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Subject Area: Literary Theory
Brown, Sharon Rogers1993 0-7734-9304-2 152 pages
This work establishes the shared theme, topics and stylistic traits of American travel narratives. Though the narratives span three hundred years and the authors belong to three different populations (explorers, colonial settlers, and American citizens), their writings may be grouped together as a genre and assessed by the same standards as other literary works.
Dewan, Pauline
2010 0-7734-3762-2 412 pages
This book examines the fairy-tale as a significant influence on place in the literature. The rapid development of children’s fiction in the nineteenth century occurred shortly after the widespread circulation of fairy tales. Fairy tales are a particularly concrete, visual, and cinematic form of writing, a genre in which place plays a significant role. Children’s authors use fictional landscapes in a variety of traditional and innovative ways to create compelling, powerful texts.
Klein, Holger
1994 0-7734-9114-7 408 pages
These nineteen essays take a comparative approach, dealing with committed texts as literary works of art. Spanning three decades, they also contain theoretical reflections on the conditions of committed writing and on approaches and methods appropriate to their study by literary critics. Some are broadly theoretical, some offer surveys of larger areas, but most study a few significant texts, demonstrating ways in which literature that offers things besides aesthetic enjoyment may be fruitfully analyzed and appraised.
McDermott, James Dishon
2006 0-7734-5899-9 168 pages
Throughout literary history, committed writers have sought to rebuke the inauthenticity of excessively ‘full’ discourses by deploying a minimalist literary style. In their texts, these literary minimalists substitute absence for those linguistic structures that are critical to the authority and integrity of the full text. In the postmodern period specifically, writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver, and David Mamet have used this literary style of contextualized fearlessness as a means of criticizing and reforming philosophical, literary, social, or political practices perceived to be inauthentic by virtue of their wasteful foundationalism. Rather than merely diverting or reassuring the reader, each writer seeks to create edifying texts that not only raise doubts about essentialist platitudes but also alert the reader to the possibility of authentic self-transformation through a reckoning with contingency. In using an austere style to challenge a set of foundationalist discursive practices, Wittgenstein addresses metaphysical philosophy and its claims to logocentric Truth; Brautigan, the discourses of Beat writing and Abstract Expressionism and their claims to noncontingent selfhood; Carver, Reaganite propaganda and its claims to essentialist community; and Mamet, mass-media entertainment and its claims to cultural hegemony.
Nelson, B. R.
1998 0-7734-8390-X 140 pages
This work is in two parts, the first presenting a theory of the nature of morality, and the second presenting a theory about the nature of dramatic form (as the true representation of a person as a moral being). It examines the problem in relation to both empirical and abstract theories. Two empirical theories are discussed in detail: one found in Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the other in Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals is examined as a powerful abstract theory. In the second part, a discussion of David Copperfield shows how dramatic form can reveal a person's character in the actual circumstances of his/her psychological development. The study illuminates the deep connections between moral philosophy and literature, revealing something essential about the life of a moral being.
Haney, William S. II
1999 0-7734-8047-1 196 pages
These essays discuss not only British literature but other literatures in English and texts in other media including film, and the changing face of not just one nation's cultural studies but cultural studies in a transnational environment. These essays epitomize a complex proliferation of approaches to the ever-changing domain of literary and cultural studies.
Burgess, Gordon J. A.
1999 0-7734-8032-3 278 pages
This is the first full-length computer-aided examination of Goethe's novel. This study focuses on a close critical analysis of the text, underpinning its findings with often incontrovertible evidence based on the outputs of computer-generated indexes and concordances. The examination of the text itself is complemented by an overview of critical attitudes toward the novel, from Goethe's contemporaries down to the present day, and by an outline of the possibilities and limitations of a computer-based text analysis.
Fajardo-Acosta, Fidel
1989 0-88946-110-4 224 pages
An interpretation of Beowulf as a disconfirmation of the heroic type in which the author argues that the poem is the vehicle of a strong anti-militaristic, anti-heroic, pacifist wisdom that he claims is the essence of epic literature.
Sánchez, Francisco Javier
2009 0-7734-4670-2 220 pages
This work anyalzes the novelistic world of Juan Benet and Alain Robbe-Grillet, acclaimed founders of the Spanish Nueva Novela and the French Nouveau Roman. It analyzes the authors’ most influential novels: Les gommes (1953), Le voyeur (1955), La jalousie (1957), Volverás a Región (1967), Una meditación (1969) and Un viaje de invierno (1972), and challenges the view that these novels are superfluous, experimental and not having any direct relationship to reality.
Edge, Hoyt L.
1994 0-7734-9075-2 192 pages
Argues that a kind of thinking which this study calls "atomistic" has come to predominate in western culture, and describes four assumptions of modernism: atomism, foundationalism, dominionism, and "Mind as Reason". Traces the origins of these ideas and their implications, and then describes a transition from atomism to holism and the increasing emphasis on relational thinking in a number of areas, from politics to science and ethics.
Cooney, William
1989 0-88946-346-8 224 pages
Articles by the best Marcel scholars in America attempt to capture Marcellian thought never before treated in literature.
Austin, William J.
1996 0-7734-4222-7 300 pages
This study examines the deconstructive themes and methods which inform T. S. Eliot's prose and poetry, and demonstrates that, long before Jacques Derrida intervened in the area of literary analysis, Eliot had already developed the principles now enshrined as deconstruction. After a brief introduction, the initial chapter is devoted to an in-depth analysis of Derrida's major texts. Once this groundwork is laid, chapter two begins the analysis of Eliot by revisiting his dissertation of F. H. Bradley with particular attention to those theoretical pronouncements that anticipate the direction of Derrida's thought. Further chapters forge a link between Derrida, the dissertation, and Eliot's essays on literature; and extend the analysis into "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Waste Land, "Ash Wednesday," Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion.
Yang, Carol L.
