This anthology of classic and cutting-edge statements in literary theory has now been updated to include recent influential texts in the areas of Ethnic Studies, Postcolonialism and International StudiesA definitive collection of classic statements in criticism and new theoretical work from the past few decades All the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory are represented, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Enables students to familiarise themselves with the most recent developments in literary theory and with the traditions from which these new theories derive

    Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become 'real' at all" writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of "the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things."

    Tolkien written by Lin Carter. It was 1st published in paper by Ballantine in 3/69 & went thru numerous additional printings. It was among the earliest full-length critical works devoted to Tolkien's fantasies, the 1st to set his writings in their proper context in the history of fantasy. It was the earliest of three studies by Carter devoted to fantasy/horror writers & the history of fantasy, being followed by Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos ('72) & Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy ('73), establishing him as an authority on the genre, indirectly leading to his editorial guidance of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Gollancz published a cloth edition updated by Adam Roberts in 8/03. The study serves as an introduction for those unfamiliar with Tolkien's work. An introduction briefly reviews the publishing phenomenon of The Lord of the Rings & its popularity in the wake of the 1st paper editions in the '60s, after which he devotes three chapters to a short biography of the author thru the late '60s, including an account of how it was written. Four chapters explaining Middle-earth & summarizing the stories of The Hobbit & the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings follow, for the benefit of readers who may not have actually read the works. Carter next turns to the question of what the works are, a point of some confusion at the time. The then-current vogue for realistic fiction provided critics with few tools for evaluating an out-&-out fantasy on its own terms. Attempts to deconstruct it as a satire or allegory were rife. Carter firmly debunks these efforts, supporting his argument by drawing on Tolkien's own published ruminations on fantasy's functions & purposes. He then contextualizes the works by sketching the history of written fantasy from its earliest appearance in the epic poetry of the ancient world thru the heroic poetry of the Dark & the prose romances of the Middle Ages, down to the fairy tales, ghost stories & gothic novels of the early modern era & the rediscovery of the genre by writers of the 19-20th centuries prior to & contemporary with Tolkien. The origins of the modern genre are discovered in the writings of Wm Morris, Lord Dunsany & E.R. Eddison & followed thru the works of authors they influenced, including H.P. Lovecraft, Fletcher Pratt, L. Sprague de Camp & Mervyn Peake. Carter next highlights some of Tolkien's particular debts to his predecessors, tracing the motifs & names he utilizes back to their beginnings in Norse mythology & highlighting other echoes in his work deriving from legend & history. Finally noted is Tolkien's influence on contemporary fantasy, which was just beginning to make itself felt, primarily in the juvenile fantasies of Carol Kendall, Alan Garner & Lloyd Alexander.

    A recent history of philosophy named Aristotle and Plato as two of the world's four greatest philosophers. The greatest historian of all is likely to be Thucydides. Why was Ancient Greek and Roman literature so great? Sweeping across a thousand years, acclaimed professor Richard Jenkyns provides a lucid and lively introduction to the foundation of all Western literature. As Jenkyns shows us, the Greeks were masters of invention - they pioneered nearly all the major literary forms, including epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, and history. The Romans, like us, already felt in the shadow of Greek literature, and, as Jenkyn puts it, they first invented imitation. In short, engaging chapters, Jenkyns illuminates the most enduring and influential works of the classical world, from the Homeric epics to the golden age of Latin poetry, and explores their unparalleled and continuing influence on Western literature.

    "The best book on the dope decade." -- "NY Times Book Review"

    Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

    Index.

    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

    A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.

    Manifestoes of Surrealism is a book by André Breton, describing the aims, meaning, and political position of the Surrealist movement.The translators of this edition were finalists of the 1970 National Book Awards in the category of translation.

    This world of total human experience is the world that is (or at least ought to be) reflected and molded by the arts, above all by the art of literature. "What is the function of literature," Mr. Huxley asks, "what its psychology, what the nature of literary language? And how do its function, psychology and language differ from those of science? What in the past has been the relationship between literature and science? What is it now? What might it be in the future? And what would it be profitable, artistically speaking, for a twentieth-century man of letters to do about twentieth-century science?"Ours is the Age of Science; but from a study of the best contemporary literature one would find it difficult to infer this most obvious of facts. Contemporary poetry, drama and fiction contain remarkably few references to contemporary science—few references even to the metaphysical and ethical problems which contemporary science has raised. That this state of affairs should somehow be remedied is the theme of every recent discussion of "the Two Cultures." unfortunately most of these discussions have been carried on in abstract terms and with almost no citations of case histories, no references to the concrete problems of literary and scientific writing, no illustrative examples. Mr. Huxley has approached the subject in a different way. He deals with specific questions in the fields of immediate experience, of conceptualization, of philosophical interpretation and of verbal expression; and he illustrates these wide-ranging themes with copious quotations, drawn from a great variety of sources. He analyzes the nature of literary language and contrasts its many-meaninged richness with the simplified and jargonized language of science. He shows how the poets of earlier centuries made use of the scientific knowledge available to them. He gives examples of the ways in which modern science has modified and added to the traditional raw materials of literature. And he concludes with a speculative discussion of the ways in which future men of letters may work up the raw materials of brand new fact and revolutionary hypothesis provided by science, transfiguring them into a new kind of literature, capable of expression and at the same time coordinating and giving significance to the totality of an ever-widening human experience.

    Longtime users will recognize these distinctive characteristics of the casebook: - multi-disciplinary approach that utilizes a variety of critical and social perspectives to explore constitutional law - extensive textual summaries of the state of the law and its development - comprehensive book ideal for a two-semester course - clear and concise coverage of First Amendment law The Fifth Edition reflects recent developments and class experience: - issues of constitutional obligation and constitutionalism in times of crisis incorporated into the opening chapter - reorganization of materials on the powers of Congress, with the materials on other powers of congress separated into a new Chapter 3 - completely updated chapter on the Distribution of National Powers, with new material growing out of the war on terrorism and its implications for free speech, immigration, naturalization, privacy, and due process, as well as enemy combatant controversies - notes are shortened, simplified, and thoroughly updated

    Published originally in 1881, The Critic As Artist is one of Oscar Wilde's major aesthetic statements.

    For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times

    From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.