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893 results in Literary theory

Page 1 of 45

Kant and Literary Studies
  • Edited by Claudia Brodsky
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics
  • Edited by John D. Kerkering
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. Individual chapters examine how US literature from this period engaged with broad political concepts and urgent political issues, such as liberalism, conservatism, radicalism, nationalism, communitarianism, sovereignty, religious liberty, partisanship and factionalism, slavery, segregation, immigration, territorial disputes, voting rights, gendered spheres, and urban/rural tensions.  Chapters on literary genres and forms show how poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction participated in political debate. The volume's introduction situates these chapters in relation to two larger disciplines, the history of political thought and literary history. This Companion provides a valuable resource for students and instructors interested in Nineteenth-Century American literature and politics.

Insurgent Cultures
  • World Literatures and Violence from the Global South
  • Pavan Kumar Malreddy
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • Moving beyond the normative frames of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this book shows how world literatures from the Global South can be used to examine the multiple modalities of violence that pervade contemporary world politics, such as communalism, factionalism, peasant wars, banditry, nationalist struggles, resource wars and acts of vengeance. The comparative approach of this book enables a theoretical realignment of insurgency from the mobilization of violence for grand, mythic, and ideological causes – as seen through the eyes of the state – to the violence for small causes, namely, the splintered violence conjured under conceptual rubrics such as divine violence, intimate violence, routine violence, everyday violence, inherited violence, and subterranean violence. Analyzing novels, autobiographies, journalistic accounts from key regions, such as Nigeria, Myanmar (Burma), India, and the Middle East, Insurgent Cultures provides a new understanding of the narratives of violence in the Global South. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
  • Edited by Russ Castronovo, Robert S. Levine
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies takes stock of critical developments over the past twenty years, offering a fresh examination of key interpretative issues in this field. In eclectic fashion, it presents a wide range of new approaches in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. This volume also maps out new directions for the future of the field. The evidence and examples discussed by the contributors are compelling, grounded in case studies of key literary texts, both familiar and understudied, that help to bring critical debate into focus and model fresh interpretive perspectives. Essays provide new readings and framings of such figures as Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Zitkála-Šá.

Texts and Intertexts in Archaic and Classical Greece
  • Edited by Adrian Kelly, Henry Spelman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • Encompassing the period from the earliest archaic epics down through classical Athenian drama, this is the first concerted, step-by-step examination of the development of allusive poetics in the early Greek world. Recent decades have seen a marked rise in intertextual approaches to early Greek literature; as scholars increasingly agree on the need to read these texts in a comparative way, this only makes all the more urgent the question of how best to do so. This volume brings together divergent scholarly voices to explore the state of the field and to point the way forward. All twelve chapters address themselves to a core set of fundamental questions: how do texts generate meaning by referring to other texts and how do the poetics of allusivity change over time and differ across genres? The result is a holistic study of a key dimension of literary experience.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
  • Edited by Adam Hammond
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • Literature has experienced two great medium shifts, each with profound implications for its forms, genres, and cultures: that from orality to writing, and that from writing to printing. Today we are experiencing a third shift, from printed to digital forms. As with the previous shifts, this transformation is reconfiguring literature and literary culture. The Cambridge Companion to Literature in the Digital Age is organized around the question of what is at stake for literary studies in this latest transition. Rather than dividing its chapters by methodology or approach, this volume proceeds by exploring the major categories of literary investigation that are coming under pressure in the digital age: concepts such as the canon, periodization, authorship, and narrative. With chapters written by leading experts in all facets of literary studies, this book shows why all those who read, study, and teach literature today ought to attend to the digital.

