Rethinking Place Through Literary Form regards the relationship between place and linguistic form as challenging real and perceived configurations of place and renegotiating geopolitically determined categories of the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. The volume argues that the rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban and alienated geographies, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one’s locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and re-building identity. By looking at narrative re-imaginings of forgotten and interrupted intimacies between habitation and place from diverse parts of the world, the twelve chapters address the growing need to expand and alter approaches to literary representations of modernity and modes of self-location.

With recent advances in digital technology, a number of exciting and innovative approaches to writing lives have emerged, from graphic memoirs to blogs and other visual-verbal-virtual texts. This edited collection is a timely study of new approaches to writing lives, including literary docu-memoir, autobiographical cartography, social media life writing and autobiographical writing for children. Combining literary theory with insightful critical approaches, each essay offers a serious study of innovative forms of life writing, with a view to reflecting on best practice and offering the reader practical guidance on methods and techniques. Offering a range of practical exercises and an insight into cutting-edge literary methodologies, this is an inspiring and thought-provoking companion for students of literature and creative writing studying courses on life writing, memoir or creative non-fiction.

Now in its fourth edition, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature has become a standard introduction to the close reading of literature. It offers students and other readers a variety of ways to interpret a piece of literature, ranging from traditional approaches through the formalist, the psychological, the mythic and archetypal, and into such contemporary approaches as feminist criticism and cultural studies. Applying these diverse approaches to the same five works, the book shows students how various methods offer different insights, enriching their response to and understanding of the individual work. This fourth edition features a new chapter on cultural studies and the inclusion and interpretation of Alice Walker's singularly rich short story, "Everyday Use."

"A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address. Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context. Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.

Christ. The Christian Experience in the Modern World focuses on the question of salvation for all people. Using seven 'anthropological constants', Schillebeeckx innovatively shows the social and political relevance of faith. Inspired by liberation and feminist theologies, he puts strong emphasis on human experience and on the importance of examining church teaching in its historical context. This volume is a testimony of Schillebeeckx' ground breaking attempt to rethink doctrine in the light of the research on the historical Jesus. Instead of starting with Christianity's great creedal statements about Christ and the Trinity, he focuses on the subjective experience of the first generations of believers as expressed in the New Testament. This choice stirred considerable controversy and a Vatican investigation but inspired and still keeps to inspire readers in their personal approach to Christian faith.

A Handbook of Middle English Studies “This sharp-minded, coherent set of essays both maps and liberates: not only does it map the intellectual territory of contemporary cultural debate; it also liberates the extraordinary texts of later medieval England to move across that contemporary cultural terrain.” James Simpson, Harvard University “Marion Turner has skilfully choreographed an exciting ensemble of fresh accounts of the English Middle Ages. We see the period in a new light that shows with compassion and imagination, as well as thoughtful scholarship, how the literature of the past speaks to contemporary preoccupations.” Ardis Butterfield, Yale University “Strikingly original: theory-literate and materially-grounded ways of reading Middle English texts.” David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania A Handbook of Middle English Studies presents twenty-six original and accessible essays by leading scholars, analyzing the relationship between critical theory and late-medieval literature. The collection offers a range of entry points into the rich field of medieval literary studies, exploring subjects including the depiction of the self and the mind, the literature of conquest, ideas of beauty and aesthetics, and the relationship between place and literature. Topics that have long been central to the field, such as authorship, gender, and race, feature alongside areas only recently coming under critical scrutiny, such as globalization, the environment, and animality. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that the manuscript culture of late medieval literature raises key theoretical issues concerning the relationship between authors, texts, and readers. A Handbook of Middle English Studies models diverse approaches to medieval texts and stakes a claim in debates about topics ranging from class to the canon, from imagination to nationhood, from sexuality to the public sphere.

The rise of Creative Writing has been accompanied from the start by two questions: can it be taught, and should it be taught? This scepticism is sometimes shared even by those who teach it, who often find themselves split between two contradictory identities: the artistic and the academic. Against Creative Writing explores the difference between ‘writing’, which is what writers do, and Creative Writing, which is the instrumentalisation of what writers do. Beginning with the question of whether writing can or ought to be taught, it looks in turn at the justifications for BA, MA, and PhD courses, and concludes with the divided role of the writer who teaches. It argues in favour of Creative Writing as a form of hands-on literary education at undergraduate level and a form of literary apprenticeship at graduate level, especially in widening access to new voices. It argues against those forms of Creative Writing that lose sight of literary values – as seen in the proliferation of curricular couplings with non-literary subjects, or the increasing emphasis on developing skills for future employment. Against Creative Writing, written by a writer, is addressed to other writers, inside or outside the academy, at undergraduate or graduate level, whether ‘creative’ or ‘critical’.

"In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed reclaims the power of black experimental poetry and prose by arguing that if literature fundamentally serves the human need for freedom in expression, then readers and critics must see it as something other than a reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. Prior to the successful campaigns against Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. and colonization in the Caribbean, literary politics seemed much more obviously interventionist. As more African Americans and Afro-Caribbean writers gained access to formal political power, more writing emerged whose political concerns went beyond improving racial representation, appealing for social recognition, raising consciousness, or commenting on the political disillusion and fragmentation of the post-segregation and post-colonial moments. Through formal innovation and abstraction, writers increasingly pushed the limits of representation and expression in order to extend the limits of thought and literary possibility. Reed offers a theoretical account of this new "black experimental writing," which is at once a literary historical development, and a concept with which to analyze the ways writing engages race and the possibilities of expression. One of his key interventions is arguing that form drives the politics literature, not vice-versa. Through extended analyses of works by N. H. Pritchard, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks and Nathaniel Mackey, Freedom Time draws out the political implication of their innovative approaches to literary aesthetics"--