An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
Language: English
Pages: 441
ISBN: 1138119032
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter.
The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms.
A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.
Addressee, the poet, the reader – but also about the effect that a civilization has had on its environment, on what is now the wasted landscape so poignantly described. According to such a reading, Shelley’s poem would be understood to respond to the ecological destruction caused by monumental human arrogance. This desolate landscape (‘boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away’) can be seen not as ‘natural’ but as having been produced by human intervention (perhaps by.
Ending is different from every other and each calls on the reader to respond to this singularity. It may be a characteristic of many short stories that they end with a twist, and it may be a characteristic of many sonnets that they end with a rhyming couplet, but every short story and every sonnet still has to be thought about on its own terms. In this way we might take the final line of Adrienne Rich’s poem, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ (1970), to be emblematic: ‘To do something very.
Through questions of the human in relation to the non-human world, focusing in particular on animals and the environment. 1. The beginning When will we have begun? Where – or when – does a literary text begin? This question raises a series of fundamental problems in literary criticism and theory. Does a text begin as the author puts his or her first mark on a piece of paper or keys in the first word on a computer? Does it begin with the first idea about a story or poem, or in the childhood.
Kramnick, Making the English Canon (1998) and Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon (1998). On the canonization of Shakespeare, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (1992), and Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (1990). Within the specifically English critical tradition of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential and opinionated work is that of F.R. Leavis, who is happy in, for example, The Great Tradition (1948), sweepingly to dismiss great swathes of.
Many of our essentialist ideas about gender. In other words, it could be argued that there is no such thing as a feminist, or a masculinist or a sexist, literary work in itself: it all depends on how it is read. An obvious example here would be the work of D.H. Lawrence. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) was a groundbreaking book because of the acuity and passion with which it attacked Lawrence’s (and other male writers’) work for its ‘phallic consciousness’ (238) and degradation of women.