2011 0-7734-1561-0 364 pages
This book is a detailed investigation of T. S. Eliot’s work in the light of Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism and carnival. It employs a new paradigm for interpreting Eliot’s work, offering new points of analysis regarding, in particular, his later works.
Price, Thomas F.
1992 0-7734-9897-4 364 pages
Introduces a new general theory of dramatic form, together with a detailed, practicable method for the analysis and critical understanding of plays and screenplays. The author proposes that any play or screenplay can ultimately be understood as conforming to one of just seven dynamic types, and that knowledge of the kinetic and modal signatures of these skeletal `plots' provides the key for decoding the metaphorical significance of a drama's action and imagery. Examples range from ancient Greek drama to modern opera libretti to contemporary film, and from acknowledged dramatic masterpieces to more popular works. Will help drama professionals and students better grasp a work's conception and intention, and help the non-professional audience better understand a play or movie.
Whaley, Annemarie Koning
2015 1-4955-0341-0 44 pages
Quinn, Dennis
2000 0-7734-7720-9 196 pages
This study subjects Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to an archetypal mode of analysis to extract a coherent meaning from the text. The approach invokes a motif-driven, patterned analysis of the text, establishing the monomythic model of Joseph Campbell as a context for evaluating the heroic dimensions of the questing knights Redcrosse, Guyon, Britomart, and Calidore. The methodology further proposes to liberate Spenser from allegory. The study promotes the quest paradigm as a valid measure of characterization capable of generating interpretation across a wide spectrum of texts. Finally, the study suggests that Spenser – himself subjected to analysis following the model – abandons his ambitious self-appointed quest to complete The Faerie Queene in favor of a modestly successful completion of a surrogate quest to achieve personal and literary renown, a quest embodied in the Amoretti. With illustrations.
Lee, Cecilia Castro
2008 0-7734-4964-0 392 pages
Based on contemporary literary theory, this study analyzes how different narrative strategies produce diverse readings of Rojas’s fables.
This study explores the narrative art of Spanish writer Carlos Rojas (1928- ) based on the analysis of his mature fictional works, or the Trilogies written between 1978 and 1995. The motif that structures expressed in the phrase, “The Dream of Reason and the Nightmare of History,” or from Goya’s Dream of Reason to James Joyce’s Nightmare of History.
Reason is necessary to confront madness (the monsters that the dream or the abandonment of reason produces); likewise it constitutes a blindness, another type of dream, one that leads to the rationalist monster. Rojas humanizes the monster and his tormented characters are called to awake from their personal and collective nightmare.
The study dismantles Rojas’s multiple-layered texts espousing his art of fabulation. Different narrative strategies and theoretical themes lead to diverse readings: mythical, ekphrastic, historical, existentialist, metaphysical, and ideological. The novels form a palimpsest where surrealism and the baroque, the modern and the postmodern, history, art, and myth are layered.
This work is based on contemporary literary theory: Eco’s Open Work, Kristeva’s intertextuality, Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernity, White’s History as Narrative, Turner’s Liminality, Kreiger’s Exphrasis and Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination. This book contains six color photographs and two black and white photographs.
Choi, Myung
2009 0-7734-3844-0 132 pages
This work examines the presence of the grotesque in fiction, plastic arts, and films, to interpret the postmodern artistic phenomenon. The Reader’s Response Theory is utilized in order to examine the relevance of the grotesque to one of the most important factors of postmodernism: the reader. The study analyzes the evolution of the grotesque and reveals different levels of grotesque imagery and its possible meanings in the works of three authors: Machado de Assis, Camilo José Cela, and Alejandra Pizarnik.
Johnston, Georgia
1997 0-7734-8577-5 280 pages
These essays examine texts from the Renaissance to the Postmodern, analyzing transgression's formation as a product of textual interdependence with audience, showing that subverted gender politics, unexpected genre combinations, and revised cultural histories result from textual transgression. The anthology emphasizes that transgression is not a transcendent transparent act that breaks cultural norms. Instead, western conceptions of text and audience construct the definitions and effects of transgression.
Wilks, Thomas
2006 0-7734-5602-3 356 pages
This study compares the substantial literary projects of Michel Leiris and Hubert Fichte, and it examines how they overstep theoretical prescriptions in their explorations of the self. The author concentrates predominantly on those components of these multi-volume projects that he argues are autobiographically motivated, although he establishes that these texts are not straightforwardly representative of this mode. In its tripartite arrangement, his study investigates the main areas of critical attention relating to the classification of the authors’ works, with particular reference to autobiography. Throughout this investigation, he provides evidence for his contention that for Leiris and Fichte alike, life and writing becomes mutually defining over the protracted progressions of their self-scrutiny. In the first part, he highlights biographical parallels between the authors, and he compares their respective project-conceptions. He then evaluates the efficacy of autobiographical theory in explaining their self-projections beyond their personal experience and towards textual processes of enactment.
Chishty-Mujahid, Nadya Q.
2012 0-7734-2563-2 116 pages
Nadya Q.Chishty-Mujahid’s Explaining the Canonical Poems of English Literature spans several centuries of English literature, by examining the canonical poetry of writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, Browning, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett, and D.H. Lawrence. Chishty-Mujahid demonstrates that however much we have studied these great poets, there is still room to elucidate on their magnitude. More importantly, Chishty-Mujahid reinvigorates the importance of these masterpieces by rejecting the postmodern argument that these authors are culturally dominant relics of the past. She argues that while canonical poetry has undergone several mutations over the centuries those works continue to uplift the soul and remain the apex of literary expression.
Chishty-Mujahid, Nadya Q.
2014 0-7734-4348-7 152 pages
The text focuses on six major themes often found in canonical English poetry. These include religion, nature, classics, romance, individual struggle, and politics. Using representative works of famous poets including, but not limited to, Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, Keats, Kipling and the Rossetti siblings, the book links poems on diverse and varied topics (such as the Virgin Mary, colonial India, and Tudor history) in order to illustrate the richness and complexity of the literary canon.
