Theory Criticism category: 49531 books

Best known for his theories of ethics and responsibility, Emmanuel Levinas was one of the most profound and influential thinkers of the last century. In this clear, accessible guide, Seán Hand examines why Levinas is increasingly fundamental to the study of literature and culture today. Exploring...

Originally published in 1994, Writing in the Air is one of the most significant books of modern Latin American literary and cultural criticism. In this seminal work, the influential Latin American literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar offers the most extended articulation of his efforts to displace...

Jorge Luis Borges-one of the most important Latin American writers-has also attained considerable international stature, and his work is commonly cited in a wide array of scholarship on contemporary fiction. Partly as a consequence of Borges' international identity, and partly because of a long-standing...

Blues singer, preacher, cultural critic, exile, Africadian, high modernist, spoken word artist, Canadian poet—these are but some of the voices of George Elliott Clarke. In a selection of Clarke’s best work from his early poetry to his most recent, Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott...

This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan’s purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect...

In this book, first published in 1984, Joel Weinsheimer advocates revitalizing the practice of imitating literature as a mode appropriate for literary critics as well as artists. The book is not only about imitation; it is itself an imitation, specifically of Samuel Johnson. As both the focus and...

Through discussion of the ways in which major Northern Irish poets (such as John Hewitt, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon) have been influenced by America, this study shows how Northern Irish poetry overspills national borders, complicating and enriching itself through cross-cultural interaction and hybridity.

The number and popularity of novels that have overtly reconfigured aspects of classic American texts suggests a curious trend for both readers and writers, an impulse to retell and reread books that have come to define American culture. This book argues that by revising canonical American literature,...

Never before or after have the horrors of the "Great War," as World War I was known, been captured as they were by Kurt Tucholsky. The famed Weimar writer, who would become one of Germany’s best-known satirist and journalists, describes surviving in the trenches and fighting a losing battle,...

The Austrian Empire was not a colonial power in the sense that fellow actors like 19th-century England and France were. It nevertheless oversaw a multinational federation where the capital of Vienna was unmistakably linked with its eastern periphery in a quasi-colonial arrangement that inevitably...

Modernist poetry heralded a radical new aesthetic of experimentation, pioneering new verse forms and subjects, and changing the very notion of what it meant to be a poet. This volume examines T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, three of the most influential figures of the modernist movement, and...

This book, first published in 1987, differs from many other ‘dictionaries of criticism’ in concentrating less on time-honoured rhetorical terms and more on conceptually flexible, powerful terms. Each entry consists of not simply a dictionary definition but an essay exploring the history and full...

Sidney Lanier was one of the most important American poets of the late 19th century.  Born in Georgia in 1842, he was influenced by the ancestry of his family, his parents religiosity, his education at Oglethorpe University, and the wealth of information he found in the Peabody Library in Baltimore,...

Against a background of enormous cultural change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writing by British Jewish women grappled with shifting meanings of Jewish identity, the pressure of social norms, and questions of assimilation. Until recently, however, the distinctive experiences and perspectives...