In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gérard Genette offers a global view of these liminal mediations and their relation to the reading public. With precision, clarity and through wide reference, he shows how paratexts interact with general questions of literature as a cultural institution. Richard Macksey's foreword situates Genette in contemporary literary theory.

    Derek Attridge argues that such resistance represents not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art.In this lively, original volume, the author:considers the implications of regarding the literary work as an innovative cultural event, both in its time and for later generations; provides a rich new vocabulary for discussions of literature, rethinking such terms as invention, singularity, otherness, alterity, performance and form; returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues the ethical importance of the literary institution to a culture; demonstrates how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a 'responsible, ' creative mode of reading.The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic.

    Only now, however, with Electronic Literature by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study.Hayles’s book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts.Dee Morris, University of Iowa

    Within this structure, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan addresses key approaches to narrative fiction, including New Criticism, formlaism, structuralism and phenomenology, but also offers views of the modifications to these theroies. While presenting an analysis of the system governing all fictional narratives, whether in the form of novel, short story or narrative poem, she also suggests how individual narratives can be studied against the background of this general system. A broad range of literary examples illustrate key aspects of the study.This edition is brought fully up-to-date with an invaluable new chapter, reflecting on recent developments in narratology. Readers are also directed to key recent works in the field. These additions to a classic text ensure that Narrative Fiction will remain the ideal starting point for anyone new to narrative theory.

    This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.

    Lawrence and James Joyce.Distils the essentials of the theory of the novel.Follows the model of Eagleton's hugely popular Literary Theory: An Introduction (Second Edition, 1996).

    The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

    One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon.For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."

    The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever.In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery.This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

    Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit. Kermode then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. He goes on to deal perceptively with modern literaturewith "traditionalists" such as Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the difference between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth, or commenting on the vogue of the Absurd, Kermode is distinctly lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.

    Why read literature? Not for pure entertainment, Deleuze tells us, but because literature can recreate the boundaries of life. With his emphasis on creation, the future and the enhancement of life, along with his crusade against 'common sense', Deleuze offers some of the most liberating, exhilarating ideas in twentieth-century thought. This book offers a way in to Deleuzean thought through such topics as: * 'becoming'* time and the flow of life* the ethics of thinking* 'major' and 'minor' literature* difference and repetition* desire, the image and ideology.Written with literature students in mind, this is the ideal guide for students wishing to think differently about life and literature and in this way to create their own new readings of literary texts

    At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.

    In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

    New features include: a new chapter on queer theory; every chapter has been revised with new introductions with appropriate new critical vocabulary, critical terms, further readings sections, and web sites; new student essays; structuralism and deconstruction have been combined into one section to make the material clearer and more streamlined; and the addition of Plotinus, Giovanni Boccaccio, Joseph Addison, Percy Pysshe Shelley, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

    It was during the writing of this book that Culler developed his now famous and remarkably complex theory of poetics and narrative, and while never a populariser he nonetheless makes it crystal clear within these pages.