A History of Haitian Literature
  • Edited by Marlene L. Daut, Kaiama L. Glover
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • From nineteenth-century antislavery pamphleteering to accounts of ecological catastrophe in twenty-first-century fiction, Haitian literature has resounded across the globe since the nation's revolutionaries declared independence in 1804. Starting with pre-revolutionary writing, including the emergence of Haitian Creole letters, extending to the long, largely francophone nineteenth century, and concluding with present-day Haitian writing in the English language, A History of Haitian Literature presents the political, cultural, and historical frameworks necessary to comprehend Haiti's vast literary output. Whether writing in Haiti or its wide-ranging diasporas, Haitian authors have boldly contributed to pressing conversations in global letters while reflecting Haiti's unique cultural and historical experiences. Considering an expansive array of poets, playwrights, and novelists – such as Baron de Vastey, Juste Chanlatte, Demesvar Delorme, Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Kettly Mars, Dany Laferrière, and Évelyne Trouillot – the contributors to this volume offer a fresh examination of a richly polyglot, transnational literary tradition that spans more than two centuries.

Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
  • Edited by Cóilín Parsons
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging set of essays exploring the travels of Irish literature and culture over the last century and more. The essays focus on writers and artists whose work has been taken up and re-read overseas; on cultural producers who have engaged with transnational scales in their work; and on critical practices that pay attention to comparative, global, and planetary dimensions of Irish literature and culture. Nation and territory have long been central to cultural production in Ireland, especially as both remain significantly contested, but a continued focus on these inherited scales has hindered critical attention to transnational routes and roots that exist alongside and challenge the nation. This volume sets agenda for the future of study of transnationalism in Irish literature and culture, recognizing the need for a new set of theories and methodologies that are adequate to our emerging world.

The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism
  • Joseph Tabbi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • At a time when scholars in both literary and scientific disciplines are advancing the term posthumanism, this book offers a through-line. Beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and continuing into the post-print, born-digital excursions of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, this literary introduction defines posthumanism and provides a summary account of the key literary and cultural theorists in the field. It embraces humanist refusals from Melville's Bartelby to Thomas Pynchon's authorial surrogation, and more recent evasions and avoidances in the writing of William Gibson, Tom McCarthy, Coleson Whitehead, Jeanette Winterson, and Claire-Louise Bennett. This book also provides close readings of key posthuman fiction, poetry, and conceptual approaches that help ground the discipline.

Theology and the Mythic Sensibility
  • Human Myth-Making and Divine Creativity
  • Andrew Shamel
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • How do stories change the way we see both ourselves and the world? That question is the starting-point of this accomplished new contribution to narrative theology. Dr Shamel addresses what he calls mythopoieic fantasy: the fictionalised myth-making occupying those twilight borderlands between contemporary secularity and a religious worldview. Exploring key writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, and J. K. Rowling, the author argues that the mythic turn of popular culture signals an ongoing hunger for something 'more': more dense, more present, more 'real'. For Dr Shamel, mythopoieic fantasy and Christian theology represent the same human impulse: a desire to participate in the divine. Despite the avowed secularity of many authors of fantasy literature, the creativity of their mythic fictions reveals something of the theological character of all human making. The stories we tell in order to encounter the world as meaningful, argues Dr Shamel, in fact emerge within a theological horizon.

The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature
  • Edited by John Ernest
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • Race is central to American history. It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding how race has been defined and deployed at every stage of the nation's history. Offering a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the history of race, The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature shows how this history has been represented in literature, and how those representations have influenced American culture. Written by leading scholars in in African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies, the essays in this volume address the centrality of race in American literature by foregrounding the conflicts across different traditions and different modes of interpretation. This volume explores the unsteady foundations of American literary history, examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and then considers various aspects of the multiple literary and complexly interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape.

Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Sarah E. Chinn
  • Published online:
    13 June 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024
  • During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of men were injured, and underwent amputation of hands, feet, limbs, fingers, and toes. As the war drew to a close, their disabled bodies came to represent the future of a nation that had been torn apart, and how it would be put back together again. In her authoritative and engagingly written new book, Sarah Chinn claims that amputation spoke both corporeally and metaphorically to radical white writers, ministers, and politicians about the need to attend to the losses of the Civil War by undertaking a real and actual Reconstruction that would make African Americans not just legal citizens but actual citizens of the United States. She traces this history, reviving little-known figures in the struggle for Black equality, and in so doing connecting the racial politics of 150 years ago with contemporary debates about justice and equity.

