Literature and Theory is designed to assist students to apply key critical theories to literary texts. Focusing on representative works and authors widely taught across classrooms in the world – Joyce, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Beckett, Eliot, and Octavia Butler – it picks up different aspects of studying literature in an accessible format. The volume also brings together chapters that represent major modern literary schools of thought, including structuralism, poststructuralism, myth criticism, queer theory, feminism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and critical theory, as well as culture studies.

Literature and Food Studies introduces readers to a growing interdisciplinary field by examining literary genres and cultural movements as they engage with the edible world and, in turn, illuminate transnational histories of empire, domesticity, scientific innovation, and environmental transformation and degradation. With a focus on the Americas and Europe, Literature and Food Studies compares works of imaginative literature, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, with what the authors define as vernacular literary practices—which take written form as horticultural manuals, recipes, cookbooks, restaurant reviews, agricultural manifestos, dietary treatises, and culinary guides. For those new to its principal subject, Literature and Food Studies introduces core concepts in food studies that span anthropology, geography, history, literature, and other fields; it compares canonical literary texts with popular forms of print culture; and it aims to inspire future research and teaching. Combining a cultural studies approach to foodways and food systems with textual analysis and archival research, the book offers an engaging and lucid introduction for humanities scholars and students to the rapidly expanding field of food studies.

An incisive study of modern American literature, casting new light on its origins and themes. Exploring canonical American writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner alongside less familiar writers like Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell, the guide takes readers though a diverse literary landscape. It considers how the rise of the American metropolis contributed to the growth of American modernism; and also examines the ways in which regional writers responded to an accelerated American modernity. Taking in African American modernism, cultural and geographical exile, as well as developments in modern American drama, the guide introduces readers to current critical trends in modernist studies.

This book intends to trace the revival of traditional literary works since the 1980s in China as it is revealed on the revitalized College Entrance Examination (CEE). In order to show how these changes reflect China’s altering ideology after the fall of Communism, selections from the CEE’s literary portion will be examined. Taking advantage of the resurrection of the powerful CEE, test creators have composed the literary portion as an education tool to shape public opinion in the post-Communist era. Literature in China have never been an independent art but had shared the responsibility for transmitting China’s intellectual and ethical traditions. The introduction of Communism to China silenced these traditions and made literature the servant of political ideology. This book traces the chronological process of restoring modern vernacular literature from the pre-Communist era and the ways in which traditional literature is being used for modern purposes. For many Chinese intellectuals, the gradual withdrawal of literature for serving political causes and the reinstatement of classical literature and early vernacular works to on the CEE bring to light the recovery of the aesthetic literary tradition and a return to normalcy. When students take the CEE, they not only mentally scrutinize literature that they first read during their secondary education, but also experience an assertive presentation of current Chinese cultural values and outlooks on life. This study argues that in the post-1980s CEE literary selections, students experience a variety of texts that summon up China’s pre-Communist literary tradition in order to serve as an intellectual guiding light for future social development. For those interested in comparative higher education, a particular area of interest may be the book’s singular consideration of the science and technology passages in connection with the restructuring of higher education in China as a remedy of China’s cultural tradition.

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's most respected and widely read living writers. His work is marked by technical sophistication and by its alliance with a variety of trends in modern culture. To date little criticism of his work has made use of the important developments in literary theory in the past two decades. This book does that, analyzing Vargas Llosa's place in modern and postmodern criticism.

In Studies in Modern Japanese Literature, twenty-two students honor their mentor, Edwin McClellan, with essays and translations focusing on literature from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. The authors discussed range from Natsume S seki to Murakami Haruki, and the subjects that are dealt with include the flourishing of literary forms in response to the Ansei earthquake, the impact of Western styles on Japanese literature, and modern poetry. Together with the translations of short stories, fables, and a critical essay, these contributions provide an overview of modern Japanese literary history. Contributors include: Paul Anderer, Carole Cavanaugh, Robert Lyons Danly, Eto Jun, Susanna Fessler, Elaine Gerbert, Ken K. Ito, Kyoko Kurita, Phyllis I. Lyons, Andrew Markus, Minae Mizumura, James R. Morita, Christopher Michael Rich, Jay Rubin, William F. Sibley, Stephen Snyder, Tomi Suzuki, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, John Whittier Treat, Dennis Washburn, and Angela Yiu.

In recent decades the study of literature in Europe and the Americas has been profoundly influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms, whether Structuralism or Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Reader-Response Theory or Rezeptionsästhetik, Semiotics or Narratology, Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, psychoanalytical or other perspectives. Whilst the value and validity of such approaches to literature is still a matter of some dispute, not least among classical scholars, they have had a substantial impact on the study both of classical literatures and of the mentalité of Greece and Rome. In an attempt to clarify issues in the debate, the eleven contributors to this volume were asked to produce a representative collection of essays to illustrate the applicability of some of the new approaches to Greek and Latin authors or literary forms and problems. The scope of the volume was deliberately limited to literary investigation, broadly construed, of Greek and Roman authors. Broader areas of the history and culture of the ancient world impinge in the essays, but are not their central focus. The volume also contains a separate bibliography, offering for the first time a complete bibliography of classical studies which incorporate modern critical theory.