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Latin American poetry--21st century--History and criticism, Latin American poetry--20th century--History and criticism, Latin American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, American poetry--20th century--History and criticism, Materialism in literature, American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, and American poetry--21st century--History and criticism

This book examines poets and artists in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how they worked to make language into material objects and material objects into language.

Criticism--Canada--Bibliography and Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.--Bibliography

The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye's influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton's 1983 rhetorical question,'Who now reads Frye?'In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye's work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye's reception in front of us – such as Hayden White's theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén's theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton's rhetorical question is'a very large and growing number,'the growth being not incremental but exponential.

Criticism, English literature--History and criticism, and Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc

As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other's human autonomy, literature flourishes as an enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences. These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity's well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated.Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell's ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie.

Imaginary places in literature and Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc

Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book, but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types, from poetry to genre-specific prose to children's story-books.This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated, how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds, and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory, reader-response studies, and pedagogical stylistics, among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics, stylistics, narratology, and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.

Marxist criticism and Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc

•Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Prize, 2019• •Shortlisted for the Isaac Deutscher Prize 2019• Why Marxism? Why today? In the first introduction to Marxist literary criticism to be published in decades, Barbara Foley argues that Marxism continues to offer the best framework for exploring the relationship between literature and society. She lays out in clear terms the principal aspects of Marxist methodology - historical materialism, political economy and ideology critique - as well as key debates, among Marxists and non-Marxists alike, about the nature of literature and the goals of literary criticism and pedagogy. Foley examines through the empowering lens of Marxism a wide range of texts: from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey; from Frederick Douglass's'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?'to Annie Proulx's'Brokeback Mountain'; from W.B. Yeats's'The Second Coming'to Claude McKay's'If We Must Die'.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Criticism--Russia (Federation)--History--20th century, and Formalism (Literary analysis)--Influence

Until the 1940s, when awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread, literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention. The Birth and Death of Literary Theory tells the story of literary theory by focusing on its formative interwar decades in Russia. Nowhere else did literary theory emerge and peak so early, even as it shared space with other modes of reflection on literature. A comprehensive account of every important Russian trend between the world wars, the book traces their wider impact in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. Ranging from Formalism and Bakhtin to the legacy of classic literary theory in our post-deconstruction, world literature era, Galin Tihanov provides answers to two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when this option is no longer available? Asserting radical historicity, he offers a time-limited way of reflecting upon literature—not in order to write theory's obituary but to examine its continuous presence across successive regimes of relevance. Engaging and insightful, this is a book for anyone interested in theory's origins and in what has happened since its demise.

Rhetoric, Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Discourse analysis, Literary, and Creative writing

This commemorative volume comprises ten essays which celebrate the work of Walter (Bill) Nash. Bill Nash was an extraordinary scholar – a classicist, parodist, critic, musician, linguist, poet, polyglot, humourist and novelist. He was as adroit in his reading of the Old Norse sagas as he was in his analyses of the rhetorical composition of everyday English usage, and his published outputs embrace the stylistic, rhetorical, compositional and creative topographies of both language and literature. The contributions that comprise this volume are all by well-known scholars in the field and each essay celebrates Nash's prodigious offering by covering the academic fields with which he was particularly associated. These fields include composition, rhetoric, discourse analysis, English usage, comic discourse, creative writing and the stylistic exploration of literature from the Old English period to that of the present day.

Motion pictures--History and Russian literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc

Yuri Tynianov was a key figure of Russian Formalism, an intellectual movement in early 20th century Russia that also included Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. Tynianov developed a groundbreaking conceptualization of literature as a system within—and in constant interaction with—other cultural and social systems. His essays on Russian literary classics, like Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and works by Dostoevsky and Gogol, as well as on the emerging art form of filmmaking, provide insight into the ways art and literature evolve and adapt new forms of expression. Although Tynianov was first a scholar of Russian literature, his ideas transcend the boundaries of any one genre or national tradition. Permanent Evolution gathers together for the first time Tynianov's seminal articles on literary theory and film, including several articles never before translated into English.