An impressive and compelling contribution to the study of poetry that will enchant students of literature and casual readers for years to come. Instead of using chronological division of works the author arranges the poems according to central themes in literature. The text’s main aim is to make challenging poems more approachable and accessible to young undergraduates.
Mermier, Guy R.
1993 0-7734-9261-5 206 pages
This textbook is an introduction to the traditional method of explication de texte. It leads the beginner from the basic concepts and definitions to gradual mastery of the method suggested. All literary genres (prose, poetry, theater) and centuries are represented in the theoretical and practical section. Texts are explicated in full at first, then suggested plans for a finished presentation are given. Later, texts are presented without guides and students are expected to imitate the sample texts. The book also includes an introduction to French prosody and criteria for evaluating ideas, emotions, style, composition and literary value. In French.
Rosales Herrera, Raúl
2012 0-7734-2588-8 304 pages
This book considers Cuban diaspora novels written since 1980, critically examining the autobiographical elements of the works and the authors who wrote them. Incorporating autobiographical theories and Cuban exile history across literary generations, the study analyzes different approaches to fictional self-figuration. It underscores how the autobiographical within fictional discourses does not conceal, but instead reveals more flexible outlets for authorial and diasporic self-representation.
From the beginning the author defines the difference between diaspora and exile. The text then studies three periodic phases in the first-person fictional novels of Cuban writers outside the island, taking into consideration the writers’ own displacement and the nature of the dynamics between exile and adopted country. The author discovers a commonality in all of the novels: strong parallels between history and fiction and overlapping characteristics of the novels’ authors and their narrating protagonists – both displaced subjects. The text represents an important contribution to autobiographical studies and to the study of both Cuban and Latino literature in the United States, but especially to the studies of one of the newest routes of Cuban literature in the world.
Pellow, C. Kenneth
1995 0-7734-9067-1 380 pages
This book shows how films are useful as literary criticism. From an examination of what will and will not "translate" into film from print, one learns much about a novel's structure and methodology, its themes, narratology, and other aspects of fictions. Novels/films include The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Sterile Cuckoo, Catch-22, Bang the Drum Slowly, A Room With a View, Ordinary People, more.
Roberts-Camps, Traci
2008 0-7734-5235-4 212 pages
This book examines the various representations of the female body in four contemporary Mexican and Chicana novels written by women: Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963) by Elena Garro, Nadie me verá llorar (1999) by Cristina Rivera Garza, La piel del cielo (2001) by Elena Poniatowska, and Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros. This work also analyzes the depictions of the female body in these novels from the perspectives of space and violence, abjection and national progress, sexuality and sensuality, and visibility and invisibility.
Parkin, John
1990 0-88946-628-9 292 pages
Reassesses the literary relationship linking Henry Miller and François Rabelais in terms of readings, imitations, and analogies. Uses a Bakhtinian approach to explore how Miller, as a 20th-century anarchist and rebel, could realize his kinship with Rabelais, a 16th-century humanist and Christian. The various avenues explored include lexical richness, conviviality, laughter, the grotesque, scenes of carnival, and the notions of freedom and self-transcendence. Despite the negative side of Miller's work, thought, and artistic vision, of which obscenity, nihilism, and despair form clear elements, Miller's personality exudes a fundamentally positive spirit based on friendship, trust, and mutual respect, all of which can be seen as elements in the Rabelaisian philosophy of Pantagruelisme.
Sasso, Eleonora
2012 0-7734-3913-7 224 pages
This text is the first to examine the influence of William Morris on the artistic, literary, and ideological styles of Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats. The focus is on a selection of Morris’ writings and situates them in the fields of art, culture, and society. Through Roland Barthes’ approach to interpreting text, Sasso demonstrates that Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats were all readers of Morris’ work which in turn stimulated their own writing and infused them with desire. Shows how Morris’ influence caused his contemporaries to emulate his style of writing and how that style ultimately framed the mind of Victorian England.
Turpin, Cherie Ann
2010 0-7734-3839-4 128 pages
This is a study of women writers of the African Diaspora and their articulation of the erotic as an important aspect of human experience beyond the limits and expectations of society. Within the imaginary scope of the works of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Dionne Brand, the erotic is made manifest through rewriting narrative and poetic form.
Punter, David
2005 0-7734-6183-3 372 pages
This is a book that treats postmodernism in its own terms, regarding it as a phenomenon which both represents a contemporary moment and also looks towards its own transcendence, passing away, disappearance. It is distinctive in two ways. First, it not only deals with recognizably postmodern features and aspects – the death of the author, dislocations of time and space, experimentations with different media – but it also looks forward to modes of writing and textuality which have – perhaps already – displaced the postmodern – the graphic novel, electronic textuality, the virtually real. Second, it attempts a type of discourse that matches these developments: never completely discursive or linear, this book seeks for a new type of criticism which will both reflect the spectrality towards which much postmodernism tends and at the same time remain in touch with the need to encounter postmodern and post-postmodern texts and cultural phenomena in intelligible terms. The book’s critical range extends from the Gothic through to the most recent harbingers of modernity, and it describes a trajectory that will both take account of a significant mass of recent fiction and poetry and at the same time point readers towards the most likely developments in the textualities of the twenty-first century.
Schneider, Ben Ross Jr.
2015 0-7734-4261-8 260 pages
A unique examination of Shakespeare’s different plays to prove the relevance of stoic philosophy, in the themes, ideas, and images that play out in his body of work. Contemporary interpreters of Shakespeare have ignored these primary philosophical sources of Renaissance thought that influenced the fundamental moral principles and thinking of his time.