The Cambridge History of the British Essay
  • Edited by Denise Gigante, Jason Childs
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024
  • From ancient influences on the essay as a form of rhetoric to the Irish essay as performance, from British imperial propaganda to African postcolonial resistance, from political pamphlets to the rise of literary professionalism, from gastronomy to ecocriticism, The Cambridge History of the British Essay offers the first authoritative single-volume history of the form's development within the British literary tradition. It restores to the contemporary understanding of the essay an appreciation of its true richness and diversity. The fifty contributors to this volume come from widely diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise that brings out neglected pockets of essayistic activity, by women, by persons of colour, by poets and pamphleteers. Together, they show how the form morphs to serve new contexts and concerns, remaining a vital genre of literary 'attempt' in the fields of journalism, academic study, autobiography and other forms of life writing, and online language arts.

The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry
  • Edited by Ann Vickery
  • Published online:
    06 June 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • An invaluable resource for staff and students in literary studies and Australian studies, this volume is the first major critical survey on Australian poetry. It investigates poetry's central role in engaging with issues of colonialism, nationalism, war and crisis, diaspora, gender and sexuality, and the environment. Individual chapters examine Aboriginal writing and the archive, poetry and activism, print culture, and practices of internationally renowned poets such as Lionel Fogarty, Gwen Harwood, John Kinsella, Les Murray, and Judith Wright. The Companion considers Australian leadership in the diversification of poetry in terms of performance, the verse novel, and digital poetries. It also considers Antipodean engagements with Romanticism and Modernism.

Europe in British Literature and Culture
  • Edited by Petra Rau, William T. Rossiter
  • Published online:
    06 June 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • How has Europe shaped British literature and culture – and vice versa – since the Middle Ages? This volume offers nuanced answers to this question. From the High Renaissance to haute cuisine, from the Republic of Letters to the European Union, from the Black Death to Brexit -- the reader gains insights into the main geographical zones of influence, shared intellectual movements, indicative modes of cultural transfer and more recent conflicts that have left their mark on the British-European relationship. The story that emerges from this long history of cultural interactions is much more complex than its most recent political episode might suggest. This volume offers indispensable contexts to the manifold and longstanding connections between British and European literature and culture. This book suggests that, however the political landscape develops, we will do well to bear this exceptionally rich history in mind.

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century
  • Theophilus Savvas
  • Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasises that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.

The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
  • Edited by Sean Pryor
  • Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.

The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan
  • Published online:
    17 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.

The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature
  • Edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
  • Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
  • Whether invisible or hyper-visible, adored or reviled, from the inception of American literature the Black body has been rendered in myriad forms. This volume tracks and uncovers the Black body as a persistent presence and absence in American literature. It provides an invaluable guide for teachers and students interested in literary and artistic representations of Blackness and embodiment. The book is divided into three sections that highlight Black embodiment through conceptual flashpoints that emphasize various aspects of human body in its visual and textual manifestations. This Companion engages past and continuing debates about the nature of embodiment by showcasing how writers from multiple eras and communities defined and challenged the limits of what constitutes a body in relation to human and nonhuman environment.

Nietzsche and Literary Studies
  • Edited by James I. Porter
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    25 April 2024
  • Nietzsche and Literary Studies tackles the literary implications of Nietzsche's philosophy and the philosophical implications of his approaches to style and expression. The book offers a complete guide to Nietzsche's writings, which in turn draw on two and a half millennia of literary and philosophical history, reaching back to Heraclitus, Plato, and the Cynics and from there to Diderot, the Schlegels, Stendahl, and Stifter, and have inspired a further century of responses from literary writers and philosophers, from Proust, Gide, and Thomas Mann to Derrida and Sarah Kofman. Individual chapters cover aphorism, the novel form, dialogue and dialogism, metaphor, truth, lies, and self-creation. Contributions are written by scholars from a wide range of fields, including classical studies, literary theory, history of literature and philosophy (including Nietzsche studies), theology and religion, and ecology.

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