Where other works of literary criticism are absorbed with the question--How to read a book?--Imagining Virginia Woolf asks a slightly different but more intriguing one: how does one read an author? It answers the question by undertaking an experiment in critical biography. The subject of this work is not Virginia Woolf, the person who wrote the novels, criticism, letters, and famous diary, but a different being altogether, someone or something Maria DiBattista identifies as "the figment of the author." This is the Virginia Woolf who lives intermittently in the pages of her writings and in the imagination of her readers. Drawing on Woolf's own extensive remarks on the pleasures and perils of reading, DiBattista argues that reading Woolf, in fact reading any author, involves an encounter with this imaginative figment, whose distinct stylistic traits combine to produce that beguiling phantom--the literary personality.
What is "deconstruction"? What authors are considered "postmodern novelists"? The Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought combines a series of 14 in-depth background chapters with a body of A-Z entries to create an authoritative, yet truly readable guide to the complex world of postmodernism. Following full-length articles on Postmodernism and philosophy, politics, feminism, lifesyles, television, and other postmodern essentials, readers will find a wide ramge of alphabetically-organized entries on the people, terms and theories connected with postmodernism.
Timeless literary masterpieces--such as Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of
Notre-Dame (1831) and The Miserables (1862), Flaubert's Madame Bovary
(1857), and Camus' The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947)--have been
the subject of copious literary criticism since their publications.
This volume has been developed specifically to help students and
general readers reach a deeper understanding of eight French novels,
enabling them to develop a true appreciation for why the works have
been regarded as masterpieces. Lucid yet challenging literary analysis
focuses on plot and character development, themes, style, and
biographical and historical context.
The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics is an indispensable
guide and reference source to the major thinkers and topics in
aesthetics. Forty-six new entries by a team of renowned international
contributors provide clear and up-to-date entries under four headings:
historical, from Plato to Derrida; aesthetic theory, from definitions
of art to pictorial representation; issues and challenges, from
criticism to feminist aesthetics; and the individual arts, from
literature to theater.
Through criticism of British cultural studies, New Historicism and cultural materialism, Easthope examines the discipline of cultural studies as it comes out of literary studies.