Griffin, Gabriele
1993 0-7734-9877-X 344 pages
Examines the conceptual parallels concerning selflessness, knowing the void, and degrees of attention in Weil's and Murdoch's moral philosophy, and considers how these concepts find expression in Murdoch's fiction. The study discusses similarities in their backgrounds; uses psychoanalytic theory to examine selflessness, the void, and destabilized identity in the novels; and concludes with a discussion of their moral philosophy which underwrites traditional feminine roles within Western culture while implying radical changes for masculine roles.
de Zwaan, Victoria
2002 0-7734-7280-0 172 pages
This study argues that the often-noted resistance to interpretation by these authors’ experimental fiction has to do with the radical functioning of metaphor in their texts. After an introductory discussion about the contemporary debates about metaphor and narrative, she examines each author’s work in various theoretical contexts such as cognitivist models, deconstruction, modernism and post-modernism, concentrating on a number of narrative strategies which she groups under the term piracy. The conclusion situates the metaphoric narrative in relation to the competing literary critical paradigms of postmodernist fiction.
Morgan, Gwendolyn A.
2006 0-7734-5939-1 136 pages
This study explores the construction of false authority within and by contemporary popular fiction, especially within those tales concerned with the creation of texts themselves. This practice represents a return to medieval theories of authority, where the Bible, theology, and the ancient classics represented recourse for the assertions of contemporary thinkers and writers.
Murphy, Neil
2004 0-7734-6518-9 286 pages
This study situates three contemporary Irish novelists, Aidan Higgins, John Banville and Neil Jordan in the context of Modernist and Postmodernist literature. In order to map how these writers respond to the problems of epistemological doubt, their work is positioned beside that of other writers like Rushdie, Nabokov, Calvino, Garcia-Marquez and Robbe-Grillet. In addition, the opening chapter outlines a working position on the meaning and significance of Postmodernism, as it pertains to literary fiction, with particular reference to the work of Brian McHale, Ihab Hassan, Patricia Waugh, David Harvey, Richard Kearney and David Lodge. Although firmly rooted in Irish literary studies, this work represents a departure from recent critical work in Irish literature in that it seeks, responding to the specificity of the fictionalized concerns of these writers, to contextualize the fictions of Higgins, Banville and Jordan within Irish and international literary traditions, rather than in an Irish historical or political framework.
Ossers, Manuel A.
2010 0-7734-1382-0 356 pages
The purpose of this work has been to study the narrative of Juan Bosch from the point of view of stylistic analysis. Such an analysis allows for an in depth examination of the sensorial dynamics as the means of expression of the author. By taking a stylistic approach to Juan Bosch’s short stories, I have drawn conclusions on the relationship between the expressive means selected by Bosch and his intent when making such selections.
In Part I, I have studied the expression in terms of sensorial experience. I hope to have established the degree of effectiveness with which the author is able to transmit his sensations (and those of his characters as he wishes the reader to perceive them) by means of the images produced through the word.
In Part II, I have studied the expression in terms of the intentional intensification of the word or phrase. I hope to have demonstrated the fidelity and originality with which Bosch interprets the existential reality of his characters and the natural or social milieu in which it takes place. This work will be of interest to scholars of the literatures of the Dominican Republic, the Spanish Caribbean, and Latin American in general.
Brooks, Douglas A.
2010 0-7734-3666-9 576 pages
This volume of the Shakespeare Yearbook brings together articles centered around the intersections between Lacanian Theory and the literary production of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Krogh, Kevin
2001 0-7734-7581-8 188 pages
In much of Antonio Machado’s poetry, the Castilian landscape is more than merely the imagery or physical context necessary to convey the poet’s state of mind or emotion. The landscape is either protagonist or co-protagonist with man in the human experience communicated through the poetic utterance. It examines Campos de Castilla as a collection which communicates a quintessentially Castilian collective perceptual experience which relies heavily on sensory data. This study examines Machado’s poetry from a dialogical perspective, a reading which explores the experience of reading, and discusses the properties of Machado’s perceptual poetry in contrast with the non-perceptual referential system of linguistic signs characteristic of Romanticism. It explores the relations between the text, the participatory consciousness of the reader and the reader’s extratextual world.
Thiel-Janczuk, Katarzyna
2006 0-7734-5550-7 196 pages
This book, by making reference to a theoretical reflection on themes of mythocriticism, the philosophy of language and the individual, places the work of this modern author within the context of two metaphors – the mythical labyrinth and its postmodernist variant, Deleuze’s rhizome – treated as figures of identity and otherness. They express two contrary tendencies in Modiano’s writing. The labyrinth signifies the breakdown of the historical paradigm of identity and the crisis of the referential functioning of literature, characteristic of structuralist thought. An attempt to recover the reliability of narration outside historical time leads the author towards archaic images which allude to the traditional idea of the sacred. The imagination, however, dictates images which are not grounded in history and are thus a parody of the mythical reversion. The rhizome, as a metaphor for opening, not only breaks down the traditional dichotomy between reality and fiction, but also, by making reference to the contemporary idea of nomadism inspired by Jewish tradition, carries a reflection on identity and otherness in the field of ethics. In the context of biographical narration, the co-existence of the labyrinth and the rhizome signifies on one hand a vain attempt to recreate faithful events from the character’s life, and on the other a restoration of the intersubjective relationship of the author with the Other, whether real or imagined, within the space of the text. This makes it possible to treat the autobiographical and autofictional dimension of Modiano’s work not as an attempt to create the author’s fictional or real identity, but as the coming into being of his ethical identity. In French
Utz, Richard J.
1995 0-7734-8882-0 264 pages
This is the first volume to offer a comprehensive examination of the theoretical and practical possibilities of an interdisciplinary approach to nominalism in medieval literature. The essays avoid theoretical reductivism and provide an outstanding critical perspective. In each essay, an expert scholar in the field investigates one of the existing theoretical approaches (e.g., nominalism as a direct 'source' for late medieval writers in the philological sense; nominalism as a philosophical superstratum; nominalism as part of a typical late-medieval mentality; nominalism as an intertext; medieval nominalist sign theory in comparison with twentieth-century sign theory, etc.) and then apply the chosen approach to a literary case study. It also contains the most inclusive bibliography on nominalism and late medieval literature. This volume will be the first and foremost source to be consulted for any scholar in the field.
