This far-ranging study develops Morson's concept of "prosaics," which stresses the importance of ordinary events and the novel's unique ability to portray them. Arguing that time is open and contingency real, Morson develops a "prosaics of process" showing how some masterpieces …
"An exhilarating volume that will ratchet up the joy for all reading groups "Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetim…
An introduction to literary theory unlike any other, 'Ten Lessons in Theory' engages its readers with three fundamental premises. The first premise is that a genuinely productive understanding of theory depends upon a considerably more sustained encounter with the foundational w…
An introduction to literary theory unlike any other, 'Ten Lessons in Theory' engages its readers with three fundamental premises. The first premise is that a genuinely productive understanding of theory depends upon a considerably more sustained encounter with the foundational w…
Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now
"Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most import…
A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a giant helmet falls from the sky; a traveler awakens to find his horse dangling from a church steeple. Eighteenth-century fiction brims with moments such as these, in which the prosaic rubs up against the marvelous. Whi…
"This book examines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an 'out-of-Scandinavia' legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon…
The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Encompassing a range of genres, it is geographically and culturally boundless and influenced by great novelists working in other languages. Michael Schmidt, choosing as his travel companions not critics…
A handbook of modernism studies
In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah draws on accounts of the world as a temporal process from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida, and analyzes several postcolonial novels to articulate a normative theory of world literature's capacity to open up new possibilities for remaki…
In "What Is a World?" Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature's cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of "world," Cheah articulates…