Soviet literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc and Literature and society--Soviet Union--History

This volume widens the field of Soviet literature studies by interpreting it as a multinational project, with national literatures acting not as copies of the Russian model, but as creators of a multidimensional literary space. The book proposes a reconsideration of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of literary field and analyzes the interactions of literature, power, and economics under the communist rule. The articles selected include theoretical discussions and case studies from different national literatures presenting different structural elements of the Soviet literary field, as well as phenomena created by the complexity of the field itself, such as the Aesopian language, state of emergency literature, or compromise as the essential element of the writers'identity.

Reality in literature, Czech fiction--20th century--History and criticism, Fiction--History and criticism, Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, and Semiotics and literature

For decades, the Prague School Structuralism assumption of textual autonomy dominated the explorations of Czech literature as well as the context of Czech literary theory. The three authors of this book combined their efforts to move beyond and offer a new conceptual frame. Sharing the structuralist proposition of texts made from words, they focus on the metamorphoses of the modes of representations through the 20th century fiction and its critical reflections. Switching between theoretical considerations and case study interpretations, their essays challenge the notion of autonomous fictional worlds and involve the pragmatic categories of the constructed image of a writer and the aesthetic experience of a reader. The focus on representational status of literary texts combines here with another conceptual frame the performative aspect. The literary texts do not function as mere documents that preserve the traces of existing reality but as objects that construct what their readers conceive as parts of existing reality. Instead of a a depository of meanings, literature is thus perceived as a permanent process of negotiations that uses the institutional power of canonisation, ritualisation or tabooisation. Drawing on contemporary international theory of literature and aesthetics (Searle, Rorty, Davidson, Iser, Greenblatt, White), the authors try to conflate semiotic analyses of textual meanings with the pragmatic notions of historical and readership contexts. The book does not offer a coherent narrative of modern Czech literature development. It chooses the productive texts of Czech literature, occasionally combined with other items of Czech culture (arts, films, TV production) and brings them into comparison with the international context. Such an approach puts aside the traditional assumption of a national context as a major defining criterion, which allows the authors to articulate more generalized abstractions.

Narration (Rhetoric), Literature--Political acpects, Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, and Politics and literature

Policing Literary Theory is an exploration of the complex relationship between literature/literary theory and police/policing.

Children's literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc

This collection takes informed and scholarly readers to the utmost frontier of children's literature criticism, from the intricate worlds of children's poetry, picturebooks and video games to the new theoretical constellations of critical plant studies, non-fiction studies and big data analyses of literature.

Fiction--History and criticism, Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Literature--Philosophy, Existentialism in literature, and Existentialism

The Art of Being is a powerful account of how the literary form of the novel reorients philosophy toward the meaning of existence. Yi-Ping Ong shows that for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir, the form of the novel in its classic phase yields the conditions for reconceptualizing the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. Their discovery gives rise to a radically new poetics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel.For the existentialists, a paradox lies at the heart of the novel. As a work of art, the novel exists as a given totality. At the same time, the capacity of the novel to compel belief in the free and independent existence of its characters depends on the absence of any perspective from which their lives may be viewed as a consummated whole. At stake in the poetics of the novel are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible. Ong's reframing of foundational debates in novel theory takes us beyond old dichotomies of mind and world, interiority and totality, and form and mimesis. It illuminates existential dimensions of novelistic realism overlooked by empirical and sociological approaches.Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, The Art of Being reveals how the novel engages in its very form with philosophically rich notions of self-knowledge, freedom, authority, world, and the unfinished character of human life.

Criticism--Great Britain--History--19th century, English literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, English literature--19th century--History and criticism, Discourse analysis, Literary--Data processing, and Ethics in literature

How practices from the digital analysis of texts both simplify and enhance traditional literary criticism.Honorable Mention, NAVSA Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies AssociationWhat is to be gained by reading George Eliot's Middlemarch from an Excel spreadsheet, or the novels of Charles Dickens through a few hundred dialogue tags—those he said/she saids that bring his characters to life? Sarah Danielle Allison's Reductive Reading argues that the greatest gift the computational analysis of texts has given to traditional criticism is not computational at all. Rather, one of the most powerful ways to generate subtle reading is to be reductive; that is, to approach literary works with specific questions and a clear roadmap of how to look for the answers. Allison examines how patterns that form little part of our conscious experience of reading nevertheless structure our experience of books. Exploring Victorian moralizing at the level of the grammatical clause, she also reveals how linguistic patterns comment on the story in the process of narrating it. Delving into The London Quarterly Review, as well as the work of Eliot, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, and other canonical Victorian writers, the book models how to study nebulous and complex stylistic effects. A manifesto for and a model of how digital analysis can provide daringly simple approaches to complex literary problems, Reductive Reading introduces a counterintuitive computational perspective to debates about the value of fiction and the ethical representation of people in literature.