Haney, William S. II
1993 0-7734-9379-4 208 pages
Unlike the Western mode, Sanskrit poetics provides an understanding of language and consciousness based not on difference but on the coexistence of opposites. This study argues that the knowledge of meaning and expanded consciousness provided by Sanskrit poetics supplements deconstruction and poststructuralism. In contributing to the growing multicultural emphasis in scholarship, this book develops a comparative poetics between the European and Sanskrit literary traditions.
Will, Frederic
1993 0-7734-3038-5 212 pages
The first section of the book deals with the births of language and literature from consciousness, and the formation of literary history. Explores Husserl's mapping of the origins of language, and subsequent language theories in Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger. Section Two traces privileged Homeric shelters such as the bowers off the battle-line in the Iliad and hidden islands like Ogygia in the Odyssey. It tracks that same language-sheltering into several Biblical wombs -- Sarai's, Mary's or Jonah's whale's, and turns from these to language shelters constructed by Sappho for her passion, Saint Paul for inner salvation, and by the creator of the Bhagavad Gita. The final section looks at the intimate intermeshing of literature and music with the Zeitsgeist, and finally, locates the impulse to literature and all art in the pulse of biology.
Ojeda, Cecilia
2004 0-7734-6367-4 172 pages
This book focuses on the “New Chilean Narrative” published in the historically significant decade of the 90s by a group of writers belonging to the “Generation of the 80s”. The analysis of selected texts by Ana María del Río, Diamela Eltit, Guadalupe Santa Cruz, Jaime Collyer, Ramón Díaz Eterovic, Gonzalo Contreras, and Alberto Fuguet explores the literary strategies by which these writers present literary “imageries of deception” that question the post-dictatorial order in Chile. The concept of “imageries of deception” alludes to literary motifs that represent a critical view of a Chilean contemporary reality whose source can be traced to the Pinochet dictatorship and its ideological aftermath. The “imageries of deception” question the dominant myths that sustain Chilean post-dictatorial society, and remember the nation’s ideological conflicts of the past three decades. As cultural spaces where memory resists the dominant will to deceptively erase the past, the narrative of the 90s reveals the enduring and debilitating impact of a dictatorship successfully disguised as the current “neo-liberal democracy”.
Vogelzang, Marianna E.
1992 0-7734-9538-X 328 pages
This book is one of the first collections of studies on a defined problem in Mesopotamian Literature. The broad topic of a possible oral or aural character of Akkadian and Sumerian epic poetry and its implications is treated in a number of ways, including a confrontation with traditional Oral-Formulaic Theory, an overview of Sumerian literary types which contrasts putative oral literature with historical literacy, a detailed analysis of the phonic features, and concentrations on specific structural features of Sumerian compositions in order to detect possible markers of either oral origins or aural performance and transmissions. Treating one of the very earliest literary systems mankind ever evolved, it will be of use to literary scholars and specialists in early literatures, as well as assyriologists.
Hallett, Cynthia Whitney
1999 0-7734-7936-8 168 pages
This work addresses minimalism as demonstrating a parallel poetics to that of the short story, and analyses many works of short fiction by Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison that reflect this relationship. Very little academic scholarship addresses Literary Minimalism in positive terms. This work traces the evolution of literary minimalism as a by-product of the development of the modern short story.
Khorrami, Mohammad Mehdi
2002 0-7734-6935-4 184 pages
This book describes and analyzes contemporary Iranian fiction through the technical components of Persian literary tradition. Texts examined include: Tuba va Ma’na-ye Shab; Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s “Dadresi”; Ayenehha-Ye Dardar; and the short stories of Shahriyar Mandanipur.
Lewis, Ethan
2007 0-7734-5758-5 252 pages
This book builds on previous research to scrutinize the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot through the lens of Imagism. While Pound eventually disassociated himself from the Imagist movement and Eliot never belonged to it, it was still an influence on the development of these two poets. Therefore, Imagism is essential to a proper understanding of certain elements in the works of these twentieth-century poets.
Levitt, Morton P.
2002 0-7734-7032-8 356 pages
Campion, Edmund J.
1995 0-7734-9029-9 172 pages
Explores the relationship between critical reading and creative imitation of the works of Erasmus by Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot. This study makes judicious use of Erasmus' exegetical writings and his Colloquies in order to demonstrate how specific religious, ethical, and moral problems were treated in remarkably similar ways by Erasmus, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Marot.
Kim, Dal-Yong
2009 0-7734-3780-0 288 pages
This study argues that esoteric ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and James Frazer provide answers to ontological questions about the origin and substance of poets looking beyond the established rationalist codes of the industrial society. The ideas also give comprehensive critical insight into creative bases on which the poets’ various mystical or occult ideas work to produce their distinct creative characters.
Smith, Evans Lansing
2003 0-7734-6700-9 380 pages
This book presents the most comprehensive study currently available of the myth of the descent to the underworld in postmodern literature. It develops a theory of necrotypes – archetypal images consistently evoked by the myth of the nekyia – and applies it to close readings of selected works by major authors of the period, from Alejo Carpentier and Octavo Paz to Thomas Pynchon and Ken Kesey. In addition, the study shows how these works exemplify the postmodern practice of ludic syncretism, the playful fusion of materials from a wide variety of multicultural sources, including Classical, Biblical, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Native American, Nordic, Celtic, and Hermetic mythologies. Finally, it shows how ludic syncretism evolved from High Classical Modernism, in a manner analogous to the evolution of Hellenistic from Classical art, or of Baroque from that of the High Renaissance.
Connolly, Thomas E.
