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A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (The Language Library)

J. A. Cuddon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The fourth edition of J.A. Cuddon's classic dictionary has been thoroughly revised and updated to maintain it as the most comprehensive and accessible work of its kind currently available, for students, teachers and general readers alike. Expanded to include many new entries, it has been improved throughout, in places rendered more concise, in others amended and extended, with both major and minor additions. The work of the third edition, to cover the schools and various terminologies of literary theory is continued, without compromising coverage afforded to more traditional critical terms and topics.

At this untimely death in 1996, Charles Cuddon, as he was known, had completed much of the revisory and updating work involved in preparing the edition. That work and other unfinished plans and outlines have since been overseen and developed by C.E. Preston of Sidney Sussex college, Cambridge, helped, as she acknowledges, by several of her academic colleagues. Among the entries extensively rewritten or newly contributed are:

* "CrimeFiction",

* "Dramatic Monologue",

* "Ellipsis",

* "Punctuation",

* "Rhyme",

* "Verse Novel", and

* "Sonnet Cycle".

After more than twenty years in print, Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory remains "a superlative work of reference that will be read for pleasure", just as it was acclaimed to be when first published in 1976. There is now no better memorial to its author's extraordinary polymathy and literary scholarship.

Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide

Lois Tyson

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This new edition of the classic guide offers a thorough and accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory. It provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African-American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading. This book can be used as the only text in a course or as a precursor to the study of primary theoretical works. It motivates readers by showing them what critical theory can offer in terms of their practical understanding of literary texts and in terms of their personal understanding of themselves and the world in which they live. Both engaging and rigorous, it is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.

Exploring Literature: Writing and Arguing about Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay (3rd Edition)

Frank Madden

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Text Review 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is an excellent text for students interested in understanding literature through reading, writing and responding. The book is written in a conversational voice making it user-friendly for all readers. The literary selections represent a wide range of works from classical to contemporary in various genres. This book is a "keeper" for students even after the course is over because of the high quality of the selections, the strong organization of the chapters and the accessibility of the content.

Editorial Review:

Featuring culturally rich and diverse literature, this anthology weaves critical thinking into every facet of its writing apparatus and guides students through the process of crafting their personal responses to literature into persuasive arguments.  

With engaging selections, provocative themes, and comprehensive coverage of writing, Madden's anthology is sure to capture the reader's imagination. Exploring Literature opens with five chapters dedicated to writing and arguing about literature. An anthology follows, organized around five themes. Each thematic unit includes an ethnically diverse collection of short stories, poems, plays, and essays, as well as a case study that explores literature from various perspectives.  For anyone interested in reading and reacting to compelling literature.

Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Beginnings)

Peter Barry

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Beginning theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for well over a decade now. This new and expanded third edition continues to offer students and readers the best one-volume introduction to the field.The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Peter Barry allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped.The book has been updated and includes two new chapters, one of which (Literary theory - a history in ten events) innovatively surveys the course of theory, while the other (Theory after 'Theory') maps the arrival of new 'isms' since the second edition appeared in 2002. It covers: Liberal humanism; Structuralism; Post-structuralism and deconstruction; Postmodernism; Psychoanalytic criticism; Feminist criticism; Lesbian/gay criticism; Marxist criticism; New historicism and cultural materialism; Postcolonial criticism; Stylistics; Narratology; Ecocriticism; and, Presentism, Transversal poetics, New aestheticism, Historical formalism, and Cognitive poetics.

The Location of Culture (Routledge Classics)

Homi K. Bhabha

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than read this again 3 out of 5 stars.
34 of 53 people found this review helpful.

The fact that this book is influential is generally beyond argument. What astonishes me, however, is that so many people had the endurance to sit through the horrific writing; the author's style is obnoxious in the extreme. The first paragraph, for example, notes that the question of culture is the "trope of our times," characterized by "a tenebrous sense of survival." These concepts are not mind-bending. An everday, or as Homi would say, "colloquial" vocabularly would sufficiently articulate his thesis, yet he seems hellbent on packing his work with obscure language like he needs show off or prove something. Again, his ideas are influential, but he makes reading them as painful as possible.

Editorial Review:

Terry Eagleton once wrote in the Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities'. In rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. A scholar who writes and teaches about South Asian literature and contemporary art with incredible virtuosity, he discusses writers as diverse as Morrison, Gordimer, and Conrad. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.

