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The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett by Wolfgang Iser
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Principles of Literary Criticism
Ivor A. Richards - 1924
He enthused a generation of writers and readers and was an influential supporter of the young T.S Eliot. Principles of Literary Criticism was the text that first was the text that first established his reputation and pioneered the movement that became known as the 'New Criticism' Through a powerful presentation of the need to read critically and creatively, with an alertness to the psychological and emotional effects of language, Richards presented a powerful new understanding both of literature and of the role of the reader. Highly controversial when first published, Principles of Literary Criticism remains a work which no one with a serious interest in literature can afford to ignore. Contents: The chaos of criticism theories | The phantom aesthetic state | The language of criticism | Communication and the artist | The critics' concern with value | Value as an ultimate idea | A psychological theory of value | Art and morals | Actual and possible misapprehensions | Poetry for poetry's sake | A sketch for a psychology | Pleasure | Emotion and the coenesthesia | Memory | Attitudes | The analysis of a poem | Rhythm and metre | On looking at a picture | Sculpture and the construction of form | The Impasse of musical theory | A theory of communication | The availability of the poet's experience | Tolstoy's infection theory | The normality of the artist | Badness in poetry | Judgement and divergent readings | Levels of response and the width of appeal | The allusiveness of modern poetry | Permanence as a criterion | The Definition of a poem | Art, play and civilization | The Imagination
Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed
Mary Klages - 2006
It engages directly with the difficulty many students find intimidating, asking 'What is ''Literary Theory''?' and offering a clear, concise, accessible guide to the major theories and theorists, including: humanism; structuralism; poststructuralism; psychoanalytic approaches; feminist approaches; queer theory; ideology and discourse; new historicism; race and postcolonialism; postmodernism. The final chapter points to new directions in literary and cultural theory.
The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction
Jacqueline Rose - 1984
In a preface, written for this edition, Rose considers some of Peter Pan's new guises and their implications. From Spielberg's Hook, to the lesbian production of the play at the London Drill Hall in 1991, to debates in the English House of Lords, to a newly claimed status as the icon of transvestite culture, Peter Pan continues to demonstrate its bizarre renewability as a cultural fetish of our times.
The Song of the Earth
Jonathan Bate - 2000
A book about our growing alienation from nature, it is also a brilliant meditation on the capacity of the writer to bring us back to earth, our home.In the first ecological reading of English literature, Jonathan Bate traces the distinctions among nature, culture, and environment and shows how their meanings have changed since their appearance in the literature of the eighteenth century. An intricate interweaving of climatic, topographical, and political elements poetically deployed, his book ranges from greenhouses in Jane Austen's novels to fruit bats in the poetry of Les Murray, by way of Thomas Hardy's woodlands, Dr. Frankenstein's Creature, John Clare's birds' nests, Wordsworth's rivers, Byron's bear, and an early nineteenth-century novel about an orangutan who stands for Parliament. Though grounded in the English Romantic tradition, the book also explores American, Central European, and Caribbean poets and engages theoretically with Rousseau, Adorno, Bachelard, and especially Heidegger.The model for an innovative and sophisticated new ecopoetics, The Song of the Earth is at once an essential history of environmental consciousness and an impassioned argument for the necessity of literature in a time of ecological crisis.
Selected Essays
T.S. Eliot - 1950
37 essays in an expanded edition of the author's major volume of criticism.
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
Matthew Arnold - 2004
Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language
Mark Turner - 1996
Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, forexample, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom iswrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thoughtmakes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking.In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination inparable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the roleof parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind.Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers toclassic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention.
The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading
John P. Muller - 1987
His far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others.
Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation
Mary Louise Pratt - 1992
The study of travel writing has, however, tended to remain either naively celebratory, or dismissive, treating texts as symptoms of imperial ideologies.Imperial Eyes explores European travel and exploration writing, in conjunction with European economic and political expansion since 1700. It is both a study in the genre and a critique of an ideology. Pratt examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism, and how they engage metropolitan reading publics with expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few. These questions are addressed through readings of travel accounts connected with particular sentimental historical travel writing. It examines the links with abolitionist rhetoric; discursive reinventions of South America during the period of its independence (1800-1840); and 18th-century European writings on Southern Africa in the context of inland expansion.
Publics and Counterpublics
Michael Warner - 2002
How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public? According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover. Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.
The Cambridge Companion to Modernism
Michael LevensonGlen MacLeod - 1999
Chapters on the major literary genres, on intellectual, political and institutional contexts, and on film and the visual arts, provide close analyses and a broader set of interpretive narratives. A Chronology and Guide to Further Reading supply valuable orientation within the field. Students will find much-needed help with the difficulties of approaching Modernism, while the essays' original contributions will send scholars back to this volume for stimulating reevaluation.
Stigmata: Escaping Texts
Hélène Cixous - 1998
Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time.Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away -- escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso -- works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work: * love's labours lost and found* feminine hours* autobiographies of writing* the prehistory of the work of artStigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and our times.
50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know
John Sutherland - 2010
It contains concise essays on a wide variety of literary concepts among the 50 entries, and everything you need to know about literary techniques and genres.
Lectures on Literature
Vladimir Nabokov - 1980
Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.
The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography
Angela Carter - 1978
So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.