Literary Theory Criticism category: 45208 books

Best known as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver also published several volumes of poetry and considered himself as much a poet as a fiction writer. Sandra Lee Kleppe combines comparative analysis with an in-depth examination of Carver’s poems, making a...

Maria Marotti applies a unique mixture of strains of contemporary literary theory to the body of posthumously published works so far published in the Mark Twain Papers series, examining these late, frequently incomplete or abandoned, and usually experimental, works in theoretical light. Marotti's...

For the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional paths, including his preference for releasing his books through independent publishers. But with the...

Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality...

Via readings of novels by J.M. Coetzee, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie and the later poetry of W.B. Yeats, this book reveals how postcolonial writing can encourage the enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility needed to supplant ongoing forms of imperial violence with cosmopolitan institutions, relationships and ways of thinking.

An invaluable introduction to the life and work of one of today's most important cultural critics. Studied on most undergraduate literary and cultural studies courses, Fredric Jameson's writing targets subjects from architecture to science fiction, cinema to global capitalism. Of his works, The Political...

Recent scholarship has acknowledged that the intertextual discourse of ancient comedy with previous and contemporary literary traditions is not limited to tragedy. This book is a timely response to the more sophisticated and theory-grounded way of viewing comedy's interactions with its cultural and...

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space...

This book addresses debt in postcolonial fiction: financial, social, historical, and cultural. The author examines how literary characters including servants, fallen women, and cultural outsiders pay or refuse to pay the debts imposed upon them, and the consequences of debts paid and unpaid. Working...

Reading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of historicism and its present usefulness as a mode of literary analysis, its limitations and its future....

This book is a type of "tooth and claw" criticism of James Fenimore Cooper's writings, focusing primarily on Deerslayer and Pathfinder from the Leatherstocking Tales. Twain begins by quoting a few critics who praise the works of Cooper, and then shortly claims that they have never read the...

Barbara Foley here focuses on the relatively neglected genre of documentary fiction: novels that are continually near the borderline between factual and fictive discourse. She links the development of the genre over three centuries to the evolution of capitalism, but her analyses of literary texts...

Does empathy felt while reading fiction actually cultivate a sense of connection, leading to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Drawing on psychology, narrative theory,...