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Textbook

Literature in the Modern World
Critical Essays and Documents

Second Edition

Edited by Dennis Walder

Price: £25.00 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-925301-2
Publication date: 23 October 2003
552 pages, 234x156 mm

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Description

Now includes fifty-nine extracts in total, more than any competing text.
Brings together texts that cannot normally be found together in one volume by combining critical material with essays on writing by well-known authors such as Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison.
The book is introduced and arranged to encourage students to gain an understanding of where the current debates on literary theory come from.
Brings together a wide variety of critical-theoretical fields and issues, including hermeneutics, new historicism, gender,post-colonial and feminist theory.

New to this edition

Completely updated to focus more on gender and identity and on recent debates such as 'Literature and Nation' and Literature and Value'.
The relevance of the book has been extended, including more writers and critics from outside Europe.
New general introduction and revised introductions to each section.
More than 20 new extracts reflect the most current topics in the discipline.

This text offers a unique combination of British, European, American and Post-Colonial perspectives on literary study from the 1920s to the present day. Carefully introduced and arranged to highlight the development of debates, it is designed to engage newcomers to the field with some of the main themes and issues that will concern them as readers of modern literary texts of all genres.

The book provides material that is exciting, original, and above all accessible, rather than simply representative of a certain critical approach. It includes the views of leading critics such as Terry Eagleton, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Umberto Eco and Paul de Man, as well as the originating voices of writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie.

In the second edition, there is an increased focus on questions of gender and identity and on recent debates, such as 'Literature and Nation' and 'Literature and Value'. The reach and relevance of the book has been extended, taking a more international voice, focusing on American and European writers and critics.

Readership: Undergraduate students on British Literature survey courses and introductory level literary theory courses.

Contents

General Introduction

Part One: General Approaches

I Questioning the Canon

Introduction

1. Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History , Marylin Butler

2. Canon and Period , Frank Kermode

3. Literature and the Rise of English , Terry Eagleton

4. Women Poets , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

5. Literary Theory and the Black Tradition , Henry Louis Gates, Jnr.

II Interpretation

Introduction

1. The Babel of Interpretations , E. D. Hirsch, Jnr.

2. Interpreting the Variorium , Stanley Fish

3. Who Cares About the Text? , Robert Scholes

4. Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory , Hans Robert Jauss

5. The Interpreter's Freud , Geoffrey Hartman

III Commitment

Introduction

1. To Cambridge Women , Virginia Woolf

2. Writing, Reading, and the Public , Jean-Paul Sartre

3. Commitment , Theodor Adorno

4. The Essential Gesture , Nadine Gordimer

5. Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature , Italo Calvino

Part Two: Themes and Issues

I Form and Genre

Introduction

1. Story and Narrative , Seymour Chatman

2. Semiotics of Theatrical Performance , Umberto Eco

3. The Signs of Drama , Martin Esslin

Close Reading , John Barrell

II Modernisms

Introduction

1. Remarks on Poetry , Paul Valery

2. Order in Narrative , Gerard Genette

3. Towards a Semiotics of Literature , Robert Scholes

4. The Ideology of Modernism , George Lukacs

5. Modernism and the Metropolis , Raymond Williams

6. Gender and Modernism , Bonnie Kime Scott

III Literature and Nation

Introduction

1. The Lion and the Unicorn , George Orwell

2. Beyond a Boundary , C. L. R. James

3. Woman and Nationalism , Virginia Woolf

4. The Intimate Enemy , Ashis Nandy

5. The National Longing for Form , Timothy Brennan

IV Literature and Ideology

Introduction

1. A Short Organum for the Theatre , Bertolt Brecht

2. Marxist Criticism , Terry Eagleton

3. The Text Says What It Does Not Say , Pierre Macherey

4. The Death of the Author , Roland Barthes

5. What is an Author? , Michel Foucault

V Literature and Gender

Introduction

1. Woman and the Other , Simone de Beauvoir

2. Language and Gender , Cora Kaplan

3. Laugh of the Medusa , Helene Cixous

4. Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation , Toni Morrison

5. Introduction to Between Men , Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick

6. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire , Judith Butler

VI End of Empire

Introduction

1. The Discourse of the Orient , Edward Said

2. Behind the Cliches of Contemporary Theatre , John McGrath

3. Englands of the Mind , Seamus Heaney

4. From the Victorian Nyanza to the Sheraton San Salvador , Mary Louise Pratt

VII From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial

Introduction

1. On National Culture , Frantz Fanon

2. Colonialist Criticism , Chinua Achebe

3. History of the Voice , Kamau Brathwaite

4. Post-Colonial Reconstruction , Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin

5. When Was The Post-Colonial? , Stuart Hall

VIII Literature and History

Introduction

1. Theses on the Philosophy of History , Walter Benjamin

2. History and Fiction , Laurence Lerner

3. Introduction to Metahistory , Hayden White

4. The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method , Jerome McGann

5. The Keening Muse , Joseph Brodsky

6. The Hollow Miracle , George Steiner

7. Literary History and Literary Modernity , Paul de Man

IX Literature and Value

Introduction

1. An Elergy for the Canon , Harold Bloom

2. The Exile of Evaluation , Barbara Hernstein Smith

Authors, editors, and contributors

Edited by Dennis Walder, Professor in Literature, Open University

Links to web resources and related information

More in the same subject area:
Literary theory
Literary studies: general

The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.

Literature in the Modern WorldCritical Essays and Documents

Second Edition

Literature in the Modern World
Critical Essays and Documents