Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

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Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics (The New Middle Ages)

By Susan Signe Morrison

This interdisciplinary book integrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, with special focus on fecopoetics and Chaucer’s literary agenda. Filth in all its manifestations—material (including privies, dung on fields, and as alchemical ingredient), symbolic (sin, misogynist slander, and theological wrestling with the problem of filth in sacred contexts) and linguistic (a semantic range including dirt and dung)—helps us to see how excrement is vital to understanding the Middle Ages. Applying fecal theories to late medieval culture, Morrison concludes by proposing Waste Studies as a new field of ethical and moral criticism for literary scholars.

Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World

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Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Readings and Sources (Interpreting Ancient History)

by Laura K. McClure (Editor)

This book explores the fascinating world of sex and gender roles in the classical period. It provides readers with essays that represent a range of perspectives on women, gender and sexuality in the ancient world. They are accessible to general readers whilst also challenging them to confront problems of evidence and interpretation, new theories and methodologies, and contemporary assumptions about gender and sexuality.
The essays cover a broad spectrum of scholarly perspectives, and trace the debates and themes of the field from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. They also address a range of literary and non-literary genres, including some non-canonical sources such as medical writings and inscriptions, to elucidate ancient ideas about sexuality and the discourses that shaped these ideas. The book also provides translations of primary sources to enable readers to confront the evidence for themselves and assess the methodology used by historians. It includes Greek literature and society, Roman culture and the legacy of classical myth for modern feminist scholars. It includes and examines not only women in antiquity but also masculinity and sexuality to provide a comprehensive account of this fascinating topic.

Sexuality in Greek and Roman Literature and Society

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Sexuality in Greek and Roman Literature and Society: A Sourcebook

by Marguer Johnson

This volume contains numerous original translations of ancient poetry, inscriptions, and documents, all of which illuminate the multifaceted nature of sexuality in antiquity.The detailed introduction provides full social and historical context for the sources, and guides students on how to use the material most effectively. Themes such as marriage, prostitution, and same-sex attraction are presented comparatively, with material from the Greek and Roman worlds shown side by side. This approach allows readers to interpret the written records with a full awareness of the different context of these separate but related societies. Commentaries are provided throughout, focusing on vocabulary and social and historical context.This is the first major sourcebook on ancient sexuality; it will be of particular use on related courses in classics/ancient history and gender studies.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

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The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

by Alex Preminger, Terry V.F. Brogan, Frank J. Warnke (Editors)

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself book as a standard in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry. Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are ex-tended; cross- references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself book as a standard in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry. Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are ex-tended; cross- references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.

Harold Bloom - The Anxiety of Influence

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The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

by Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. His argument that all literary texts are a strong misreading of thise that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature.
Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorable quotes, this second edition of Bloom's classic work maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded--neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. A new Introduction, centering upon Shakespeare and Marlowe, explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking, and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past twenty years Here, Bloom asserts that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation he calls "poetic misprision." The influence-anxiety does not su much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem, or essay. In other words, without Keats's reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, we could not have Keats's odes and sonnets and his two Hyperions.
This new edition is certain to find a responsive audience among the new generation of scholars, students, and layreaders interested in the Bloom canon.

Faulkner and Love

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Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art

by Prof. Judith L. Sensibar

"We know a lot about William Faulkner''s drinking, his philandering, his struggles with race, sexuality and history. We know much less about why Faulkner was so spectacularly talented and so spectacularly troubled. Judith Sensibar''s magisterial new book tells how the fraught, obsessive relationships with the women in his life permeated every aspect of his art and life. Faulkner''s critics and biographers too often dismiss or caricature his mother, his "mammy," and his wife. But by uncovering important new information about Faulkner''s family life, and integrating it with intelligent readings of his fiction and poetry, Faulkner and Love places Maud Butler, Caroline Barr, and his wife Estelle Oldham Faulkner back where they belong at the center of his work and illuminates the obsessions that impelled him to write the greatest novels of the 20th century." - Diane Roberts, author of Dream State (Diane Roberts )