Literature and science, Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Criticism, and Science--Methodology--Philosophy

Karl Popper's philosophy of science, with its focus on falsifiability and critical rationalism, provides a firm foundation for a theory of literary interpretation that avoids the pitfalls of many contemporary theories. Building on the work of Popper, John Eccles, Imre Lakatos, Ernst Gombrich, Louise DeSalvo and James Battersby, this study outlines the approach, sets it in a theoretical context, and applies the theory to challenging works by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, Jean Toomer, Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, J-M.G. LeClézio, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Littell, Patrick Modiano, Albert Schweitzer, Popper's protégé William Warren Bartley III and the Gospel of Mark. The book concludes with a set of general principles for understanding literature as a mode of investigation in what Popper called the unended quest.

Existentialism in literature, Literature--Philosophy, Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, and Postmodernism (Literature)

The book revives literary theory, which was popular at the end of the 20th century, with the purpose of showing how useful it is in the current century in opening the minds of students to the dangers of claiming to have a fixed identity. The book shows that in Western cultures identity is a construct that always sees individuals as lacking something (being fallen) that can be retrieved or gained at the expense of an Other, an adversary seen as standing in the way of identity fulfillment. The book shows the history of'fallenness'through an analysis of Melville's Billy Budd, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. It also shows ways to heal identity through an analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Rudolfo Anaya's Tortuga.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Primitivism in literature, and Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism

This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas. Primitivism has long been accepted as a transhistorical tendency of the'civilized'to idealize that primitive condition against which they define themselves. In the modern era, this has been a matter of the'West'projecting its primitivist fantasies onto non-Western'others.'Arguing instead that primitivism was an aesthetic mode produced in reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism, and that the most intensively primitivist literary works were produced by imperialism's colonized subjects, the book overturns basic assumptions of the last two generations of literary scholarship. Against the grain, Ben Etherington contends that primitivism was an important, if vexed, utopian project rather than a form of racist discourse, a mode that emerged only when modern capitalism was at the point of subsuming all human communities into itself. The primitivist project was an attempt, through art, to recreate a'primitive'condition then perceived to be at its vanishing point. The first overview of this vast topic in forty years, Literary Primitivism maps out previous scholarly paradigms, provides a succinct and readable account of its own methodology, and presents critical readings of key writers, including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Literary form--History--20th century, and Criticism--History--20th century

Ralph Cohen was highly regarded as the visionary founding editor of New Literary History, but his own theoretical essays appeared in such a scattering of publications that their conceptual originality, underlying coherence, and range of application have not been readily apparent. This new selection of twenty essays, many published here for the first time, offers a synthesis of Cohen's vital work. In these pages Cohen introduces change and continuity as essential modes of discourse in the study of literary behavior, an approach that can produce reliable narratives of literary, artistic, and cultural change. Here Cohen conceptualizes and develops a compelling, innovative theory of genre that promotes a systematic study of historical change, offering rewarding insights for twenty-first-century scholars.

Art and literature--History and Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc

This book challenges the focus on pictoriality as central constituent of visual culture from the perspective of literary studies, which in the wake of an ‘intermedial turn'so far focused on the ways texts relate to pictures and visual media either in praesentia (e.g. word and image studies) or in absentia (e.g. ekphrasis). Instead, it emphasizes literature's participation in visual culture at large and focuses on three areas of investigation: (1) the depiction of, for instance, visual perceptions in the literary mode of description, which is paramount to formatting the mental aspect of visual culture; (2) the readerly practice of visualising situations and events of the fictional world, which mediates between those mentefacts and techniques of writing; (3) textual visibilities which are grounded in materiality. The volume explores these three areas from a systematically integrated perspective and the essays include in-depth treatments of seminal examples taken from Western literatures (primarily English and German, but also French and American literature) from early modern times to the present. This book's aim is to work out literature's active role in shaping visual culture, thus demonstrating its relevance for “image studies”.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Humanities--Methodology--History, Imperialism and philology, and Philology--Political aspects--History

For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.