Four Essays.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung .

Addresses developments in literary studies, including 'the growth of a kind of anti-theory', and the idea that literary theory has been institutionalized.

Dealing with literary criticism, the author aims to show how, from antiquity to the twentieth century, literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. The exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature.

This text contains two of Walter Benjamin's essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , and Theses on the Philosophy of History , as well as others on the art of translation, Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust, and book collecting.

Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. This title examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

This work offers a unified field theory of Western culture, high and low, since the Egyptians invented beauty. From Emily Dickinson and Medusa to Madonna, it makes a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and demonic nature.

A new book by America's leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why is Bloom's manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.

Collection of literary lectures by E.M. Forster, published in 1927. For the purposes of his study, Forster defines the novel as any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words. Forester's wit and lively, informed originality have made this study of the novel a classic.

This anthology of critical writing ranges from Gorgias and Plato to Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin. Each of the 147 contributions has a headnote introducing the writer and making connections to other critics, theorists and movements. An introduction surveys the history of theory and criticism.

A series of essays in which Barthes seeks to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself.

In this work of feminist literary criticism the authors explore the works of many major 19th-century women writers. They chart a tangible desire expressed for freedom from the restraints of a confining patriarchal society and trace a distinctive female literary tradition.

War Against Cliche is a collection of essays.

A look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning. Using comics to examine the medium itself, the author takes the form of a cartoon character and explains the structure, meaning, and appeal of comics, and provides a running analysis of comics as art, literature, and communication.

Contains lectures on Hamlet , Othello , King Lear and Macbeth . Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as shakespeare might have wondered about people in novels or in life, this book is written by a Shakespeare critic.

In his enjoyable readings of ambiguity, puns and paradox, Empson draws on a variety of authors from Chaucer to Eliot, illuminating the strategies of individual writers and creating a brilliant general theory of poetic practice: wide ranging, witty and still controversial.

Defines our understanding of colonialism and empire.

The definitive critical study of Tolkien's greatest works by the respected and world renowned Tolkien scholar Professor T.A. Shippey.

Based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge.

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.