Literary theory

We are living in the moment of the essay. The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in essays that interrogate personal experience; contemporary Australian writers are using their lives to think through the ways we connect, remember, and live,...

Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed dynamically. In The Postmodern Condition Jean-Francois Lyotard extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status...

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a diverse selection of essays that register the situatedness of critical theory and practice amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts.In recent...

Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisisWhy has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is...

Incisive and confessional, Raised by Wolves collects the most acclaimed work of Taiwanese poet -filmmaker Amang. In her poems, Amang turns her razor-sharp eye to everything from her suitors ("For twenty years I've loved you, twenty years / So why not say...

World Literature Today Editor's Pick "Enchanting. . . . The Poetic Species is a wonderful read in its entirety, short yet infinitely simulating." -MARIA POPOVA, Brain Pickings In this shimmering conversation (the outgrowth of an event co-sponsored by the...

For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent...

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely...

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with...

From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead's work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature...

Energetically places modern British drama and contemporary critical and cultural theory in dialogue, demonstrating how theory allows fresh insights into familiar plays. Each chapter pairs a well-known play from the post-war period with a classic theory...

Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against...

How rhyme became entangled with debates about the nature of liberty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English...

How the words we use-and don't use-reinforce dominant cultural normsWhy is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash"? Offering a...