By Jonathan Culler
What's literary idea? Is there a courting among literature and tradition? actually, what's literature, and does it subject? those questions and extra are addressed in Literary concept: a really brief creation, a ebook which steers a transparent course via a topic that's frequently gave the impression to be complicated and impenetrable. Jonathan Culler, an incredibly lucid commentator and lots more and plenty trendy within the box of literary conception, deals discerning insights into such theories because the nature of language and that means, and even if literature is a kind of self-expression or a mode of attract an viewers. Concise but thorough, Literary thought additionally outlines the guidelines at the back of a few diverse colleges: deconstruction, semiotics, postcolonial conception, and structuralism, between others. From subject matters reminiscent of literature and social id to poetry, poetics, and rhetoric, Literary conception: a truly brief creation is a welcome advisor for a person attracted to the significance of literature and the debates surrounding it.
Read or Download Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) PDF
Best literary theory books
This leading edge booklet finds the entire quantity of electricity's value in 19th- and early-twentieth-century tradition. Ranging throughout an unlimited array of fabrics, Sam Halliday exhibits how electrical energy functioned as either a way of representing "other" things--from love and harmony to embodiment and temporality--and as an item of illustration in its personal correct.
Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation
Fiction writers and critics have interaction the cultured, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of latest fiction.
Discourse research is a time period that has come to have diversified interpretations for students operating in several disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it's involved as a rule with the constitution of social interplay manifested in dialog; for a psycholinguist, it's essentially desirous about the character of comprehension of brief written texts; for the computational linguist, it's thinking about generating operational versions of text-understanding inside of hugely constrained contexts.
- Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture)
- Contextualizing World Literature
- Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames : The Future in the Instant
- Toward a Sociobiological Hermeneutic: Darwinian Essays on Literature
- Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal
- Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue
Additional resources for Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Example text
Never has so much been written about Shakespeare; he is studied from every angle conceivable, interpreted in feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, historicist, and deconstructive vocabularies. Wordsworth has been transformed by literary theory from a poet of nature to a key figure of modernity. What have suffered neglect are ‘minor’ works that were regularly studied when literary study was organized to ‘cover’ historical periods and genres. Shakespeare is more widely read and vigorously interpreted than ever, but Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, and Ben Jonson – 47 Literature and Cultural Studies What will become of the literary canon if cultural studies swallows Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists who used to surround him – are little read today.
For anything that seemed to make sense, literature could make it nonsense, go beyond it, transform it in a way that raised the question of its legitimacy and adequacy. Literature has been the activity of a cultural elite, and it has been what is sometimes called ‘cultural capital’: learning about literature gives you a stake in culture that may pay off in various ways, helping you fit in with people of higher social status. But literature cannot be reduced to this conservative social function: it is scarcely the purveyor of ‘family values’ but makes seductive all manner of crimes, from Satan’s revolt against God in Milton’s Paradise Lost to Raskolnikov’s murder of an old woman in Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment.
One could say that the two go together: ‘theory’ is the theory and cultural studies the practice. Cultural studies is the practice of which what we call ‘theory’ for short is the theory. Some practitioners of cultural studies complain about ‘high theory’, but this indicates an understandable desire not to be held responsible for the endless and intimidating corpus of theory. 42 Work in cultural studies is, in fact, deeply dependent on the theoretical debates about meaning, identity, representation, and agency that I take up in this book.