Mythologies

Roland Barthes

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense."--Edward W. Said

Glossary of Literary Terms

M.H. Abrams

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Essential for Lovers of Literature 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Every student of literature should have their own copy of this book. Non-students would get a lot out of this too. And while the price might appear excessive, I think in the long-term this book is a worthwhile investment. What makes this guide of literary terms different from others, is its comprehensiveness. Abrams goes into great detail on the important terms that one comes across most often in literature. There is information on theories and movements in criticism and terms such as modernism and post modernism, are clearly defined. there is also material on symbolism, metaphor and other figures of speech and so on. A Glossary of Literary Terms, now in its 8th edition, is written in a lucid style, and is a must buy for anyone who wants to expand their literary horizons. Recommended. 5 stars.

Editorial Review:

First published in 1957, A GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS contains succinct essays on the terms used in discussing literature, literary history, and literary criticism. This text is an indispensable reference for students.

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Fredric Jameson

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The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 3 out of 5 stars.
81 of 99 people found this review helpful.

The term, Postmodernism refers to the cultural and ideological configuration that is taken to have replaced or be replacing Modernity. New movements in architecture and the arts as well as social theories indicate a change from modernity to postmodernity.
Frederic Jameson, an American Marxist social theorist and the author of the book, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, draws the attentions to the differences in culture between the modern and postmodern periods. In order to explain his arguments, Jameson is specially interested in the fields of architecture, art and other cultural forms. He places the heaviest emphasis on architecture. In his article, Jameson's basic argument is that postmodernism is a dominant cultural form and that is indicative of late capitalism.
Jameson's article begins with the comparison of Van Gogh's painting to Warhol's. Jameson contrasts Van Gogh's painting with Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes," He refers to the former as the symptom of a typical "modernist" work and the latter as a prime example of a "postmodernist" one. His main assertion here is that cultures and production has experienced important changes and these changes must be accounted by even more significant changes in history . He focuses on these changes on the individual level in postmodern society and his main concern was the cultural expressions and aesthetics that is associated with the different systems of production.
Jameson suggests that postmodernism is differed from other cultural forms by its emphasis on fragmentation. He specially emphasizes on the term, fragmentation. For Jameson, the fragmentation of the subject replaces the alienation of the subject which characterized modernism. Postmodernism always deals with surface, not substance. There is no center, rather everything tends to be decentralized in postmodernism. Postmodernist works are often characterized by a lack of depth. According to Jameson, individuals are no longer anomic and anxious, because there is nothing from which an individual could cut his or her ties. The liberation from the anxiety that characterized anomie may also mean a liberation from other kind of feeling as well. For him, this is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodernism are devoid of feelings, but rather such feelings are now free-floating and impersonal.
Jameson defines the late capitalist age as a distinct period, which focuses on commodification and the recycling of old images and commodities. Jameson provides an example of Warhol's work, (Diamonds Dust Shoes) as well as Warhol himself. Jameson refers to this cultural recycling as historicism (the random cannibalization of all styles of the past.) It is an increasing primacy of the 'neo'(new) and a world was transformed into sheer images of itself. the actual organic tie of history to past events is being lost.
All of these cultural forms in art and architecture are indicative of postmodernism, late capitalism, or what Jameson calls present-day multinational capitalism. Jameson claims that there has been a radical shift in our surrounding material world and the ways, in which it works. He refers to an architectural example, a postmodern building Symbolic of the multinational world space which people function in daily. Jameson suggests that the human subjects who occupy this new space have not kept pace with the evolution which produced it. There has been a mutation in the object, yet we do not possesses the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace. Therein lies the source of our fragmentation as individuals.
Jameson also suggests that this latest mutation in space, postmodern hyperspace, (he provides the Bonaventura hotel as an example) has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. This is the symbol and analogue of our inability at present to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which people find themselves caught as individual subjects. He continues, we now live in a world where our daily life, our experiences, our cultural languages are dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, which was dominant in past eras. For Jameson, late capitalism aspires to a total space and a vastness of scale.
Jameson's argument in this article is that postmodernism is a dominant cultural form, not simply a style, and Jameson considers this dominant cultural form (postmodernism) as a sign of late capitalism. In explaining postmodernism as a dominant cultural form, he is specially concerned with the field of architecture, art and other cultural forms. Yet, as far as I have seen in this article, Jameson seems to emphases much more on the field of art and architecture than on social and political aspects of postmodernism. For example, he does not explicitly give much attention or interest to social theories such as poststructuralism, which is highly associated with postmodernism. Secondly, although the term, "Late-Capitalism" implies multinational capitalism, media-capitalism, the modern world system and postindustrial society, in the article he only talks about multinational capitalism and he neither explicitly touches nor sufficiently explains the terms like; modern world system and postindustrial society.
I would also like to commend on Jameson's style of writing, in the article, he produces sentences that sometimes can run more than half a page, I think this makes the article a little bit harder to read. Nevertheless, Jameson's article is worth to read since it stands as one of the best written books on postmodernism, besides it also offers detailed analyses of postmodernism and late capitalist age.
In conclusion, by his article -The cultural logic of late capitalism"- Jameson tries to argue that all of the characteristics of contemporary art, architecture and cultural forms reflect the structure of late capitalism as well as contemporary society - (i.e. domination by multinational corporations, the decline of national sovereignty). Moreover he argues that postmodernity is a part of the cultural logic of late capitalism and this is what brings about cultural fragmentation. Although, in this article, social, political and other aspects of postmodernism have not been emphasized as much as art, architecture, and cultural aspects of postmodern age have been, this article clearly explains the connection and relation between postmodernism as dominant cultural form and late capitalist age.

