Human beings have constantly told stories, presented events and placed the world into narrative form. This activity suggests a very basic way of looking at the world, yet, this book argues, even the most seemingly simple of stories is embedded in a complex network of relations. Paul Cobley traces these relations, considering the ways in which humans have employed narrative over the centuries to re-present time, space and identity.

This second, revised and fully updated edition of the successful guidebook to narrative covers a range of narrative forms and their historical development...

The aphorism captures a huge amount of truth, meaning or wit in a very short statement. It has been used and studied from classical times to contemporary theory and takes on a new relevance when we look at today s communication media such as text messages and twitter. This concise guide offers an overview of:

• The history of the aphorism to the present day
• Its relation to other short forms, including the fragment, the proverb, the maxim, the haiku, the epigram and the quotation
• The use of the aphorism by authors such as Heraclitus, Bacon, La Rochefoucauld, Chuang...

Literary Geography provides a valuable introduction to the field, making work in cultural geography more accessible and visible to students and academics working in literary studies. Acknowledging how the cultural turn in human geography and the spatial turn in literary studies are together reinvigorating the interdisciplinary field of literary geography, this volume:

• provides an introductory overview of cultural geography as a subfield in human geography
• introduces literary geography and discusses its connections with spatial theory, literary studies and...

Modernist movements radically transformed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary establishment, and their effects are still felt today. Modernism introduces and analyzes what amounted to nothing less than a literary and cultural revolution.

In this fully updated, expanded, and revised third edition, charting modernism in its global and local contexts, Peter Childs:

• details the origins of modernism and the influence of thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein
• explores the radical...

Related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists and has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines.

This new edition of The Sublime looks at:

• The legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the post-modern and avant-garde sublimity
• The major theorists of the sublime such as Longinus, Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan and i ek, offering critical introductions to...

Reception introduces students and academics alike to the study of the way in which texts are received by readers, viewers, or audiences. Organised conceptually and thematically this book provides a much-needed overview of the field, suggests new ways of understanding and configuring the relationships between the various terminologies and theories which comprise reception study, and suggests potential ways forward for study and research in the light of such new configurations. Written in a clear and accessible style with a glossary of key terms and further reading included, this is...