1995 0-7734-8886-3 144 pages
This work advances a theory of poetic forms in the six modes of poetry: lyric, narrative, dramatic, expository, descriptive, and argumentative. The theory is based on a combination of Aristotle's four-part method of describing classical tragedy with part of Joyce's aesthetic theory expressed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Mills, Mary V.
1996 0-7734-8855-3 116 pages
Within his writings, Hartmann von Aue addresses a problem characteristic of his period, got und der werlt gevallen, by fusing the quest for secular happiness as it is presented in the heroic literatures of ancient and medieval times with the search for spiritual happiness as it is depicted by St. Augustine in his Civitas Dei. In the discussion of the quest for saelde within Hartmann's works, this study establishes the pilgrimage motif as his main tectonic principle and most significant action motif. The examination of Hartmann's tectonic principle also documents the ideologized transformation of the pilgrimage motif as a progression from the rather stark dualism of his Kreuzzugslieder to the gradualism in Gregorius and Der arme Heinrich and marks a peak of gothic style and ideology in the medieval epic tradition.
Burger, Patrick R.
2001 0-7734-7631-8 164 pages
Yarington, Earl Frank
2007 0-7734-5438-1 232 pages
This work seeks to rediscover the fiction of Mary Jane Holmes (1825-1907) and examine contrasting factors which made her work popular in the nineteenth century but virtually unknown in the twentieth century. The emphasis of the study is on cultural poetics and feminism, establishing a critique of how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics decontextualized Holme’s work which resulted in their inability to recognize the cultural work that her fiction performed for both the middle-class and mass readership of her day. In contrast to such readings, this study constitutes an argument for the relational value of Holmes’s narratives. By focusing on the work of such critics as Jane Tompkins, Nancy Chodorow, Stephan Greenblatt, Mary Louise Kete, Joanne Dobson and Carol Gilligan, a new and much needed theory is established for examining the texts that appeal to Holmes’s audience, while uncovering the cultural value of popular sentimental works such as those that Holmes creates. The theory developed is then utilized to examine various aspects of relational capacity that women writers present and that their works are based on, enabling them to relate to their culture and readers. The theory provides a means of analyzing popular women writers who have been undervalued by the academy, which has been founded on masculine doctrine.
El-Meligi, Eman
2015 1-4955-0291-0 208 pages
This book, on Postmodernist Arab American literature, offers comparative readings informed by theories and approaches by Foucault, Gramsci, Baudrillard, Said, Gilbert and Gubar, Lyotard, Genette, Deleuze and Guttari, Hutcheon, as well as Saldivar, Villa and Anzaldua.
“Living Theory: A Comparative Reading of Feminist-Postcolonial Resonances in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999) and Postmodernist Reflections in Ihab Hassan’s Out of Egypt” (1986), studies the two autobiographies as an embodiment and reflection of critical and literary theory. “The Text and the World: Foucauldian and Gramscian Resonances in Historiographic Metafictional Prison Narratives,” offers a comparative reading of Sinan Antoon’sI’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody and the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Woman’s Prison. “The Arabian Nights as a Postmodern Arab American Counternarrative,” offers a comparative reading of “Rhizome,” “Thick Description” and Minority Discourse in Jack Marshall’s The Arabian Nights (1986) and Moha Kahf’s E-Mails from Sheherazad (2003). “Technique as Culture in Postmodern Ethnic American novel,” offers a feminist cultural reading of “Barrio-Logos” of the “Nueva Mestiza” in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, reading Arab American borderland novel genre within the discursive framework of Chicana critical and cultural theory.
The hermeneutical counternarrative offered by the above writers is a very practical and reflexive one that is told in an exaggeratedly rhetorical or oratorical manner, even when politics, history, dictatorship, exile and imperialism are always lurking at the background. With their nomadic body without organs, Arab American writers have voiced and contextualized their minority discourse. This has been mainly done through technique, acting as culture and embodying the rhizome troupe, elucidating the assemblage of nomadic identities in constant formation and flux.
Powell, Anna
2003 0-7734-6831-5 316 pages
This book explores the uncanny modalities of eroticism in vampire literature and film. It critiques the predominant approaches to a body of texts which depict sovereignty and the will to power, and considers the shortcomings of the overwhelming focuses on sexuality in current Gothic studies, present the vampire instead as a popular cultural version of transgressive human sovereignty. The theoretical trajectory interfaces literary, cinematic, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, and engages with psychoanalysis, and proposes a metaphysics of vampire fantasy.
Gorton, Kristyn
2007 0-7734-5559-0 236 pages
This book explores the concept of desire through psychoanalytic theory, namely in the work of Freud and Lacan, in Feminist theory and in contemporary critical theory and literature. Wide ranging in its pursuits, the book examines what Gorton terms ‘critical scenes of desire’ in literary and artistic examples in order to argue that desire, as a concept, allows for moments of production and transformation. Unlike theorisations that situate desire as ‘lack’, Gorton argues that desire can be reconceived as progressive and multiple. She also suggests that there is a desire on the part of the reader or critic which creates a second ‘scene of desire’ in which the reader tries to ‘solve’ the enigma of the text. In other words, there is a tendency on the part of the critic and reader to want to fill in the gaps that desire creates in the narrative. This book does not seek to be comprehensive in its theorisation of the concept of desire, nor does it attempt to offer a history of the concept within cultural theory. Instead, it examines the way we read for desire and argues that the concept of desire can be found in these readings as progressive and transformative.
Coffin, Arthur
1991 0-7734-9903-2 340 pages
Fulfills the need for a carefully selected group of supplementary readings in the study of Tragedy. Begins with the premise that any reading of tragedy can be stimulated and enriched by supplementary critical texts which have been selected for precisely those qualities that would enhance one's response to tragedy. Attempts a reconstruction of the canon of the criticism of tragedy through a critical overview of traditional classical commentary, Russian Formalism, Reader Response Theory, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstructionism, and Marxist criticism. Includes selections from the writings of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Georg Lukacs, Arthur Miller, Karl Jaspers, Max Sheler, Laurence Michel, Henry Alonzo Myers, Northrop Frye, Albert C. Outler, and others. Arranged chronologically, supplemented by selective bibliography.