Ancient Literary Criticism

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Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies)

by Andrew Laird

The volume makes widely available some important scholarship on the canonical texts of ancient rhetoric and poetics. While there are numerous studies of general trends in classical criticism, this collection offers direct discussions of primary sources, which provide a useful companion to the Russell and Winterbottom anthology, Ancient Literary Criticism. The volume contains a chronology, suggestions for further reading, a new translation of Bernays' 1857 essay on katharsis, and an important introductory chapter addressing the tension in ancient literary criticism between its place in the classical tradition and its role in contemporary endeavors to reconstruct ancient culture.

Hans-Georg Gadamer - Truth And Method

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Truth And Method (Continuum Impacts)

by Hans-Georg Gadamer

This is Gadamer's most influential work, his magnum opus. An astonishing synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, theology, the theory of law and classical scholarship, it is undoubtedly one of the most important texts in twentieth century philosophy.

Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography

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Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography (Hardcover)

by Ruth Morello, A. D. Morrison (Editors)

The surviving body of ancient letters offers the reader a stunning variety of material, ranging from the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri to imperial rescripts, New Testament Epistles, fictional or pseudepigraphical letters and a wealth of missives on almost every conceivable subject. They offer us a unique insight into ancient practices in the fields of politics, literature, philosophy, medicine and many other areas. This collection presents a series of case studies in ancient letters, asking how each letter writer manipulates the epistolary tradition, why he chose the letter form over any other, and what effect the publication of volumes of collected letters might have had upon a reader's engagement with epistolary works. This volume is the first of its kind on ancient letters in any language, and it brings together both well-established and promising young scholars currently working in the fields of ancient literature, history, philosophy and medicine to engage in a shared debate about this most adaptable and 'interdisciplinary' of genres.

Jacques Derrida - The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

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The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

by Jacques Derrida

You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably. What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you. On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path. The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a "fortune-telling book" watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean to happen, to arrive, to have to happen or arrive, to let or to make happen or arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, da und fort, the one or the other. You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself.J. D."With The Post Card, as with Glas, Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel (the long section is called "Envois," roughly, "dispatches" ), he stages his writing more overtly than in the scholarly works. . . . The Post Card also contains a series of self-reflective essays, largely focused on Freud, in which Derrida is beautifully lucid and direct."—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal

Euripides and the Poetics of Nostalgia

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Euripides and the Poetics of Nostalgia

by Gary S. Meltzer

Branded by critics from Aristophanes to Nietzsche as sophistic, iconoclastic, and sensationalistic, Euripides has long been held responsible for the demise of Greek tragedy. Despite this reputation, his drama has a fundamentally conservative character. It conveys nostalgia for an idealized age that still respected the gods and traditional codes of conduct. Using deconstructionist and feminist theory, this book investigates the theme of the lost voice of truth and justice in four Euripidean tragedies. The plays' unstable mix of longing for a transcendent voice of truth and skeptical analysis not only epitomizes the discursive practice of Euripides' era but also speaks to our postmodern condition. The book sheds new light on the source of the playwright's tragic power and enduring appeal, revealing the surprising relevance of his works for our own day.

Harold Bloom - Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

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Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

by Harold Bloom

Product DescriptionAmerica's most prominent and bestselling literary critic takes an enlightening look at the concept of genius through the ages in a celebration of the greatest creative writers of all time.A monumental achievement of scholarship, GENIUS examines 100 of the most creative and literary minds in history. From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent achievements of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, Bloom discusses the numerous influences of his chosen geniuses and the kinships among them over the centuries. He also offers revealing excerpts from their works that continue to surprise, enchant, and move the reader time after time. Bloom's insightful analyses of the poetry of Milton, Shelley, and Whitman; the drama of Ibsen and Tennessee Williams; and the narratives of Melville and Tolstoy, among many others, will illuminate and expand readers' understanding and appreciation of these great works of art. A wide-ranging study that enriches as it informs, GENIUS is a book to treasure.

