Theory Aside take up another possibility: that our theoretical prospects are better served worrying less about "what’s next?" and more about "what else?" Instead of looking for the next big thing, the fourteen prominent thinkers in this volume take up lines of thought lost or overlooked during theory's canonization...read more

Product Description: For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world’s religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius, and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and Enlightenment essays and philosophical texts, together with the inherent skepticism about life after death in tragicomedies by Plautus, Shakespeare, Molière, and nineteenth-century novels by such as Dickens and Hugo, the literary critic and historian Alexander Welsh analyzes the prevalence of openness of mind and relieving good humor in Western thought...read more

Product Description: The Critic in the Modern World explores the work of six influential literary critics―Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood―each of whom occupies a distinct historical moment...read more

Product Description: In recent years, the disciplines of literary studies and cultural studies have engaged in occasional hostilities, but very rarely in productive engagement with each other's methodologies. Yet, each offers a set of rich resources for the other in a period of disciplinary crisis across the humanities in general, and within these two fields in particular...read more

With a new introduction and fully updated pointers to further reading, this second edition of Hans Bertens’ bestselling book is a must-have guide to the world of literary theory. Exploring a broad range of topics from Marxist and feminist criticism to post-modernism and new historicism it includes new coverage of: the latest developments in post-colonial and cultural theory literature and sexuality the latest schools of thought, including eco-criticism and post-humanism the future of literary theory and criticism. Literary Theory: The Basics is an essential purchase for anyone who wants to know what literary theory is and where it is going.

Product Description: Wittgenstein took literature extremely seriously and did not consider it of secondary importance.However, academic philosophy often shies away from the literary inflection of his philosophy. This is the first book to provide detailed discussions of his engagement with individual authors, such as Dostoevsky, Goethe, and Shakespeare...read more

Product Description: Stanley Cavell is widely recognized as one of America’s most important contemporary philosophers. His writings have attracted considerable attention among literary critics and theorists. Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature is the first monograph to comprehensively address the importance of literature in Cavell’s philosophy, and, in turn, the potential effect of his philosophy on contemporary literary criticism...read more

This outstanding practical guide to writing analytical essays on literature develops interpretive skills through focused exercises and modeled examples. The program is tailored to meet the specific needs of beginning undergraduates. Features unique, detailed guidance on paragraph structure Includes sample essays throughout to model each stage of the essay-writing process Focused exercises develop the techniques outlined in each chapter Dedicated checklists enable quick, accurate assessment by teachers and students Enhanced glossary with advice on usage added to core definitions

Product Description: Why did deconstruction emerge when it did? Why did commentators in literary studies seem to need to look back on it from the earliest moments of its emergence? This book argues that the invention of deconstruction was spread across several decades, conducted by many people, and focused on its two central figures, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man...read more

Product Description: Rooted religiously in the texts of the Old and new testament, the term 'Crisis of Faith' is a common phrase that evokes intense spiritual strife and doubt, the eternal struggle between good and evil. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////Critical contexts...read more

Over the past decade, our understanding of the cognition of literature has been transformed by scientific discoveries, such as the mirror neuron system and its role in empathy. Addressing questions such as why we care so deeply about fictional characters, what brain activities are sparked when we read literature, and how literary works and scholarship can inform the cognitive sciences, this book surveys the exciting recent developments in the field of cognitive literary studies and includes contributions from leading scholars in both the humanities and the sciences. Beginning with an overview of the evolution of literary studies, the editors trace the recent shift from poststructuralism and its relativism to a growing interdisciplinary interest in the empirical realm of neuroscience. In illuminating essays that examine the cognitive processes at work when we experience fictional worlds, with findings on the brain’s creativity sites, this collection also explores the impact of literature on self and society, ending with a discussion on the present and future of the psychology of fiction. Contributors include Literature and the Brain author Norman N. Holland, on the neuroscience of metafiction reflected in Don Quixote; clinical psychologist Aaron Mishara on the neurology of self in the hypnagogic (between waking and sleeping) state and its manifestations in Kafka’s stories; and literary scholar Brad Sullivan’s exploration of Romantic poetry as a didactic tool, applying David Hartley’s eighteenth-century theories of sensory experience.

Product Description: This book explains how literary criticism contributed to the creation of new literary genres, forms, and conventions. Particularly when written by authors who are still writing literature, it shows how criticism offers a way to invent new styles of literature...read more

Further education colleges deliver education and training to more students than any other institutions in the post-compulsory sector. Presenting a practical guide to teaching and learning within the context of the changing FE environment, this book addresses the diverse nature of the curriculum and of the student body for which it is designed.

Product Description: At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping—from falling asleep and waking up, to drowsiness and insomnia, to states in which sleeping and waking mix...read more