Sellin, Eric
1993 0-7734-9361-1 172 pages
Analyzes the aesthetic thrust of the three most important avant-garde movements in the twentieth century, defining both similarities and differences in their poetics. In compelling essays like "A Will to Art," "Modern Drama and Nonverbal Poetics," "Le Chapelet du hasard: Ideas of Order in Dada-Surrealist Imagery," "Three Modes of Semantic Accrual," and "The Aesthetics of Ambiguity," Sellin explores the inner workings of the creative impulses and the resulting poetic structures which inhere in the creative works of these early avant-garde movements.
Rizzoli, Renato
1999 0-7734-1253-0 212 pages
This study analyzes a characteristic feature of some Jacobean plays, the serialization of coup de théâtre, by first tracing back and theoretically reconstructing its pattern in Aristotle’s Poetics and later in the Italian literary debate and experiments on tragicomedy of the late Renaissance. The adoption of the larger European perspectives allows the study to document the peculiar, original solutions adopted by the Jacobean dramas, where this pattern is not only integrally reproduced in the case of Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragicomedy, but also inventively used in a critical way by dramatists such as Tourneur, Middleton and Webster in order to create highly problematical and radical tragedies.
Lippman, Carlee
1994 0-7734-9394-8 196 pages
Examines texts from a range of cultures, exploring differences in technique and point of view in the presentation and valuation of innocence. It explores eight texts and arrays them on a scale of increasing complexity. Texts include: an untitled Manx tale by Neddy Beg Hom Ruy; a Navaho autobiography, Son of Old Man Hat; Grahame's The Wind in the Willows; Mediz Bolio's La tierra del Faisán y del Venado; Kafka's Elf Söhne; Diderot's Neveu de Rameau; and Gombrowicz's Pornografia.
Ford, Edward
2007 0-7734-5459-4 156 pages
It has long been assumed that F. Scott Fitzgerald was inspired by American and British sources, however, this study takes the first look at continental literature as a possible source of Fitzgerald’s writing and finds that there was massive borrowing. Most saliently, the vast the influence of Alain-Fornier’s Le grand Meaulnes on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is demonstrated in detail for the first time, while other chapters consider the influence of Tolstoy, Ibsen and Strindberg on Fitzgerald’s fiction. Though largely focused on The Great Gatsby, this study does cover the full life and work of this important American author who continues to draw in new readers every year with his Roaring Twenties version of the American Dream.
Grove, Dana
1990 0-88946-929-6 404 pages
Dana Grove's A Rhetorical Analysis of "Under the Volcano"- Malcolm Lowry's Design Governing Postures is a valuable volume-length close reading of Lowry's magnum opus, a useful primer on the intricacies of this dark text for the uninitiated. Grove's is an astute and lucid study that explicates Lowry's text on a chapter-by-chapter basis for its techniques, themes, and sources, while providing a useful synthesis of the best that has been thought and said about the novel. In particular, Grove's bibliography of other critical studies (including the original book reviews) of Under the Volcano is comprehensive and current.
Bell, Robert H
2012 0-7734-2640-X 296 pages
Bell utilizes an inter-disciplinary approach to studying autobiography in the 18th Century. Making use of religion and philosophy, history and literature, contemporary theory and humanism, his original analysis offers a unique array of disciplinary interpretations of the genre. This book not only deals with autobiography in a thorough manner, it also incorporates historical and philosophical interpretations to the presentation of self in this type of literature. He also demonstrates some of the problems with first person singular writing, which distinguishes this style from other forms of non-fiction, and shows how the philosophical question of ‘what can we know and how can we know it?’ is intimately related to the problem of the ‘self’ and narrative persona.
Sullivan, Karen
2007 0-7734-5317-2 188 pages
This study breaks new ground by focusing on the role of the arts in Rousseau’s novel, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, and through them demonstrates the underlying consistency of his thought. Although he never elaborated a formal aesthetic doctrine, Rousseau’s ideas on the arts provide the foundation for the novel and can be discerned therein. Moving between his theoretical and literary writings, this study reveals how Rousseau achieved his aesthetic and ethical goals, examining his alternation between the roles of censor and champion of the arts. This book contains 12 black and white photographs.
Lee, Monika
1999 0-7734-7969-4 212 pages
Examines the literary relationship between Rousseau and Shelley as it presents itself historically, intertextually, and in relation to language theory. Provides the reader with close original readings of several major works by Shelley: Queen Mab, Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, The Sensitive Plant and The Triumph of Life. Finally, Shelley's search for a suitable figure through whom he sought to examine the nature of identity is generalized into an exploration of Romantic subjectivity and written expressions of the self. Such an analysis of romantic notions of identity and subjectivity has broad significance for the study of Romanticism as a whole.
Flores, Ralph
1996 0-7734-8792-1 264 pages
This study moves against the grain of both traditional allegories and contemporary critical theory. The first section proposes hypotheses about existing theoretical work in the field. It shows how Pali Buddhist texts context 'metaphysics' many centuries before Nietzsche and Derrida, providing a distinct outlook on the problem of figurative language. The second section examines four texts, ranging from Plato to Dante, to indicate the difficult assumptions of 'life-giving' allegory. The third section deals with texts from Spenser onward that illustrate ghost-effects in the displacement of medieval allegory. The various chapters examine differing yet related inflections: economics in Plato, theatricality in the Buddha's texts, failing communication in Augustine, 'unreading' in the Roman de la Rose, marginality in Dante, doubtful signatures in Spenser, decapitation in Hawthorne, blindness in Baudelaire. The study is culturally far-reaching, and takes issue with the relatively truncated theories of allegory in our time. By scrutinizing other texts than the usual, it discloses new possibilities for investigation.
