An introduction to literary theory unlike any other, Ten Lessons in Theory engages its readers with three fundamental premises. The first premise is that a genuinely productive understanding of theory depends upon a considerably more sustained encounter with the foundational writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than any reader is likely to get from the introductions to theory that are currently available. The second premise involves what Fredric Jameson describes as "the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan's is the richest." Entertaining this conviction, the book pays more (and more careful) attention to the richness of Lacan's writing than does any other introduction to literary theory. The third and most distinctive premise of the book is that literary theory isn't simply theory "about" literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature, after all. Ten Lessons in Theory argues, and even demonstrates, that "theoretical writing" is nothing if not a specific genre of "creative writing," a particular way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble sentences that make, or desire to make, radical changes in the very fabric of social reality. As its title indicates, the book proceeds in the form of ten "lessons," each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canon of theoretical writing. Each lesson works by creatively unpacking its featured sentence and exploring the sentence's conditions of possibility and most radical implications. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these troubling sentences, the ten lessons work and play together to articulate the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences. Provided in each lesson is a working glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a footnote. But while each lesson constitutes a precise explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a "practice of creativity" (Foucault) in itself.

N.B. this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title. Stock of this book requires shipment from overseas. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. Using literary and social analysis, this book examines a range of modern Arab American literary fiction and illustrates how socio-political phenomena have affected the development of the Arab American novel.

How did eighteenth-century readers find and make time to read? Books have always posed a problem of time for readers. Becoming widely available in the eighteenth century—when working hours increased and lighter and quicker forms of reading (newspapers, magazines, broadsheets) surged in popularity—the material form of the codex book invited readers to situate themselves creatively in time. Drawing on letters, diaries, reading logs, and a range of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels, Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century concretely describes how book-readers of the past carved up, expanded, and anticipated time. Placing canonical works by Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Fielding, Amelia Opie, and Samuel Richardson alongside those of lesser-known authors and readers, Lupton approaches books as objects that are good at attracting particular forms of attention and paths of return. In contrast to the digital interfaces of our own moment and the ephemeral newspapers and pamphlets read in the 1700s, books are rarely seen as shaping or keeping modern time. However, as Lupton demonstrates, books are often put down and picked up, they are leafed through as well as read sequentially, and they are handed on as objects designed to bridge temporal distances. In showing how discourse itself engages with these material practices, Lupton argues that reading is something to be studied textually as well as historically. Applying modern theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, and Bernard Stiegler, Lupton offers a rare phenomenological approach to the study of a concrete historical field. This compelling book stands out for the combination of archival research, smart theoretical inquiry, and autobiographical reflection it brings into play.

Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.

Graham-Bertolini provides the first analysis of vigilante women in contemporary American fiction. She develops a dynamic model of vigilante heroines using literary and feminist theory and applies it to important texts to broaden our understanding of how law and culture infringe upon women's rights.

Everyone knows something of nineteenth-century France - or do they? "Les Miserables", "The Lady of the Camelias" and "The Three Musketeers", "Balzac" and "Jules Verne" live in the popular consciousness as enduring human documents and cultural icons. Yet, the French nineteenth century was even more dynamic than the stereotype suggests. This exciting new introduction takes the literature of the period both as a window on past and present mindsets and as an object of fascination in its own right. Beginning with history, the century's biggest problem and potential, it looks at narrative responses to historical, political and social experience, before devoting central chapters to poetry, drama and novels - all genres the century radically reinvented. It then explores numerous modernities, ways nineteenth-century writing and mentalities look forward to our own, before turning to marginalities - subjects and voices the canon traditionally forgot. No genre was left unchanged by the nineteenth century. This book will help to discover them anew.

Re-examines a critical tradition unchallenged since the 19th century. The 20 essays reassess the place of women in Anglo-Saxon culture as demonstrated by the laws, works by women, and the depiction of them in the standard Old English canon of literature (Beowulf, Alfred, Wulfstan, et al.) Categories include the historical record, sexuality and folklore, language and gender characterization, and several deconstructions of stereotypes. Paper edition (unseen), $14.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This study of fiction produced in America in the decade following 1945 examines literature by writers such as Kerouac and Bellow. It examines how, though such fiction seemed to resolutely avoid the events and implications of World War II, it was still suffused with dread and suggestions of war in imagery and language.