Deconstruction: Theory and Practice

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Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (New Accents)

by Christopher Norris

In this third, revised edition, Norris builds upon his 1991 afterword with an entirely new postscript, reflecting upon recent critical debate. The postscript includes an extensive list of recommended reading, complementing what was already one of the most useful bibliographies available.

Deconstruction And Criticism

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Deconstruction And Criticism (Question What You Thought Before)

by Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, Paul De Man (Authors)

This is the book that introduced deconstruction as a tool for literary and cultural theorists throughout the English-speaking world, and set the ball rolling for the subsequent controversies over the use of theory to study liuterature.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism

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The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

by Steven Connor (Editor)

Offering a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism, this Companion features examinations of the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant effect on contemporary critical thought. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, and modern cultural studies. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology.

Semiotics: The Basics

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Semiotics: The Basics

by Dani Chandler

This up-dated second edition provides a clear and concise introduction to the key concepts of semiotics in accessible and jargon-free language. With a revised introduction and glossary, extended index and suggestions for further reading, this new edition provides an increased number of examples including computer and mobile phone technology, television commercials and the web.
Demystifying what is a complex, highly interdisciplinary field, key questions covered include:
What is a sign?
Which codes do we take for granted?
How can semiotics be used in textual analysis?
What is a text?
A highly useful, must-have resource, Semiotics: The Basics is the ideal introductory text for those studying this growing area.

Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections

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Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections

by Frederick Burwick

In this study, Frederick Burwick probes the origins - philosophical, aesthetic and literary - of developing subjectivist mimesis in the literature and theory of the Romantic period. He draws on the theories of Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, Thomas De Quincey, and others.

Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism

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Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism

by William Harmless

In the fourth century, the deserts of Egypt became the nerve center of a radical new movement, what we now call monasticism. Groups of Christians-from illiterate peasants to learned intellectuals-moved out to the wastelands beyond the Nile Valley and, in the famous words of Saint Athanasius, made the desert a city. In so doing, they captured the imagination of the ancient world. They forged techniques of prayer and asceticism, of discipleship and spiritual direction, that have remained central to Christianity ever since. Seeking to map the soul's long journey to God and plot out the subtle vagaries of the human heart, they created and inspired texts that became classics of Western spirituality. These Desert Christians were also brilliant storytellers, some of Christianity's finest. This book introduces the literature of early monasticism. It examines all the best-known works, including Athanasius' Life of Antony, the Lives of Pachomius, and the so-called Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Later chapters focus on two pioneers of monastic theology: Evagrius Ponticus, the first great theoretician of Christian mysticism; and John Cassian, who brought Egyptian monasticism to the Latin West. Along the way, readers are introduced to path-breaking discoveries-to new texts and recent archeological finds-that have revolutionized contemporary scholarship on monastic origins. Included are fascinating snippets from papyri and from little-known Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopic texts. Interspersed in each chapter are illustrations, maps, and diagrams that help readers sort through the key texts and the richly-textured world of early monasticism. Geared to a wide audience and written in clear, jargon-free prose, Desert Christians offers the most comprehensive and accessible introduction to early monasticism.

Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature

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Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature

by Anne Marie Hacht

This new 4-volume set covers world authors from many periods and genres, building a broad understanding of the various contexts in which literature can be viewed - from the biographical to the literary and historical.

Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition

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Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition

by Umberto Eco

How do we know a cat is a cat? And why do we call it a cat? How much of our perception of things is based on cognitive ability, and how much on linguistic resources? Here, in six remarkable essays, Umberto Eco explores in depth questions of reality, perception, and experience. Basing his ideas on common sense, Eco shares a vast wealth of literary and historical knowledge, touching on issues that affect us every day. At once philosophical and amusing, Kant and the Platypus is a tour of the world of our senses, told by a master of knowing what is real and what is not.