This set reissues 27 books on literary theory originally published between 1965 and 1992. Top academics in the field examine different aspects of literary theory, including structuralism, post-structuralism, stylistics and semiotics, and approach these theories in a variety of ways. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature and literary theory.
Edited
By Andrew Benjamin
January 11, 2018
Modern literary theory is increasingly looking to philosophy for its inspiration. After a wave of structural analysis, the growing influence of deconstruction and hermeneutic readings continues to bear witness to this. This exciting and important collection, first published in 1988, reveals the ...
By Elizabeth Wright
January 11, 2018
In this radical and deliberately controversial re-reading of Brecht, first published in 1989, Elizabeth Wright takes a new view of the playwright, giving us a more ‘Brechtian’ reading than so far achieved and making his work historically relevant here and now. The author discusses in detail Brecht’...
By Sandy Petrey
January 11, 2018
This book, first published in 1990, combines an introduction to speech-act theory as developed by J. L. Austin with a survey of critical essays that have adapted Austin's thought for literary analysis. Speech-act theory emphasizes the social reality created when speakers agree that their language ...
By Mary Bittner Wiseman
January 11, 2018
In this pioneering work, first published in 1981, Sunday O. Anozie examines the relevance of structuralism and semiology to literary criticism in general and to African poetics in particular. Behind the growing body of African literature lies an immense reservoir of oral tradition for which the ...
By Sandy Petrey
January 11, 2018
In The Conspiracy of the Text, first published in 1986, Jeff Adams looks at an early stage in childhood to examine the ways in which children create social organisation and moral order. Adams shows how certain narratives, such as fairy tales, serve as a foundation for this system, and does this ...
By Mary Bittner Wiseman
January 11, 2018
In this book, first published in 1989, Mary Bittner Wiseman interprets Roland Barthes’s experiments as efforts to reposition the human subject with respect to language and to time in order to let the subject escape from the language of a particular culture and the present time. With her insistent ...
Edited
By Ralph Cohen
January 11, 2018
In this book, first published in 1989, twenty-give eminent critics and theorists write about different aspects of literary theory. These essays represent leading research in psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, Continental theory, feminism, Afro-American studies, philosophy, cybernetics, ...
By Roger Fowler
January 11, 2018
In The Language of Literature, first published in 1971, Roger Fowler argues that the vitality and centrality of the verbal dimension of literature, and, read as a whole, the papers in this collection imply a consistent point of view on language in literature. The author focuses on the continuity of...
By Horst Ruthrof
January 11, 2018
In this book, first published in 1981, the author argues that narrative is an interaction between "the presented world and the presentational process" and attempts to define narrative from the perspective of reading. The Reader’s Construction of Narrative includes chapters on narrative language, ...
Edited
By Ian Adam
January 11, 2018
The contributors of this text, first published in 1988, provide a dynamic view of the social functioning of texts, taking account of linguistic, literary and cultural elements. They bring together innovative perspectives on literary analysis and theory, on pragmatics and discourse analysis, as well...
By Jeffrey Steele
January 11, 2018
American writers in the 1830’s and 1840’s felt the need for a new terminology to express their awakening perception of "new" aspects of the mind. Without words like the "unconscious" vast areas of the psyche would have remained unexpressed and thus unapproachable. This "discovery" of the ...
Edited
By Roma Gill
January 11, 2018
This volume of commemorative and celebratory essays, first published in 1974, concentrates on William Empson – the critic, the poet and friend. The papers range from the biographical to the academic, but what every one suggests is the impossibility of separating the man from his work and the ‘life’...