Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Promiscuity in Western Literature
1st Edition
By Peter Stoneley
December 13, 2021
Poet and novelist Charles Bukowski described promiscuity as "feast and feast and feast." The promiscuous person is having fun, getting away with it, and showing no signs of stopping. More often, though, promiscuity has been seen as demonic, as the sign of an uncivilised race, or as a symptom of ...
Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art
1st Edition
By Frances Restuccia
June 30, 2021
This volume develops the central (though neglected) Agambenian concept of nudity along with its crucial political implications. The book discovers within The Use of Bodies a philosophical path to Agamben’s "ontology of nudity," as it is subtended by his notion of the messianic—a dual temporality of...
Conceptualisation and Exposition: A Theory of Character Construction
1st Edition
By Lina Varotsi
June 30, 2021
While the concept of the fictional character has been widely discussed at interdisciplinary level, a foundational theory of character creation is yet to follow. As a result, creative writing students and beginner writers refer to post-construction analysis, as well as the step-by-step advice often ...
Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle
1st Edition
Edited
By Patrick Gill, Florian Kläger
June 30, 2021
The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short ...
Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel
1st Edition
By Marta Puxan-Oliva
June 30, 2021
How does racial ideology contribute to the exploration of narrative voice? How does narrative (un)reliability help in the production and critique of racial ideologies? Through a refreshing comparative analysis of well-established novels by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, ...
The Individual and the Authority Figure in Egyptian Prose Literature
1st Edition
By Yona Sheffer
June 30, 2021
The Individual and the Authority Figure in Egyptian Prose Literature explores and analyses political conflicts between individuals and authority figures, as those conflicts are depicted in thirteen Egyptian novels written from 1957 to the last years of Mubarak's presidency. The book discusses the ...
The Waste Fix: Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos
1st Edition
By William G. Little
March 31, 2021
First published in 2002. This book explores the philosophical, social, and aesthetic implications of twentieth-century America's obsession with eliminating waste. Through interdisciplinary engagement with fiction and popular culture, William Little traces the way this obsession finds expression in ...
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden
1st Edition
By Katarzyna Nowak McNeice
September 30, 2020
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and ...
Making and Seeing Modern Texts
1st Edition
By Jonathan Locke Hart
September 30, 2020
Making and Seeing Modern Texts explores the poetics of texts through a close reading and analysis across the genres of poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction travel literature and theory. This volume demonstrates that prose, as much as poetry, share the making and seeing of language, literary practice...
The Pictorial Third: An Essay Into Intermedial Criticism
1st Edition
By Liliane Louvel
September 30, 2020
The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observesing the modalities and workings of what is termed ‘intermedial ...
Cultural Evolution and its Discontents: Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure
1st Edition
By Robert Watson
January 14, 2020
People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those ...
Revised Lives: Whitman, Religion, and Constructions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Culture
1st Edition
By William Pannapacker
December 10, 2019
Revised Lives examines self-representation in U.S. culture from the American Revolution through the nineteenth century. Drawing on studies of the history of the book, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, and ethnic and gender revisionism, this book focuses on the processes of national development, the ...