Bücher der Reihe Literature, Culture, Theory

This is the first book to explore Lacan's theory of poetry and its relationship to subjectivity and history. Chaitin's lucid study explores Lacan's move beyond the polarities of poetics and philosophy to embrace literature's role in the creation of self hood. This book is a definitive study of Lacan's theoretical development across the entire career.

This 1995 book is Pierre Macherey's first on literature and theory since A Theory of Literary Production. It offers both a new theory of the relationship between literature and philosophy, and a series of speculations on important texts and problems in the French literary tradition.

The pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece, has attracted new interest in the context of postmodernist thought. This volume explores ways in which rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism contribute to rethinking the human sciences and cultural politics.

Kenneth Burke's influence ranged across history, philosophy and the social sciences. Robert Wess's important study examines Burke's influence on contemporary theories of rhetoric and subjectivity. This 1996 book is a judicious exposition of Burke's long career and a crucial intervention in critical debates surrounding rhetoric, history, and human agency.

The postmodern debate has been heavily influenced by often contradictory conclusions about the foundations of knowledge. In this 1994 book, Horace Fairlamb examines the history of foundationism and analyses the work of leading theorists including Fish, Foucault, Gadamer and Habermas, in order to argue for a less reductive and less arbitrary theory of knowledge and meaning.

The relationship of words to the things they represent and to the mind which forms them has long been the subject of linguistic enquiry. Joseph Graham's challenging book, first published in 1992, takes this debate into the field of literary theory, making a searching enquiry into the nature of literary representation.

James Paxson offers a critical and theoretical appraisal of literary personification in the light of developments in poststructuralist thought, reassessing early theories and examining medieval and early modern texts to show how personification reveals and advertises the problems and limits inherent in poetic or verbal creation.

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer a coherent accounts of ethics in a fragmented social and intellectual world? In this collection, a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the renewed interest in the literary text as a focus for ethical issues.

The German philosopher Manfred Frank challenges many of the fundamental assumptions of contemporary literary theory. The emphasis on language, Frank argues, ignores key arguments inherited from Romantic hermeneutics, those which demonstrate that interpretation is an individual activity never finally governed by rules.

Michael Bernard-Donals explores the ambivalence underlying the language theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, and the mirroring difficulties experienced by antifoundationalist and materialist strands in literary scholarship. This book is a contextualized study of Bakhtin, a critique of contemporary criticism, and an original contribution to literary theory.

Mimesis has long been cited as a key concept in the exploration of art and reality. In this major study Arne Melberg discusses the theory and history of mimesis through analysis of major texts, charting the movement of the concept from the Platonic philosophy of similarity to modern ideas of difference.

The concept of possible worlds, originally introduced in philosophical logic, is here used to explain the notion of fictional worlds. Through a comparative reading of the use of possible worlds in philosophy and in literary theory Ruth Ronen proposes a radical rethinking of fictionality in general and fictional narrativity in particular.

The practical application of theory as a pedagogical aid has yet to be fully addressed. The Practice of Theory, examines the connection between theory and pedagogy at the level of practice and offers a sustained reflection on the production of knowledge across a range of contemporary disciplines.

This 1997 book explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of cultural and film studies. Patrick McGee shows how film can be both a product and a critique of the culture industry. He analyses the function of the university in producing interpretations of such highly political art forms and in determining the limits of critical discussion.

In Singularities, Thomas Pepper addresses the relationship between text, philosophical value, and critical difficulty. Through a rich sequence of nuanced close readings of especially demanding texts, this book addresses key moments in the work of seminal twentieth-century theorists, and questions the whole direction of contemporary critical thought.

An analysis of way developments in technology have transformed our understanding of time and affected the structure of the novel. This wide-ranging study offers readings of postmodernist theory the relationship between literature and science.

The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.

Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book explains the relationship between the novel and the emergent commodity culture of Victorian England. Analysing the work of Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Gaskell, Novels behind Glass will interest students of Victorian literature, history, and social and cultural theory.

Peter Szondi is widely regarded as being among the most distinguished post-war literary critics: this is the first English translation of his important lectures on hermeneutics. He traces the historical development of hermeneutics through examination of the work of German Enlightenment theorists, and explores its relevance for the contemporary critic.

The pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece, has attracted new interest in the context of postmodernist thought. This volume explores ways in which rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism contribute to rethinking the human sciences and cultural politics.

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer a coherent accounts of ethics in a fragmented social and intellectual world? In this collection, a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the renewed interest in the literary text as a focus for ethical issues.

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi argues that postmodern culture does not reject Enlightenment beliefs and explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel and Wittgenstein.

In Modernism, Expressionism and Theories of the Avant Garde, Richard Murphy mobilises theories of the postmodern to challenge our understanding of the avant-garde. He assesses the importance of the avant-garde for contemporary culture and for the debates among theorists of postmodernism such as Jameson, Eagleton, Lyotard and Habermas. Murphy reconsiders the classic formulation of the avant-garde in Lukacs and Bloch, especially their discussion of aesthetic autonomy, and investigates the relationship between art and politics via a discussion of Marcuse, Adorno and Benjamin. Combining close textual readings of a wide range of films as well as works of literature, it draws on a rich array of critical theories, such as those of Bakhtin, Todorov, MacCabe, Belsey and Raymond Williams. This interdisciplinary project will appeal to all those interested in modernist and avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, and provides a critical rethinking of the present-day controversy regarding postmodernity.

In Ideology and Inscription Tom Cohen questions the way history is currently invoked in cultural studies and argues for a new politics of memory.

This 2004 book contains a series of readings of the work of major writers. Tom Cohen shows how analysis of long-undervalued material elements of writing - sound, signature, letters - exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism, and transforms our understanding of literary texts.

Wordsworth's poetry has been a focus for many of the theoretical schools of criticism that comprise modern literary studies. This challenging book uses the case of Wordsworth studies to make a far-reaching survey of modern literary theory and its implications for the practice of criticism and teaching today.

This book addresses the central crisis in critical theory today: the attempts to theorise the subject as both a construct of discourse and a dialogical agent. Through wide reference to leading political, philosophical, and critical thinkers, Meili Steele maps new ways of confronting the problem of how politics and ethics are deployed in imaginative narratives.

In Theory and the Novel Jeffrey Williams analyses a range of novels - Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness - and shows how narrative technique is never beyond or outside plot. He offers a striking and original contribution to readings of the English novel, as well as to current discussions of theory.

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gerard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declaration requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions as revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interact with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Gennet's work in contemporary literary theory.

The work of Jacques Derrida can be seen to reinvent most theories; here Robert Smith offers a reading of Derrida's philosophy and an investigation of theories of autobiography. Smith thinks through Derrida's texts in a new way, and finds new perspectives on the work of classical writers including Hegel, Nietszche, Kierkegaard, Freud and de Man.