Using a wide-ranging variety of texts the author reviews and evaluates an equally broad range of approaches to textual commentary, introducing the reader to the fundamental distinction between actual and virtual worlds in critical practice, arguing for an unambiguous relation between critical practice and theories of language, and elucidating the critically important practice of how texts mean.

Technology is no longer confined to the laboratory but has become an established part of our daily lives. Its sophistication offers us power beyond our human capacity which can either dazzle or threaten; it depends who is in control.
Living in a Technological Culture challenges traditionally held assumptions about the relationship between man-and-machine'. It argues that contemporary science does not shape technology but is shaped by it. Neither discipline exists in a moral vacuum, both are determined by politics rather than scientific inquiry.
By questioning our existing...

Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as
* George Orwell
* William Golding
* Angela Carter
* Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo
* Hanif Kureishi
* Marina Warner
* Maggie Gee
Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British...

Insatiable bloodlust, dangerous sexualities, the horror of the undead, uncharted Trannsylvanian wildernesses, and a morbid fascination with the other': the legend of the vampire continues to haunt popular imagination.
Reading the Vampire examines the vampire in all its various manifestations and cultural meanings. Ken Gelder investigates vampire narratives in literature and in film, from early vampire stories like Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire' tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula, the most famous vampire narrative of all, to contemporary American vampire...

Philosophy of Mathematics is an excellent introductory text. This student friendly book discusses the great philosophers and the importance of mathematics to their thought. It includes the following topics:
* the mathematical image
* platonism
* picture-proofs
* applied mathematics
* Hilbert and Godel
* knots and nations
* definitions
* picture-proofs and Wittgenstein
* computation, proof and conjecture.
The book is ideal for courses on philosophy of mathematics and logic.

When did psychology become a distinct discipline? What links the continental and analytic traditions in philosophy? Answers to both questions are found in this account of the debate surrounding psychologism in Germany at the turn of the century. The trajectory of 20th century philosophy has been largely determined by this anti-naturalist view which holds that empirical research is in principle different from philosophical inquiry, and can never make significant contributions to the latter's central issues.

Verificationism is the first comprehensive history of a concept that dominated philosophy and scientific methodology between the 1930s and the 1960s. The verificationist principle - the concept that a belief with no connection to experience is spurious - is the most sophisticated version of empiricism. More flexible ideas of verification are now being rehabilitated by a number of philosophers.
C.J. Misak surveys the precursors, the main proponents and the rehabilitators. Unlike traditional studies, she follows verificationist theory beyond the demise of positivism to examine its...

For better or worse, modernism and postmodernism are now the two most comprehensive and influential terms applied to twentieth-century culture. The Postmodern Arts begins by establishing definitions of both words, while also demonstrating the inconsistencies and contradictions which are inherent within them.
As with all books in the Critical Readers in Theory and Practice series, the volume is divided into two halves: the first, a comprehensive and thorough introduction by the editor, offering a schematic survey of the major themes and positions taken in the debates around...

Animal experimentation is one of the most controversial areas of debate on animal rights. Biomedical research is at the hard edge of these debates: it throws up fundamental questions of moral value - of whether human life is more important than that of animals. Much experimentation is defended by its apparent success in terms of increasing medical knowledge. This study investigates whether biomedical research using animals is, in fact, scientifically justified. The authors show that in scientific terms - using the models that scientists themselves use - these claims are exaggerated, or even...

In Real History, Martin Bunzl brilliantly succeeds in bringing together two schools of thought at the forefront of the philosophy of history: that of realism and objectivity. He shows us how the realism debate is inhabited by philosophers, whereas the objectivity argument lies in the hands of historians. In his lucid and direct style, Bunzl proposes a synthesis between these two parallel traditions. We see that what historians say they are doing is not necessarily what they are actually doing. Bunzl draws on recent work (from the likes of Foucault to Rorty) to develop a new model for...