There exists an area of overlap where language and nature meet, and this book, first published in 1980, illuminates that fascinating territory. When real-world things, such as plants, are used in literature or language as symbols, these special signs have a double allegiance. They function as language but derive their meaning from nature. The authors trace the consequences of this, and show how it affects the character of the relevant areas of language and literature.

Original and entertaining, this study cuts across a number of traditional disciplines. It should appeal not only to...

In this book, first published in 1981, the author argues that narrative is an interaction between "the presented world and the presentational process" and attempts to define narrative from the perspective of reading. The Reader’s Construction of Narrative includes chapters on narrative language, translating narrative and discusses what happens when we read a narrative text. This book will be of particular interest to students of literary theory.

This book, first published in 1965, provides an interdisciplinary approach to the work of I. A. Richards. This study is particularly concerned with ideas about education, literary theory, language, philosophy and psychology, and focuses on many of Richard’s most important works, including The Meaning of Meaning and The Philosophy of Rhetoric.

The imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms.

This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the one hand, and the features of black literary practice on the other. Rather than merely...

In this book, first published in 1987, Professor Schleifer sets Greimas’ work in its intellectual context and sets forth the development of his distinctive style of interpretation. Moreover, the author goes on to consider Greimas’ work against the latest examinations of discourse in philosophy, depth psychology, and literary criticism. He tests Greimas’ semiotic square against Derridean deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the literary analyses of Paul de Man.

This book will constitute an important and lucid survey of an often inaccessible critic, and will be of...

This title, first published in 1991, opens with an account by Gadamer of his own life and work and their relation to the achievements of hermeneutics. Building upon the key theme of dialogue, Gadamer and Hermeneutics provides a series of essays, either linked Gadamer to other major contemporary philosophers or focusing on a given Gadamerian theme. This book will be of interest to students of literary theory.

By exposing the theory of romance to the romance of theory, Diane Elam explores literature’s most uncertain, least easily definable and most tenacious genre, assessing its implications for both feminism and the understanding of history.

Arguing for a parallel between postmodernism’s divided relation to modernism and romance’s difficult stance towards realism, Romancing the Postmodern, first published in 1992, not only highlights how postmodernism questions our assumptions about historical time, it also reintroduces the figure of woman to the theory of both history and...

Essays in Modern Stylistics, first published in 1981, is a collection of essays in the application of modern linguistic theory to the study of literature. The essays reflect the development in stylistics away from programmic statements towards analysis of particular literary works and effects. This selection includes studies of the theory of stylistics, linguistic approaches to the poetry of John Keats, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake, modern metrical theory and prose style. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.

Through this exploration of the relation between Marxism, post-structuralism and the theory of the subject, first published in 1988, Antony Easthope contrasts the degree to which post-structuralism has made a radical impact on English and American national cultures. This book reprints an important interview in which Jacques Derrida discusses the relations between Marxism and deconstruction. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.

American writers in the 1830’s and 1840’s felt the need for a new terminology to express their awakening perception of "new" aspects of the mind. Without words like the "unconscious" vast areas of the psyche would have remained unexpressed and thus unapproachable. This "discovery" of the unconscious constitutes to the theme of this study, which was first published in 1987. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.