Walter Benjamin is widely acknowledged as amongst the greatest literary critics of this century, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama is his most sustained and original work. Indeed, Georg Lukacs - one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin's aesthetics - singled out this work as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.
Focusing on Shakespeare's Hamlet as foremost a study of grief, Alexander Welsh offers a powerful analysis of its protagonist as the archetype of the modern hero. For over two centuries writers and critics have viewed Hamlet's persona as a fascinating blend of self-consciousness, guilt, and wit. Yet in order to understand more deeply the modernity of this Shakespearean hero, Welsh first situates Hamlet within the context of family and mourning as it was presented in other revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's time.
Although Frankenstein is now widely taught in classes on Romanticism, little attention has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works. Indeed the excitement of the last decade at feminist approaches to Frankenstein has ironically obscured the persona of its author. This collection of essays, written by a preeminent group of Romantic scholars, sketches a portrait of the "other Mary Shelley": the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent interplay among issues of family, gender, and society, and whose writings resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics, culture, and feminism.
Slavoj Zizek (Routledge Critical Thinkers)Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary philosopher. Approaching critical theory and psychoanalysis in a recklessly entertaining fashion, Zizek's critical eye alights upon a bewildering and exhilarating range of subjects, from the political apathy of contemporary life, to a joke about the man who thinks he's a chicken. Tony Myers provides a clear and engaging guide to Zizek's key ideas, explaining the main influences on Zizek's thought (most crucially his engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis) using examples drawn from popular culture and everyday life.
Paul de Man died of cancer in 1983 at the relatively early age of sixtyfour. Towards the end of those sixty-four years he had begun to emerge as a literary critic and philosophical thinker of international standing. At his memorial service the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described his friend’s achievement as a transformation of ‘the field of literary theory, revitalising all the channels that irrigate it both inside and outside the university, in the United States and Europe’ (Derrida 1989, vxii).