MacEwen, Sally
2006 0-7734-5776-3 576 pages
“A hero is someone who looks like a hero,” says film critic Robert Warshow, but in fact, we do not know who looks heroic to viewers other than ourselves. This study uses theories of affect and spectatorship to show how dramatic productions arouse pre-cognitive responses, such as pity and fear. These responses are tied to ideological frameworks: viewers root for Spiderman, but not for his arch-nemesis, the Green Goblin. In that case, affects arise from the value constructs of their cultures, and a comparison of heroes, modern films from Shane to Spiderman with stories of ancient Greek superheroes such as Antigone and Achilles, shows that each culture maintains a stereotype within which a range of responses to heroes can be defined. An ancient spectator, therefore, would not be concerned about whether Spiderman could save every innocent victim, for example, while a modern spectator does not admire Achilles when he demands respect before he saves his community. This study examines primary texts like the Iliad and Cryopaedia to set the viewing parameters of Athenian ideology, then considers how heroes, for example, like Oedipus and Iphigenia, might “look like heroes” to their original audience. This “affective hero,” unlike the structuralist hero, reflects the audience’s self-image back at itself and reveals surprising insights into culture.
Geary, Robert F.
1992 0-7734-9164-3 160 pages
While the numinous and heavily psychological aspects of the Gothic have recently received serious attention, no work has examined carefully the relation of the Gothic supernatural to the very different backgrounds of 18th-century and Victorian belief. This study examines the rise of the form, the artistic difficulties experienced by its early practitioners, and the transformation of the original problem-ridden Gothic works into the successful Victorian tales of unearthly terror. In doing so, this study makes a distinct contribution to our grasp of the Gothic and of the links between literature and religion.
Sadowski, Piotr
1999 0-7734-8179-6 257 pages
Jaidka, Manju
1997 0-7734-8658-5 184 pages
This unconventional study of T. S. Eliot is based on the conviction that Eliot is not just a "difficult" poet who wrote for intellectual readers, but also a writer for the common man. This volume focuses on three popular sources: nonsense poetry of the sort written by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, detective fiction and the music-hall/vaudeville tradition. The study makes use of unpublished material from rare book libraries (including the New York Public Library, the Houghton at Harvard, the Beinecke at Yale, and the Harry Ramson Center at Austin). The theoretical premises are derived from critics like Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin.
Finas, Lucette
2003 0-7734-6756-4 364 pages
This book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of literary criticism, literary theory, especially those interested in modern critical theory and 18th- and 19th-century French fiction. The five readings of these French short stories are preceded by a translator’s introduction on Finas’s work; two short pieces by Finas herself in which she describes her approach; and Roland Barthes’s preface to Le Bruit d’Iris (a selection of essays by Finas). The Appendix includes the complete text in English translation of two of the five short stories: Sade, Florville and Courval, translated by Lowell Bair, and Villiers de l’lsle-Adam, The Brigands, translated by Hamish Miles, both excellent translations, now out of print.
Thompson, Helen
2006 0-7734-5971-5 376 pages
This collection of essays examines Ireland’s literary canon in light of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and Irish identity at the turn of the century, contextualizing its readings within the understanding that The Field Day Anthology has crystallized discussions of literary value, canonicity, political agency and Irish identity because of its agenda and the ensuing controversy surrounding its publication. Yet, while The Field Day Anthology constitutes the occasion for writing, the collection also moves beyond it to suggest new models for reading and evaluating Irish literature and identity in the new century. The essays in the collection examine the canonical status of writers such as Joyce, Yeats and Beckett; how postcolonial theory and criticism have reshaped the boundaries of Irish studies; and how women’s writing has challenged canonicity as a concept.
Caamaño, Juan Manuel
2008 0-7734-5057-8 200 pages
This study mines the work of the preeminent Spanish cultural theorist and philosopher Juan Carlos Rodríguez. By elucidating some of the key features of his work, this work advances debate on the broader problems of literary analysis within and beyond Hispanism.
Danow, David
2003 0-7734-6552-9 242 pages
This study opens with an extensive introductory essay focused on the concept that there is no story without some kind of transformation. It ranges over centuries and across literatures in order to document clearly and concisely how this omnipresent feature of narrative actually works. Various aspects of transformation are investigated and elaborated, including problems of ontology and teleology, progression and regression, discovery and recovery, physical and psychological change, literal and figural formulations, truth and lie, physics and metaphysics. Eight principal chapters are devoted to classic works: the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Tom Jones, Jacques the Fatalist, Anna Karenina, and Ulysses. A centrally situated essay treating Don Quixote links the first four chapters with the second four. Profound shifts, changes, and reversals of plot find their place here in a wide-ranging discussion aimed also to evoke a focused sense and reminiscence of selected masterworks of world literature.
Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine
1996 0-7734-8747-6 459 pages
This volume contains 32 essays which deal with modern trends in criticism in American and English literary and linguistic studies.
McCormick, Kathleen
1991 0-88946-493-6 196 pages
The first critical study to link recent reader-response theory, cognitive analysis, psychoanalysis, and ideological theory to a complex modernist text. Combines theory and practical application in the areas of modernist literature, specifically James Joyce's Ulysses, and literary theory, particularly theories of reading.
Helmbold, Anita
2010 0-7734-4691-5 468 pages
This study utilizes a two-pronged approach to examine the rationale underlying the iconography of the frontispiece to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Corpus Christi College Cambridge Manuscript 61. It considers Chaucer in light of orality/literacy theory as well as in relation to prelection and interprets the work within a political framework. This book contains one color photograph.
MacEwen, Sally
1991 0-88946-627-0 128 pages
Six essays by five classicists describing a number of ancient and modern works which have Clytemnestra as a central character. Combines classical philology, modern psychology, feminist theory, and a variety of other critical techniques to analyze old views of Clytemnestra and arrive at new ones ranging from that of a fearful monstrosity to that of a mater dolorosa. Includes many one-of-a-kind museum photos.