Editorial Review:

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of “postmodernism.” Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low,” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood

Mark Twain

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This volume collects the most important writings by Mark Twain in which he used biblical settings, themes and figures. Featuring Twain's singular portrayals of God, Adam, Eve, Satan, Methuselah, Shem, St. Peter and others, the writings stand among Twain's imaginative expressions of his views on human nature and humankind's relation to the Creator and the universe. Composed over four decades (1871-1910), the writings range from farce to fantasy to satire, each one bearing the mark of Twain's unmistakable wit and insights. Among the many delights in store for readers are Adam and Eve's divergent accounts of their domestic troubles; Methuselah's discussion of an ancient version of baseball, complete with a parody of baseball jargon; Shem's hand-wringing account of how material shortages and labour troubles were hampering the progress of the ark his father, Noah, was building; a description of the disruptive actions of the fire-and-brimstone evangelist Sam Jones upon arriving in heaven; Captain Stormfield's revelations of what heaven is really like; Satan's musings on our puerile concepts of the afterlife; and Twain's advice on how to dress and tip properly in heaven. Twain's humour, however, is never gratuitous. As readers laugh their way through this volume, they will find ample evidence of Twain's concerns about scriptural fallacies and inconsistencies, the Bible's rather flat portrayal of important characters, and our limited notions about the nature and meaning of our own - and God's - existence. Many of the pieces in this collection, even the most lighthearted, might still be considered controversial; of some of the darker pieces, Twain himself acknowledged that they would be heretical in any age. Moreover, these writings are valuable cultural artifacts of a time when, across the Western world, fundamental religious beliefs were being called into question by the precepts of Darwinism and the rapid advances of science and technology. Several of this volume's selections are previously unpublished; others, like "Letters from the Earth", are classics. Virtually all have been edited to reflect as closely as possible Twain's final intentions for their form and content. For serious Twain devotees, editors Howard G. Baetzhold and Joseph B. McCullough have supplied background material on the writings, including details on the history of their composition, publication and relevance to the Twain canon.

The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (4th Edition)

Robert L. Root, Michael J. Steinberg

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The Guideline for Creative Non-Fiction 5 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

Finally the genre of Creative Non-Fiction is gaining recognition as a valid art form. Critics are finally starting to realize what the puplic has always known; real people have valid and intruiging stories to tell. The Fourth Genre collects an overview of the best non-fiction writers writing in and about their genre. I had the privilege to study under a contibutor from this book and discovered the joys of writing about my life and reading about the lives of others. This book is a necessity to those interested in Creative Non-Fictions. I would also recommend Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach, and Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell.

Keeper Text Book 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I've been using this book in a career writing class where we have been focusing on learning how to write creative non-fiction. It is a great book full of incredible selections and is a great introduction to the field of Creative Nonfiction. Let me tell you, after years of writing academic essays, this has been a blast. The book, and my instructor, has helped me understand the difference between an autobiography and a memoir or a personal familiar essay and a personal critical essay.

All of that being said, I found this book to be more of an introduction into the world of Creative Nonfiction than an instructional 'how to' book. I have enjoyed being introduced to such a large host of, for me, new writers and will definitely keep this text book for reference, enjoyment, and inspiration.

Editorial Review:

 

Helps in writing creative nonfiction.   This best-selling anthology is a comprehensive and indispensable introduction to the way creative nonfiction is written today.  General Interest; Writing Nonfiction