Examines the theoretical and practical dimensions of Habermas's debates with contemporary philosophy and the social sciences and the politically informed unity of his theory and practice.

Northrop Frye is acknowledged as a prominent 20th-century critic. The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is said to have transformed literary theory, and his contributions to studies of Blake, theories of aesthetics, theology and social criticism, have ensured his place in the field of cultural studies. His belief that ideology is everywhere, and that mythology is part of ideology, has given rise to one of the most important contemporary theoretical debates: the relation between myth and ideology, between narrative and imagination. This work surveys Frye's career, incoporating archival material as...

In this study, Bradford reasserts the value of Roman Jakobson's work, arguing that he has a great deal to offer contemporary critical theory and providing a critical appraisal for the sweep of Jakobson's career. Bradford re-establishes Jakobson's work as vital to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetry. By exploring Jakobson's thesis that poetry is the primary object of language, new reading of his work is offered which includes the most radical elements of modernism. This book is aimed at students of Jakobson, and those interested in the development of critical...

In Roman Jakobson Richard Bradford reasserts the value of Jakobson's work, arguing that he has a great deal to offer contemporary critical theory and providing a critical appraisal the sweep of Jakobson's career.
Bradford re-establishes Jakobson's work as vital to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetry. By exploring Jakobson's thesis that poetry is the primary object language, Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art offers a new reading of his work which includes the most radical elements of modernism. This book will be invaluable to students of...

In Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines, Marian Hobson gives us a thorough and elegant analysis of this controversial and seminal contemporary thinker. Looking closely at the language and the construction of some of Derrida's philosophy, Hobson suggests the way he writes, indeed the fact he writes in another language, affects how he can be understood by English speakers.
This superb study on the question of language will make illuminating reading for anyone studying or engaged with Derrida's philosophy.

This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist positions on the postmodern...

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology is a lucid and accessible introduction to a major twentieth-century thinker those ideas have influenced fields as diverse as literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, politics and anthropology. Stephen Bygrave explores the content of Burke's vast output of work, focusing especially on his preoccupation with the relation between language, ideology and action.
By considering Burke as a reader and writer of narratives and systems, Bygrave examines the inadequacies of earlier readings of Burke and unfolds his thought within current debates in...

Bringing some of the insights of modern critical theory to bear on a great deal of information about Pound's activities as a literary critic (some of it made available only recently), K.K. Ruthven provides a provocative re-reading of a major modernist writer who dominated the discourse of modernism.

The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."'

Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the intellectual poetry' of the critic who, whether or not he represents the future of the profession', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism.
Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a...

William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice provides the most coherent account of Empson's diverse career to date. While exploring the richness of Empson's comic genius, Paul H. Fry serves to discredit the appropriation of his name in recent polemic by the conflicting parties of deconstruction and politicized cultural criticism. He argues that Empson is a larger, more important figure than the orthodox in either camp can acknowledge, deserving to be considered alongside such versatile critics as Walter Benjamin, Kenneth Burke and Roland Barthes.