This new collection of J. Hillis Miller’s essays centres on the question “why and to what end should we read, teach, and spend our time with literary and/or cultural studies?” At a time when electronic media seem to dominate the market completely, and jobs follow the money flows into electronic and technical fields, literary and cultural studies might appear as a decorative addenda but no…
The 1970s and 1980s saw a revolution in Japanese literary criticism. A new generation of scholars and critics, many of them veterans of 1960s political activism, arose in revolt against the largely positivistic methodologies that had hitherto dominated postwar literary studies. Creatively refashioning approaches taken from the field of linguistics, the new scholarship challenged orthodox interp…
Concerned with the 50% dropout rate for public high school students in the Southern Highlands, Jim Wayne Miller published this book in 1989 to ensure that young people had access to published works and other text that examine the themes of familiy, community, and work. Miller intended to provide public school teachers with the tools to engage students and stimulate meaningful conversations.
Beauvoir in Time situates Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in the historical context of its writing and in later contexts of its international reception, from then till now. The book takes up three aspects of Beauvoir's work more recent feminists find embarrassing: "bad sex," "dated" views about lesbians, and intersections with race and class. Through close reading of Beauvoir's writing in m…
This volume offers a collection of addresses on John Ruskin delivered at a February 1919 meeting of the Ruskin Centenary Council.
Germany has had a profound influence on English stories for children. The Brothers Grimm, The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi quickly became classics but, as David Blamires clearly articulates in this volume, many other works have been fundamental in the development of English children’s stories during the 19th century and beyond.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one of Vladimir Nabokov's most autobiographical novels and it has often been observed that Sebastian's passionate affair with the femme fatale Nina Rechnoy is a dramatized extension of Nabokov's infatuation with Irina Guadanini. In this book it is shown that the novel also conceals another, secluded, love affair Sebastian had with a man, which reflects the m…
Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared bel…
From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of bibliomigrancy Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves.Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in…
Examines the underlying precarity in twenty-first-century immigrant fiction and reveals the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology.