Literary Criticism : Semiotics & Literary Theory

American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s fully updates Vincent B. Leitch’s classic book, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s following the development of the American academy right up to the present day. Updated throughout and with a brand new chapter, this second edition:.; provides a critical history of American literary theory and practice, discussing the impact of major schools and movements; examines the social and cultural background to literary research, considering the role of key theories and practices; provides profiles of major figures and influential texts, outlining the connections among theorists; presents a new chapter on developments since the 1980s, including discussions of feminist, queer, postcolonial and ethnic criticism. Comprehensive and engaging, this book offers a crucial overview of the development of literary studies in American universities, and a springboard to further research for all those interested in the development and study of Literature. more...

Price: $35.95

The legacy of Columbus’s discovery of the New World and its subsequent colonization is a current focus of much historical investigation. Columbus himself continues to be a cipher like the signature he crafted for himself, a signature no one has been able to decode. What is certain, however, is that this signature symbolized the construction of a colonial imagery that is still operative and that the consequences of the violent encounter between the European and Amerindian civilizations are now being debated and reinterpreted.Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus examines the constitution of an Amerindian world of resistance against European cultural imperialism. The essays in this volume by literary critics, linguists, semioticians, and historians argue that in the long run the images constructed by the Amerindians to confront the consequences of their encounter with European culture will ensure the endurance of their own culture, that they modified rather than renounced their own imaginary to integrate the material ramifications of their conquest and Westernization. Amerindians in effect became their own Others, and in that process came to understand and accept the substantial alternity of the Other, ultimately realizing the impossibility of absolute assimilation. more...

Price: $90.00

Drawing on feminist and Foucauldian theory, Quinby offers a powerful critique of the millenarian rhetoric that pervades American culture. Tracing the deployment of power through systems of alliance, sexuality, and technology, the author promotes a variety of critical stances—genealogical feminism, an ethics of the flesh, and “pissed criticism”—as challenges to apocalyptic claims for absolute truth and universal morality. more...

Price: $60.00

This study argues that American poets become civic actors when their poems imagine and reconstruct the conceptual architecture of the moment. more...

Price: $115.00

By modeling ways to think through chaos and through the mutual deformations of Romanticism and postmodernity, Arrow of Chaos contributes to alternative alignments of knowledge across time and technique. more...

Price: $120.00