Beginning with an introductory survey of the variety of literary representations and responses to the city, and the relations between self and urban space, Writing London follows the shaping of the urban consciousness from William Blake to Charles Dickens and through readings of Shelley, Barbauld, Byron, DeQuincy, Engels and Wordsworth. It concludes with an afterword which, in developing insights into the relationship between writing and the city, questions the heritage industry's reinvention of London, while arguing for a new understanding of the urban spirit.

To what extent did the Gothic haunt the nineteenth century? Victorian Gothic seeks to answer this as it introduces the reader to a timely revision of notions of the Gothic in all its manifestations. The Gothic is found to haunt all aspects of Victorian literature and culture. Moreover, Victorian Gothic connects its disparate areas of research in returning repeatedly to the question of the constitution of the subject, in a study of the Victorians from the 1830s to the 1890s.

Dickens to Hardy, 1837-1884 charts the transitions of particular Victorian literary and cultural concerns across nearly fifty years of the Nineteenth century. With each chapter focusing on readings of particular novels, Julian Wolfreys questions how the Victorian middle classes identified themselves in their modernity and discusses how literature mediated the construction of identities through notions of cultural memory. Additionally, two chapters focus on particular genres, the gothic and the political, in the novel tradition of the Nineteenth century.

Queer Theories explores and aggressively expands the provocative new field of sexual identity studies. It covers the history of the terms "gay" and "lesbian" as identity categories, the reclamation of the word "queer" as a term of radical self-identification, and the recent challenges to sexual identity studies posed by transgender and bisexual theories. Donald E. Hall also offers concrete applications of the abstract theories that he explores with imaginative new readings of works such as "The Yellow Wallpaper," Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Orlando, and The Color Purple.

The French theorist Lacan has always been called a 'literary' theoretician. Here is, for the first time, a complete study of his literary analyses and examples, with an account of the importance of literature in the building of his highly original system of thought. Rabate offers a systematic genealogy of Lacan's theory of literature, reconstructing a doctrine based upon Freudian insights, and revitalised through close readings of authors as diverse as Poe, Gide, Shakespeare, Plato, Claudel, Genet, Duras and Joyce. Not simply an essay about Lacan's influences or style, this book shows how the...

Rather than a straightforward dictionary of terms, this book gives students a brief introduction to each concept together with short extracts from the work of key thinkers and critics. Each term, concept or keyword and the passages discussing these are glossed and annotated; at the end of each entry a few reflective, practical questions direct the student to consider a particular aspect of the quotations and the concept they address. The book is designed to be used as a dip-in reference book as well as a guide to literary theory for practical classroom use.

Rather than a straightforward dictionary of terms, this book gives students a brief introduction to each concept together with short extracts from the work of key thinkers and critics. Each term, concept or keyword and the passages discussing these are glossed and annotated; at the end of each entry a few reflective, practical questions direct the student to consider a particular aspect of the quotations and the concept they address. The book is designed to be used as a dip-in reference book as well as a guide to literary theory for practical classroom use.

Through a series of short essays, Readings traces the consideration given to the act of close reading in literary criticism and theory over the last thirty years.Focusing on short passages from a number of critical works, including those by Barthes, Cixous, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan and J. Hillis Miller amongst others, the essays enact close readings of the trope of reading - its movements and performances in each of the passages in question - so as to offer a more detailed comprehension of the nature of reading, and the ways in which critical thinking has transformed our...

The French Connections of Jacques Derrida offers stimulating and accessible essays that address, for the first time, the issue of Derrida's relation to French poetics, writing, thought, and culture. In addition to offering considerations of Derrida through studies of such significant French authors as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Valery, Laporte, Ponge, Perec, Blanchot, and Barthes, the book also reassesses the development of Derrida's work in the context of structuralism, biology, and linguistics in the 1960s, and looks at the possible relationships between Derrida's writing and that of the...

Every student of literature needs to understand how to use literary theory to analyze and interpret the text. In Literary Theories William Baker and Julian Wolfreys challenge the outdated notion that theory is something separable from the act of reading itself. Maintaining that the best way to learn is through practical application, the editors have assembled a volume of essays that plunges the student into the midst of a range of critical readings.

Each essay in the book explores a previously unpublished short story by Richard Jeffries, also included in the volume, from a different...