What is Literary Theory? Is there a relationship between literature and culture? Addressing such questions, this book offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, and outlines the ideas behind a number of different schools: deconstruction, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and structuralism amongst them.

An essay about how we study and understand history, this book begins by inviting us to think about various questions provoked by our investigation of history. It explores the ways these questions have been answered in the past. It also introduces the concepts of causation, interpretation, and periodization, through examples of how historians work.

In this book the author gives an account of the arguments surrounding the proposition of postmodernism and contributes to the debate on what exactly is the nature of current social change.

Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. This book surveys Barthes' work in prose.

Covers the major aspects of linguistics. This guide begins at the 'arts' end of the subject and finishes at the 'science' end, with the discoveries regarding language in the brain. It looks at the prehistory of languages and their common origins, language and evolution, language in time and space, grammar and dictionaries and phonetics.