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
This reader provides a selection of important and representative work from all the major theoretical schools or tendencies in contemporary criticism, including substantial extracts from the period's most seminal thinkers, and presents them both historically and thematically. This is a fully revised Second Edition with up-dated commentary and introductory essays providing a context for each item. A sampling of authors represented include: Derrida, Bakhtin, Barthes, Foucault, Bloom, Said, Eagleton and Eco.
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
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 new edition of David Lodge's Modern Criticism and Theory is fully revised and expanded to take account of the developments of theoretical and general interest in contemporary literary criticism since publication of the first edition in 1988.
Building on the strengths of the first edition, the volume is designed to introduce the reader to the guiding concepts of present literary and cultural debate by presenting substantial extracts from the period's most seminal thinkers.
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 new edition of David Lodge's Modern Criticism and Theory is fully revised and expanded to take account of the developments in theoretical contemporary literary criticism since the publication of the first edition in 1988. Building on the strengths of the first edition, this volume is designed to introduce the reader to the guiding concepts of present literary and cultural debate by presenting substantial extracts from the most seminal thinkers. As with the original edition there is a selection of the most important and representative work from the major schools in contemporary criticism.
Concise introductions with updated suggestions for further reading give a context for each essay and the editors have provided footnotes that help explain the most difficult references. Both students and general readers are encouraged to identify for themselves links between essays, as the selection is ordered both historically and thematically.
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 BarthesThe 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 LyotardAnswering 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 RifaterreTransposing 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 JamesonPostmodernism and Consumer Society
- Stephen Greenblatt The Circulation of Social Energy
- Jerome McGann The Textual Condition
- Stuart HallNew Ethnicities
- Gayatri Chakravarty SpivakQuestions of Multi-culturalism
- Judith ButlerCritically Queer
- Malcolm BowieFreud and the European Unconscious
- Jeffrey WeeksThe Sphere of the Intimate and the Values of Everyday Life
- Lawrence BuellPlace
- Slavoj ZizekFantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach
- Meyda YegenogluThe battle of the veil: woman between Orientalism and nationalism
- David Scott KastanFrom codex to computer; or, presence of mind
- Alexander StilleWriting and the Creation of the Past
- Valentine CunninghamTouching Reading
- Jacqueline RoseDaddy
- Terry EagletonThe Rise and Fall of Theory