Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller— two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives— debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate…
In the story of the three baseball umpires, two novice umpires compete in boasting how they respect «truth» and the way things «really» are. One says, «I call them the way I see them»; the other, trying to trump this remark, responds, «I call them the way they are». Then enters the third, most seasoned umpire, saying, «They aren’t, until I call them». This book deals with two widel…
Research that deals with metaphors and linguistic imagery has increased in the last thirty years. However, studies that question existing theories of metaphor from a comparative perspective are less common. The reason for the present theoretical sketch was the metaphorical model of conceptualism, alias the cognitive theory of metaphor: at least with this theory, `metaphor' itself has become a m…
In Brenda Murphy's major study of his work she examines Williams' life and career and provides an analysis of more than a score of his key plays, including in-depth studies of major works such as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and others. She traces the artist figure who features in many of Williams' plays to broaden the discussion beyond the normal referen…
The writer Marguerite Duras was a key figure in post-war French cinema, pioneering innovations such as the disjunction of film and image, and the primacy given to voices, silence and music. Her multisensorial approach opened up new spaces for the female experience to be expressed. Although she worked with some of the best French visual technicians and musicians of her time, critiques have often…
Thackeray: The Sentimental Cynic chronicles British novelist William Thackeray’s ambivalent attitudes toward society and traces his conduct during the major crises of his life in terms of those attitudes. Lambert Ennis examines the emotional tensions in Thackeray’s life and the impact they had in his work. In so doing, he illustrates key themes in Victorian studies more broadly: the questio…
This book examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography’s powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims to show how texts critically reflect upon the m…
this broad-reaching, multi-disciplinary collection, leading scholars investigate how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text. In doing so, it challenges the very notion of scholarship as it has traditionally been imagined. Incorporating scientific, socio-historical, materialist and theoretical approaches, this rich body of work explores topics ranging from how computers ha…
How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David Garrick, struggled with these questions through their reenactments of Shakespearean plays. For these artists, the resurgence of Shakespeare, a pl…
This interdisciplinary study intergrates historiographical, literary and cultural methodologies in its focus on a little known corpus of testimonial accounts published by French women deported to Nazi camps. Comprising epistemological and literary analyses of the accounts and an examination of the construction of deportee identities, it will interest those working in the fields of modern French…