Geared toward students, teachers, readers, and writers alike, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory explains critical jargon (intertextuality, aporia), schools of literary theory (structuralism, feminist criticism), literary forms (sonnet, ottava rima), and genres (elegy, pastoral) and examines artifacts, historic locales, archetypes, origins of well-known phrases, and much, much more. Scholarly, straightforward, comprehensive, and even entertaining, this is a resource that no word-lover should be without.

    

    Genette describes the multiple ways a later text asks readers to read or remember an earlier one. In this regard, he treats the history and nature of parody, antinovels, pastiches, caricatures, commentary, allusion, imitations, and other textual relations. Gérard Genette is one of the most original and influential literary critics of modern France. He is the major practitioner of narratological criticism, a pioneer in structuralism, and a much-admired literary historian. Such works as Narrative Discourse and Mimologics (Nebraska 1995) have established his international reputation as a literary theorist of the first order.

    Essays include: "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", "On Science Fiction", "The Hobbit", "Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings", and "George Orwell" He also comments on the novels of Charles Williams, Ryder Haggard and Dorothy L Sayers.

    

    In addition to publishing some twenty books, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote thousands of letters, mainly to close friends and acquaintances, and these provide a record of almost fifty years of the writer’s life.Her interests are wide-ranging, and we read of such diverse subjects as the pleasures of travel, Proust’s shortcomings as a literary critic, current politics, Rupert Brooke at the Café Royal, an eccentric moorhen, and the Spanish Civil War.Includes index and introduction by William Maxwell.

    The story of Finn and Hengest, two fifth-century heroes in northern Europe, is told both in Beowulf and in a fragmentary Anglo-Saxon poem known as The Fight at Finnsburg, but so obscurely and allusively that its interpretation had been a matter of controversy for over 100 years. Bringing his unique combination of philological erudition and poetic imagination to the task, however, Tolkien revealed a classic tragedy of divided loyalties, of vengeance, blood and death. The story has the added attraction that it describes the events immediately preceding the first Germanic invasion of Britain which was led by Hengest himself.

    A champion of the French symbolists, he was influential to both Yeats and Pound.

    And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom GunnThom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience. The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.

    The author argues that there are three major influences which determine the verse-forms used in any language: the natural rhythm of the spoken language itself; the properties of rhythmic form; and the metrical conventions which have grown up within the literary tradition. He investigates these in order to explain the forms of English verse, and to show how rhythm and metre work as an essential part of the reader's experience of poetry.

    Text and the City is the first book of his work to appear in English. A literary and cultural critic deeply engaged with European critical thought, Maeda was a brilliant, insightful theorist of modernity for whom the city was the embodiment of modern life. He conducted a far-reaching inquiry into changing conceptions of space, temporality, and visual practices as they gave shape to the city and its inhabitants. James A. Fujii has assembled a selection of Maeda’s essays that question and explore the contours of Japanese modernity and resonate with the concerns of literary and cultural studies today.Maeda remapped the study of modern Japanese literature and culture in the 1970s and 1980s, helping to generate widespread interest in studying mass culture on the one hand and marginalized sectors of modern Japanese society on the other. These essays reveal the broad range of Maeda’s cultural criticism. Among the topics considered are Tokyo; utopias; prisons; visual media technologies including panoramas and film; the popular culture of the Edo, Meiji, and contemporary periods; maps; women’s magazines; and women writers. Integrally related to these discussions are Maeda’s readings of works of Japanese literature including Matsubara Iwagoro’s In Darkest Tokyo, Nagai Kafu’s The Fox, Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up, Kawabata Yasunari’s The Crimson Gang of Asakusa, and Narushima Ryuhoku’s short story “Useless Man.” Illuminating the infinitely rich phenomena of modernity, these essays are full of innovative, unexpected connections between cultural productions and urban life, between the text and the city.

    Susan Sontag's prefatory essay is one of her finest acts of criticism, informed by intellectual sympathy and a sure sense of the contours of the mind she is describing.

    Allegory is a protean device, omnipresent in Western literature from the earliest time to the modern era.

    This book focuses on the self-images and social contexts of the nineteenth-century immigrants, their descendants, and the Americanized writers.

    In the twentieth century, Pater's theories of art and literature exerted a strong inluence on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stevens.

    With Life Studies, his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill.'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James

    . . a clutch of examples of semiotics usefully and intelligently applied, which Schole’s patient, cheerful tone and his resolutely concrete vocabulary manage to combine into a breezily informative American confection.”—Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement “This critique demonstrates once more that Scholes . . . is one of the most authoritative scholars in the field of semiotics.”—The Antioch Review “[Scholes] applies the range of semiotic theory to a series of other texts—poems, stories, films, a scene from a play, bumper stickers, even a part of the human anatomy. . . . When we finish this text (which includes a useful glossary and descriptive bibliography), we feel that we have learned the basic principles of semiotics and can apply them in our teaching and criticism; as a bonus, we gain many new insights into familiar texts.”—Richard Pearce, Novel “[Scholes] is among our best interpreters of literary theory. . . . He provides not only an argument for semiotics but an informed criticism of it as well.”—Martin Green, The Literary Review

    Gass. The term “metafiction” here refers to a strain in American writing where the self-concious approach to the art of fiction-making is a commentary on the nature of meaning itself.

    

    From this perspective, whatever represents the Self is necessarily male; and the Other, which challenges the Self, is female. The author's approach gives us a fresh understanding of both Shakespeare's characters and the structure of the plays. The author defines genre in terms of the nature of the challenge offered by the Other to the Self. Using specific plays and characters of Shakespeare, the author shows how in tragedy the Other betrays or appears to betray the Self; in comedy the Other evades the social hierarchies dominated by versions of the male Self; in romance the Other comes and goes, leaving the Self bereft when she is gone and astounding him with happiness when she reappears. History is defined as a genre in which the masculine heroes confront no challenge from the Other but only from each other, from other versions of the Self. The book consists of a long theoretical introduction followed by chapters on comedy, history, and some individual plays: Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.

    

    Dalloway and Between the Acts. Miller explores the multifarious ways in which repetition generates meaning in these novels--repetition of images, metaphors, motifs; repetition on a larger scale of episodes, characters, plots; and repetition from one novel to another by the same or different authors. While repetition creates meanings, it also, Miller argues, prevents the identification of a single determinable meaning for any of the novels; rather, the patterns made by the various repetitive sequences offer alternative possibilities of meaning which are incompatible. He thus sees "undecidability" as an inherent feature of the novels discussed.His conclusions make a provocative contribution to current debates about narrative theory and about the principles of literary criticism generally. His book is not a work of theory as such, however, and he avoids the technical terminology dear to many theorists; his book is an attempt to interpret as best he can his chosen texts. Because of his rare critical gifts and his sensitivity to literary values and nuances, his readings send one back to the novels with a new appreciation of their riches and their complexities of form.

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    An important feature of this book is its carefully annotated bibliographies. The bibliographies and the text may be used independently; both have been prepared to complement and reinforce each other.

    In most forms of comedy, and certainly in the New Comedy with which Shakespeare was concerned, the emphasis is on moving towards a climax in which the end incorporates the beginning. Such a climax is a vision of deliverance or expanded energy and freedom. Frye draws on the Aristotelian notion of reversal, or peripeteia, to analyse the three plays commonly known as the 'problem comedies' "Measure for Measure," "All's Well That Ends Well," and "Troilus and Cressida," showing how they anticipate the romances of Shakespeare's final period.

    Originally published in 1976, it was first translated into English in 1982. Ernst Tugendhat was trained in the Heideggerian modes of phenomenological and hermeneutical thinking. Yet increasingly he came to believe that the most appropriate approach was from within the framework of analytical philosophy. This book grew out of that conviction, and as such it brought a fresh perspective to some of the rarely examined assumptions and methods of analysis. Professor Tugendhat begins by showing how semantic analysis related to such 'traditional' conceptions of philosophy as Aristotle's and Kant's, and the manner in which it treats such 'traditional' problems as being and consciousness. From these considerations he develops a systematic, thorough and original theory of reference, predication and individuation, which make it an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the philosophy of language.