The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel

Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel

Tim Lanzendörfer

Examines the connection between historical and speculative fiction to offer a new form of literary-genre fiction that registers the upheavals of the early twenty-first century

Books of the Dead

Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature

Tim Lanzendörfer

The zombie has cropped up in many forms—in film, in television, and as a cultural phenomenon in zombie walks and zombie awareness months—but few books have looked at what the zombie means in fiction. Tim Lanzendörfer fills this gap by looking at a number of zombie novels, short stories, and comics, and probing what the zombie represents in contemporary literature. Lanzendörfer brings together the most recent critical discussion of zombies and applies it to a selection of key texts including Max Brooks’s World War Z, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Junot Díaz’s short story “Monstro,” Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead, and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Within the context of broader literary culture, Lanzendörfer makes the case for reading these texts with care and openness in their own right. Lanzendörfer contends that what zombies do is less important than what becomes possible when they are around. Indeed, they seem less interesting as metaphors for the various ways the world could end than they do as vehicles for how the world might exist in a different and often better form.

AI and the Challenge to Literary Studies

Tim Lanzendörfer

What are the consequences of generative AI for everyday literary studies? In this short monograph, Tim Lanzendörfer contends that genAI’s challenge to literary studies is both fundamental and productive: it not only confronts us with our own possible demise as a discipline, it also requires us to reflect on what we do, how we do it, and why. The book is a generative provocation and a thought experiment. It begins by reflecting on the questions raised by the potential to stochastically generate art and literature. It asks after the status of art in the age of genAI, including questions such as the prevalent belief in the need for human agency in the making of art, and issues of quality and originality. And then, it wonders what these discussions mean for literary studies, and most specifically, for literary criticism, for the work of interpretation. What would it mean to work on stochastic genAI art—but more importantly, what would it mean for our work on art to be doable by stochastic genAI? What can we think about when we think about the potential replaceability of human-made literary studies by genAI?

The Professionalization of the American Magazine

Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic

Tim Lanzendörfer

Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The Production of Periodicals and the Uses of Biography -- The Port Folio, the Market, and Periodical Biography -- Periodicals, Biography, and the War of 1812 -- Conclusion: Professionalizing Periodical Production in the Market Age -- Appendices -- Notes on the Text -- Bibliography -- Index.

The Allegory of Love

C. S. Lewis

A classic study of the allegorical power of love in literature, traced through the medieval and Renaissance periods.

The Western Canon

The Books and School of the Ages

Harold Bloom

The literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Harold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a "heroically brave, formidably learned" defense of the great works of literature that comprise the traditional Western Canon. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the essential writers of the western literary tradition ( The New York Times Book Review). Placing William Shakespeare at the "center of the canon," Bloom examines the literary contributions of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and many others. Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition and passion. "An impressive work...deeply, rightly passionate about the great books of the past."—Michel Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

Mimesis

The Representation of Reality in Western Literature - New and Expanded Edition

Erich Auerbach, Edward W. Said

The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how, from antiquity to modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism. This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.

The Classical Tradition : Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature

Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature

Gilbert Highet

A reissue in paperback of a title first published in 1949.

Comparative Literature

Theory, Method, Application

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

This book serves several purposes, all very much needed in today's embattled situation of the humanities and the study of literature. First, in Chapter One, the author proposes that the discipline of Comparative Literature is a most advantageous approach for the study of literature and culture as it is a priori a discipline of cross-disciplinarity and of international dimensions. After a Manifesto for a New Comparative Literature, he proceeds to offer several related theoretical frameworks as a composite method for the study of literature and culture he designates and explicates as the systemic and empirical approach. Following the introduction of the proposed New Comparative Literature, the author applies his method to a wide variety of literary and cultural areas of inquiry such as Literature and Cultural Participation where he discusses several aspects of reading and readership (Chapter Two), Comparative Literature as/and Interdisciplinarity (Chapter Three) where he deals with theory and application for film and literature and medicine and literature, Cultures, Peripheralities, and Comparative Literature (Chapter Four) where he proposes a theoretical designation he terms inbetween peripherality for the study of East Central European literatures and cultures as well as ethnic minority writing, Women's Literature and Men Writing about Women (Chapter Five) where he analyses texts written by women and texts about women written by men in the theoretical context of Ethical Constructivism, The Study of Translation and Comparative Literature (Chapter Six) where after a theoretical introduction he presents a new version of Anton Popovic's dictionary for literary translation as a taxonomy for the study of translation, and The Study of Literature and the Electronic Age (Chapter Seven), where he discusses the impact of new technologies on the study of literature and culture. The analyses in their various applications of the proposed New Comparative Literature involve modern and contemporary authors and their works such as Dorothy Richardson, Margit Kaffka, Mircea Cartarescu, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, Péter Esterházy, Dezsö Kosztolányi, Michael Ondaatje, Endre Kukorelly, Else Seel, and others.

Sexual Politics

Kate Millett

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

A Companion to Poetic Genre

Erik Martiny

A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE This eagerly awaited Companion features over 40 contributions from leading academics around the world, and offers critical overviews of numerous poetic genres. Covering a range of cultural traditions from Britain, Ireland, North America, Japan and the Caribbean, among others, this valuable collection considers ancient genres such as the elegy, the ode, the ghazal, and the ballad, before moving on to Medieval and Renaissance genres originally invented or codified by the Troubadours or poets who followed in their wake. The book also approaches genres driven by theme, such as the calypso and found poetry. Each chapter begins by defining the genre in its initial stages, charting historical developments and finally assessing its latest mutations, be they structural, thematic, parodic, assimilative, or subversive.

A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015

Wolfgang Gortschacher, David Malcolm

A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.

Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730

Bethany Wiggin

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The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800

Jack Lynch

In the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, forty-four authorities from six countries survey the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity--serious and satirical, public and private, by men and women, nobles and peasants, whether published in deluxe editions or sung on the streets. The contributors discuss poems in social contexts, poetic identities, poetic subjects, poetic form, poetic genres, poetic devices, and criticism. Even experts in eighteenth-century poetry will see familiar poems from new angles, and all readers will encounter poems they've never read before. The book is not a chronologically organized literary history, nor an encyclopaedia, nor a collection of thematically related essays; rather it is an attempt to provide a systematic overview of these poetic works, and to restore it to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800

John T. Lynch

In the most comprehensive, up-to-date account of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, a team of leading experts surveys the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity. They provide a systematic overview, and restore these poetic works to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

Pindar and the Emergence of Literature

Boris Maslov

For much of Western history, Pindar's work was recognized as the pinnacle of lyric poetry. This book presents an introduction to different aspects of Pindar's art, while demonstrating its importance for the coming into being of literature as it has been conceived of in the West.