This book focusses on computer methodologies as a way of investigating language and character in literary texts. Both theoretical and practical, it surveys investigations into characterization in literary linguistics and personality in social psychology, before carrying out a computational analysis of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves.
Fresh, original and compelling, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies.
Starting at ‘the beginning’ and concluding with ‘the end’, the book covers topics that range from the familiar (character, narrative, the author) to the more unusual (secrets, pleasure, ghosts). Eschewing abstract isms, Bennett and Royle successfully illuminate complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works – so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, whilst Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literary laughter.
A court lady of the Heian era, an early modern philologist, a Meiji-period novelist, and a physicist at Tokyo University. What do they have in common, besides being Japanese? They all wrote zuihitsu -- a uniquely Japanese literary genre encompassing features of the nonfiction or personal essay and miscellaneous musings. For sheer range of subject matter and breadth of perspective, the zuihitsu is unrivaled in the Japanese literary tradition, which may explain why few examples have been translated into English.
In Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism, Daniel Worden argues for the importance of “cowboy masculinity,” as dramatized in late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Nat Love, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister.
Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660
"Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660 is an complex study of Catholic poets and dramatists in what is perhaps the most complex period of English literary and religious history. Shell's approach to the religious and literary changes of this period is refreshingly candid. Most of the traditional literary historians simply group everything under the heading Christian, and as the author has shown, the differences are both confessional and aesthetic. All in all, Shell writes a very learned and interesting book." Church History