This volume seeks to put drama and its neglected mental dimension into the limelight. While narrative fiction with its intricate ways of rendering consciousness has been deemed an ideal playground for approaches of a cognitivist leaning, the dramatic genre has been all but ignored by cognitive literary studies. Providing insights into such drama-related issues as subject construction, interiority, performativity, empathy, reader manipulation and reception control, the contributions to this...

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works...

As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.Even as the decline of the reading of literature, as argued by the National Endowment for the Arts, proceeds in our culture, Garber (“One of the most powerful women in the academic w...

From one of the country's most eminent reviewers and academics, a delightfully sceptical and devastatingly intelligent assessment of the true value of art.

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony? This Very Short Introduction explores comedy both as a literary genre, and as a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences and events. Matthew Bevis studies the classics of comic...

Now in its fourth edition, Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the exciting and diverse world of poetry. Jeffrey Wainwright’s accessible introduction demystifies poetic forms and traditions, which can at first seem bewildering.Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Dylan Thomas, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain pleasure from poetry. This comprehensive guide e...

Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction explores how fiction works in the brains and imagination of both readers and writers.Demonstrates how reading fiction can contribute to a greater understanding of, and the ability to change, ourselvesInformed by the latest psychological research which focuses on, for example, how identification with fictional characters occurs, and how literature can improve social abilitiesExplores traditional aspec...

From the apparently simple adaptation of a text into film, theatre or a new literary work, to the more complex appropriation of style or meaning, it is arguable that all texts are somehow connected to a network of existing texts and art forms. In this new edition Adaptation and Appropriation explores:multiple definitions and practices of adaptation and appropriationthe cultural and aesthetic politics behind the impulse to adaptthe global and local...

Grief and mourning are generally considered to be private, yet universal instincts. But in a media age of televised funerals and visible bereavement, elegies are increasingly significant and open to public scrutiny. Providing an overview of the history of the term and the different ways in which it is used, David Kennedy:outlines the origins of elegy, and the characteristics of the genreexamines the psychology and cultural background underlying works of mourning

At a time when millions travel around the planet – some by choice, some driven by economic or political exile – translation of the written and spoken word is of ever increasing importance. This guide presents readers with an accessible and engaging introduction to the valuable position translation holds within literature and society.Leading translation theorist Susan Bassnett traces the history of translation, examining the ways translation is currently utilized as a burgeoning int...

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history...

Studying Literature in English provides the ideal point of entry for students of English Literature. This book is an accessible guide for Literature students around the world. This book:Grounds literature and the study of literature throughout by referencing a selection of well-known novels, plays and poemsExamines the central questions that readers ask when confronting literary texts, and shows how these make literary theory meaningful and necessary