This book provides a lively introduction to the work of Roland Barthes, one of the twentieth century's most important literary and cultural theorists. The book covers all aspects of Barthes's writings including his work on literary theory, mass communications, the theatre and politics. Moriarty argues that Barthes's writing must not be seen as an unchanging body of thought, and that we should study his ideas in the contexts within which they were formulated, debated and developed.

In the final stages of his career, Roland Barthes abandoned his long-standing suspicion of photographic representation to write Camera Lucida, at once an elegy to his dead mother and a treatise on photography. In Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, Jean-Michel Rabaté and nineteen contributors examine the import of Barthes's shifting positions on photography and visual representation and the impact of his work on current developments in cultural studies and theories of the media and popular culture.

Revolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess.—Roland Barthes In the field of contemporary literary studies, Roland Barthes remains an inestimably influential figure—perhaps more influential in America than in his native France. The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes proposes a new method of viewing Barthes’s critical enterprise. Patrizia Lombardo, who studied with Barthes, rejects an absolutist or developmental assessment of his career. Insisting that his world can best be understood in terms of the paradoxes he perceived in the very activity of writing, Lombardo similarly sees in Barthes the crucial ambiguity that determines the modern writer—an irresistible attraction for something new, different, breaking with the past, yet also an unavoidable scorn for the contemporary world. Lombardo demonstrates that her mentor’s critical endeavor was not a linear progression of thought but was, as Barthes described his work, a romance, a “dance with a pen.”

Roland Barthes was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, but why should the reader of today, or tomorrow, be concerned with him? Martin McQuillan provides a fresh perspective on Barthes, addressing his political and institutional inheritance and considering his work as the origins of a critical cultural studies. This stimulating study: - Provides a biographical consideration of Barthes' writing - Offers an extended reading of his 1957 text Mythologies as a text for our own time, drawing Barthes' work into a historical relation to the present - Examines his connection to what we call cultural studies - Features an annotated bibliography of Barthes' published work Thought-provoking and insightful, Roland Barthes is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the writings of this key theorist and his continuing relevance in our post-9/11 world.

In this cogent, accessible biography, Andy Stafford offers a new picture of the man and his work, one that helps us to understand him even as it acknowledges the complexity presented by his restless interests and unorthodox career. Stafford argues that Barthes is best classified as a journalist, essayist, and critic, and he emphasizes the social preoccupations in his work—how Barthes continually worked to analyze the self and society, as well as the self in society. In doing so, Stafford paints a fascinating picture not just of Barthes, but of the entire intellectual scene of postwar France. As Barthes continues to find new readers today, this book will make the perfect introduction, even as it offers new avenues of thought for specialists.

This comprehensive introductory study considers the full range of Barthes' work - from his early structuralist phase, through his post-structuralist explorations of "Text", to his late writings. In looking at the late work, often of an autobiographical or personal-lyrical nature, Rylance examines the relationship between the critical and the personal, as well as Barthes' relation to developments in feminism and postmodernism. Throughout, Barthes' writings are presented as paradigmatic of many of the major shifts in intellectual opinion in the post-war period. The book is part of a series reflecting the broad spectrum of modern European and American theory. It focuses on those cultural theorists who have had the most significant impact in the 20th century. The series aims to show how modern thinkers differ in their aproaches to interpreting culture, texts, society, language, history, gender and social life. Designed to be accessible to students, each volume in the series the thought and work of often difficult theorists in a clear and informative way, balancing exposition and critique.

Roland Barthes' Cinema offers the first systematic English-language critical treatment of Barthes' writing on cinema, reassessing the relevance of his work for a new generation of readers and filmgoers.

Roland Barthes – the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published. The Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his lifetime.