Synopses & Reviews
This third edition of
Modern Criticism and Theory represents a major expansion on its previous incarnations with some twenty five new pieces or essays included. This expansion has two principal purposes. Firstly, in keeping with the collections aim to reflect contemporary preoccupations, the reader has expanded
forward to include such newly emergent considerations as ecocriticism and post-theory.
Secondly, with the aim of presenting as broad an account of modern theory as possible, the reader expands backwards to to take in exemplary pieces by formative writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Marx, Freud and Virginia Woolf.. This radical expansion of content is prefaced by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides a rationale for the collection and demonstrates how connections can be made between competing theories and critical schools.
The purpose of the collection remains that of introducing the reader to the guiding concepts of contemporary literary and cultural debate. It does so by presenting substantial extracts from seminal thinkers and surrounding them with the contextual materials necessary to a full understanding. Each selection has a headnote, which gives biographical details of the author and provides suggestions for further reading, and footnotes that help explain difficult references. The collection is ordered both historically and thematically and readers are encouraged to draw for themselves connections between essays and theories.
Modern Criticism and Theory has long been regarded as a necessary collection. Now revised for the twenty first century it goes further and provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the complex landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think and live in the world today.
David Lodge is Emeritus Professor of English Literatureat the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987. He is well-known as one of the most significant British novelists and critics of recent times. His work, fiction and non-fiction, has been translated into some twenty-five languages
Nigel Wood is Professor of Literature at Loughborough University. Widely published as an editor and critic, Nigel is currently working on the Longman Annotated Edition of the poems of Alexander Pope.
Synopsis
'In our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding body of knowledge in its own right.' David Lodge
This anthology uses extracts from the works of the leading thinkers in the field of literary criticism to introduce the main ideas at the centre of todays literary and cultural debates. Each extract begins with an introduction that places the writing in context and ends with suggestions for further reading that will help students research the subject further.
The new edition has been thoroughly updated and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, so there is now more coverage of post-colonialism, Queer theory and Ecocritical perspectives. There are improved references to web and electronic sources and a glossary of key terms to help students understand the subject.
Synopsis
This is the widely anticipated new edition of Lodge and Woods classic introduction to the leading thinkers in literary criticism.- Literary criticism is taught as a core part of every English degree this book will be widely adopted on these courses
- The 'Lodge' name is hugely recognised by academic and general reader alike
About the Author
David Lodge is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the Universityof Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he became a full-time writer. He is well-known as a novelist, and has also written screenplays and stage plays.
Nigel Wood is Head of the Department of English and Drama, LoughboroughUniversityand is an expert on eighteenth-century literature and the staging of dramatic texts. He has edited a wide number of books and is also involved in occasional advisory work for the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company
Table of Contents
- Karl Marx “Preface” and section on “The Premisses of the Materialist Method” in The German Ideology
- Ferdinand de Saussure “The Object of Study”
- Sigmund Freud “The Premises and Technique of Interpretation” and “Manifest and Latent Elements”
- Walter Benjamin “The Task of the Translator”
- Virginia Woolf A Room of Ones Own
- Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, “Myth and Reality” and “Womens Situation and Character”
- Frantz Fanon “The Negro and Language”
- Roman Jakobson “Linguistics & Poetics” and “The Metaphoric & Metonymic Poles”
- Berthold Brecht “Study of the First Scene of Shakespeares Coriolanus”
- Jacques Lacan “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious”
- Jacques Derrida “Structure, Sign & Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
- Tzvetan Todorov “The Typology of Detective Form”
- Mikhail Bakhtin “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”
- E. D. Hirsch Jr. “Faulty Perspectives” - in current edition - and “In Defence of the Author”
- Michel Foucault “What is an author?”
- Wolfgang Iser “The Reading Process: a phenomenological approach”
- Roland Barthes“The Death of the Author” and “Textual Analysis: Poe's 'Valdemar'”
- Raymond Williams “The Country and the City”
- Julia Kristeva “The Ethics of Linguistics”
- Helene Cixous “Sorties”
- Edward Said “Crisis”
- Stanley Fish “Interpreting the Variorum”
- J Hillis Miller “The Critic as Host”
- Jean-Francois Lyotard“Answering the Question What is Postmodernism?”
- Jean Baudrillard “Simulacra and Simulations”
- Paul de Man “The Resistance to Theory”
- Geoffrey Hartman “The Interpreters Freud”
- Umberto Eco “Casablanca: cult movies and intertextual collage”
- Michael Rifaterre“Transposing Presuppositions on the Semiotics of Literary Translation”
- Patrocinio P. Schweickart “Reading Ourselves: Toward a feminist theory of reading”
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick “The Beast in the Closet”
- Luce Irigarary “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother”
- Fredric Jameson“Postmodernism and Consumer Society”
- Stephen Greenblatt “The Circulation of Social Energy”
- Jerome McGann “The Textual Condition”
- Stuart Hall“New Ethnicities”
- Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak“Questions of Multi-culturalism”
- Judith Butler“Critically Queer”
- Malcolm Bowie“Freud and the European Unconscious”
- Jeffrey Weeks“The Sphere of the Intimate and the Values of Everyday Life”
- Lawrence Buell“Place”
- Slavoj Zizek“Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach”
- Meyda Yegenoglu“The battle of the veil: woman between Orientalism and nationalism”
- David Scott Kastan“From codex to computer; or, presence of mind”
- Alexander Stille“Writing and the Creation of the Past”
- Valentine Cunningham“Touching Reading”
- Jacqueline Rose“Daddy”
- Terry Eagleton“The Rise and Fall of Theory”