Terry Eagleton's work has had a powerful influence in debates about the politics of literature and culture. This book reflects the breadth of his interests. It offers a view of his career to date, raising a number of central issues in literature, culture and politics.

This book offers a detailed account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of Spinoza's texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid-1960s to its latest "postmodern," neopragmatist or anti-theoretical phase. He examines the thought of Althusser, Macherey and...

What happens when women writers re-imagine culture? How do feminists need that ur-text of patriarchy, the Bible? Unwritten volume: Re-thinking teh Bible attempts to re-think certain customary assumptions about feminism and about the Bible, in the light of poetic "readings" of biblical texts by 19th and 20th century women writers. The author proposes that women writers relate to the Bible in complex ways, which both critique biblical misogyny and stem directly from elements of transgressive writing within scripture iteself. Ultimately Ostriker suggests that feminist reinterpretations of...

Over the past decade, psychoanalysis has been a focus of continuing controversy for feminism, and at the centre of debates in the humanities about how we read literature and culture. In these essays, Jacqueline Rose continues her engagement with these issues while arguing for a shift of attention - from an emphasis on sexuality as writing to the place of the unconscious in the furthest reaches of or cultural and political lives. With essays on war, capital punishment and the dispute over seduction in relation to Freud, she opens up the field of psychopolitics. Finally in two extended essays...

This work provides an introduction to the philosophy of religion, and is written for those with no previous knowledge of philosophy. It explains the nature of philosophical inquiry and shows how the demand for a philosophical examination of religion arose out of particular historical situations. It discusses traditional philosophical questions about the existence of God, miracles, the truth of the Bible, science and religion, and religion and ethics. The argument of the book suggests that the attempt to find historical and scientific proof for religious beliefs is bound to fail, as is the...

The nature of time is one of the continuing mysteries of human life. This is of particular relevance to archaeology with its unique focus on the social development of the human species from its origins to the present.

Christopher Gosden probes the way in which the rhythms of social life derive from our involvement in the world, particularly as those rhythms unfold over many thousands of years. The author argues that time is created through the social use of material things such as landscapes, settlements and monuments, and illustrates this with case studies drawn from Europe and...

Updated and now available in paperback, this highly successful training guide includes original contributions from leading training and development specialists. It has proved to be invaluable to newly appointed trainers and more experienced practitioners alike and is particularly suitable for students of the professional bodies' Certificate in Training and Development.

In this most recent collection of his writing, Cavell provides extraordinary careful and sustained readings of Emerson's "Fate," Derrida's response to J. L. Austin in "Signature Event Context," and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations .

Psychoanalysis and Narrative is a clear and exemplary demonstration of the ways in which the vital connections between psychoanalysis and literature can be articulated without reductive simplification. Following Freud's assumption that sexuality and narrative form are analogous, Brooks proposes that literature constitutes a fundamental part of human existence. He supplements the terminology of narrative theory with the rich and suggestive language of psychoanalysis.