Author Archives
Literariness is an open access collection of notes inviting everyone to explore the unfathomable English Language, Literature, and Theory. Feel free to discover and share knowledge.
Contributor: Nasrullah Mambrol
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Key Theories of Wolfgang Iser
Wolfgang Iser’s (1926-2007) theories of reader response were initially presented in a lecture of 1970 entitled The Affective Structure of the Text, and then in two major works, The Implied Reader (1972) and The Act of Reading (1976). After examining… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Hans Robert Jauss
The phenomenological method of Husserl and the hermeneutics of Heidegger paved the way for what became known as reception theory. One of the foremost figures of reception theory, Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), studied at the University of Heidelberg with the… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Martin Heidegger
Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) proved to be one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and the major modern exponent of existentialism. His impact extends not only to existentialist philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Simone de… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Edmund Husserl
Much reader-response theory had its philosophical origins in the doctrine known as phenomenology, whose foundations were laid by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). The Greek word phainomenon means “appearance.” Hence, as a philosophical attitude, phenomenology shifts our emphasis of… Read More ›
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The Poetics of Modernism: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Modernism comprised a broad series of movements in Europe and America that came to fruition roughly between 1910 and 1930. Its major exponents and practitioners included Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Luigi… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Wimsatt and Beardsley
In addition to their other works, the critic Wimsatt (1907–1975) and the philosopher Beardsley (1915–1985) produced two influential and controversial papers that propounded central positions of New Criticism, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and The Affective Fallacy (1949). In the first of… Read More ›
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Key Theories of Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) is increasingly being recognized as one of the major literary theorists of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for his radical philosophy of language, as well as his theory of the novel, underpinned by… Read More ›
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Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview
Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete… Read More ›
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Marxist Feminism
From a Marxist perspective, history is dominated by a struggle between social classes that will only end when a truly classless society has been achieved. Given the fact that throughout history women have been collectively denied important rights, it was… Read More ›
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Translation and Gender
The interest of cultural studies in translation inevitably took translation studies away from purely linguistic analysis and brought it into contact with other disciplines. Yet this ‘process of disciplinary hybridization’ (Simon 1996: ix) has not always been straightforward. Sherry Simon,… Read More ›
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World Systems Theory
A theory of the operation of the world economic, social and political system, formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974a; 1974b). The chief assertion of this theory is that the capitalist system has been the world economic system since the sixteenth century… Read More ›
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Postcolonial Translation Theory
In Translation and Gender, Sherry Simon’s focus centres on underlining the importance of the cultural turn in translation. In the conclusion, she insists on how ‘contemporary feminist translation has made gender the site of a consciously transformative project, one which… Read More ›
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Corporeal Feminism
During the 1990s, a group of Australian feminists (e.g., Grosz 1994; Grosz and Probyn 1995; Gatens 1996; Kirby 1997) developed a branch of sexual difference theory known as ‘corporeal feminism.’ Drawing on Irigaray, this group has argued that feminist researchers… Read More ›
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Zoocriticism and the Postcolonial
Throughout western intellectual history, civilisation has consistently been constructed by or against the wild, savage and animalistic, and has consequently been haunted or ‘dogged’ by it. The wild man of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lurked at the dangerously liminal… Read More ›
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Realism and Naturalism in Europe and America
Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism arose in many parts of Europe and in America, beginning in the 1840s. The major figures included Flaubert and Balzac in France, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy… Read More ›
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The Naturalism of Émile Zola
The novels of the French writer Émile Zola (1840–1902) move toward a more extreme form of realism known as naturalism, taking its name from its allegedly scientific impulse to base its characters, events, and explanations on natural rather than supernatural… Read More ›
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The Realism of Henry James
Though Henry James (1843–1916) was an American novelist, he saw the word “American” as embracing a certain cultural openness, or in his words, a “fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world.”1 The experience underlying James’ creative… Read More ›
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The Realism of William Dean Howells
Regarded by many as the major American novelist and critic of his age, William Dean Howells (1837–1920) began his career as a printer and journalist. He became sub-editor and then chief editor of the most prestigious journal on the East… Read More ›
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The Realism of George Eliot
One of the most succinct yet poignant statements of realism was made by the major Victorian novelist George Eliot (1819–1880), the latter being the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans. Her novels include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism and Theory in the Twentieth Century
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
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Terry Eagleton and Marxist Literary Theory
Terry Eagleton’s contribution to Marxist cultural theory is broad in its range. While his earlier writing examined in some depth certain Marxist categories of literary-cultural analysis, his later, more popularizing, work has argued persuasively the need for theory. Eagleton has… Read More ›
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The Philosophy of Henri Bergson
Schopenhauer’s thought impinges considerably not only on the thought of Nietzsche but also on Bergson’s philosophy and his theories of art and humor. Notwithstanding his self-dissociation from Schopenhauer,1 Bergson’s philosophy stands in direct line of descent. In fact, his student… Read More ›
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The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)– who is the most widely read philosopher in Germany today – offered an incisive critique of the bourgeois world: its vision of the present as alone real, its exaltation of a rationality answering merely to pragmatic needs,… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Friedrich Schleiermacher
The German philosopher and Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is generally credited with having laid the foundations of modern hermeneutics, or the art of systematic textual interpretation. His most important text in this regard was his Hermeneutics and Criticism, published… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Friedrich von Schiller
Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) was a poet, dramatist, and literary theorist whose development of Kant’s aesthetic ideas had a great influence on other German Romantic writers and on Coleridge. He was a Romantic in many senses: writing in the aftermath… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) is best known for his political writings and his activities as a statesman. In 1765 he became secretary to the marquess of Rockingham, a leader of the Whig or Liberal political party in England. He also served as… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of John Locke
John Locke’s (1632–1704) philosophy has been enduring and widespread in its influence. He laid the foundations of classical British empiricism, and his thought is often characterized as marked by tolerance, moderation, and common sense. In general, Locke’s affiliations were with… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of David Hume
The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) was one of the major figures of the Enlightenment. Like John Locke and George Berkeley, he was an empiricist, believing that our knowledge derives from experience, and he pushed the empiricism of his predecessors… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Giambattista Vico
The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) expressed in his writings a historical view of the progress of human thought, language, and culture that anticipates the evolutionary perspectives of Hegel, Marx, and others. His major work was his Scienza Nuova (New… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Joseph Addison
Though he was also a poet and dramatist, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) is best known as an essayist, and indeed he contributed much to the development of the essay form, which, like the literary form of the letter, flourished in the… Read More ›
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Black Feminisms
The term ‘Black’ is radically unstable and is applied to various, related political positions. An attempt to trace the meanings that surround and inform this term involves an engagement with its geographical, cultural and political indeterminacies, with its reliance on… Read More ›
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Translation Studies
The 1980s was a decade of consolidation for the fledgling discipline known as Translation Studies. Having emerged onto the world stage in the late 1970s, the subject began to be taken seriously, and was no longer seen as an unscientific… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) has long enjoyed a reputation as both one of the finest poets of the Renaissance and an influential critic. He is best known for his epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581), whose topic was the First Crusade. This… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Jacopo Mazzoni
Born in Cesena, Italy, the Italian scholar Jacopo Mazzoni’s (1548–1598) major work was a philosophical treatise called De Triplici Hominum Vita, Activa Nempe, Contemplativa, e Religiosa Methodi Tres, 1576 (On the Three Ways of Man’s Life: The Active, the Contemplative,… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Lodovico Castelvetro
Lodovico Castelvetro (1505–1571) is best known for his stringent reformulation of Aristotle’s unities of time and place in drama, his rigid approach being subsequently endorsed by neoclassical writers. Also important in his writings, however, are his treatment of imitation, plot, the… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Giambattista Giraldi
The Italian dramatist, poet, and literary critic Giambattista Giraldi (1504–1573) was embroiled in a number of controversies. Like Dante, he spoke in favor of the use of vernacular languages and, as against the influential classical notions of literature deriving from Aristotle… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Christine de Pisan
Christine de Pisan (ca. 1365–1429) was perhaps the most articulate and prolific female voice of the European Middle Ages. Being widowed at the age of 25 without an inheritance and with three children, she was obliged to earn her living… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Giovanni Boccaccio
Though Boccaccio (1313–1375) wished to be known as a scholar, he is most widely known for his Decameron (1358), a collection of a hundred, sometimes bawdy, stories told by ten characters against the background of the bubonic plague that overtook… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Germaine de Staël
Germaine de Staël’s (1766–1817) life and writings intersect profoundly with a number of political, intellectual, and literary movements. To begin with, she was one of the heirs of Enlightenment thought; her friends and acquaintances included the Encyclopedists Denis Diderot and Jean… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Geoffrey de Vinsauf
Geoffrey de Vinsauf derives his name (de Vino Salvo in Latin) from a treatise on the preservation of wine which was attributed to him. However, it was not wine but poetics which earned him renown, though almost nothing is known… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Pierre de Ronsard
Like his friend and distant cousin Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) eventually studied under the supervision of the Hellenist Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret in Paris, an institution that housed a nucleus of seven poets known… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of George Gascoigne
The poet and dramatist George Gascoigne (1542–1577) is credited with having written the first literary-critical essay in the English language, entitled Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English. This essay appeared in a collection… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of George Puttenham
A long and influential treatise entitled The Arte of English Poesie, published anonymously in 1589, is attributed to George Puttenham (1529–1590, though the evidence for this is not conclusive and continues to be argued by scholars. Puttenham was educated at… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille(1606–1684), born in the French town of Rouen in Normandy, was primarily a playwright. Born into a middle-class family, and having failed in his initial endeavor as a lawyer, he launched into a stormy and controversial career in the… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The French poet, satirist, and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) had a pervasive influence not only on French letters (of the old-fashioned kind) but also on English and German poets and critics. His L’Art Poétique (The Art of Poetry), first published… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was a pioneer in many respects. Because of her family circumstances and her husband’s early death, she was obliged to support herself as a writer – the first woman to do so. She is one of the… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism, published anonymously by Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in 1711, is perhaps the clearest statement of neoclassical principles in any language. In its broad outlines, it expresses a worldview which synthesizes elements of a Roman Catholic outlook with… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson
Of his numerous achievements, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) is perhaps best remembered for his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755. Of almost equal renown are his Lives of the English Poets (1783) and his eight-volume edition of Shakespeare… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the first major American writer explicitly to advocate the autonomy of poetry, the freeing of poetry from moral or educational or intellectual imperatives. His fundamental strategy for perceiving such autonomy was to view poetry not as… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson (1803–1882), the most articulate exponent of American Romanticism, was a poet; but he was distinguished primarily by his contributions to literary and cultural criticism. He was the leading advocate of American “transcendentalism” with its insistence on the value of… Read More ›
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Romanticism in America
The French Revolution of 1789 marked a watershed for the future of Europe, a fact keenly discerned by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Irving Babbitt and Matthew Arnold. Not only did that Revolution initiate the political… Read More ›
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Romanticism in France
One of the founders of Romanticism, its so-called father, was the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who espoused a return to nature and equated the increasing growth and refinement of civilization with corruption, artificiality, and mechanization. Rousseau’s Social Contract espouses democratic… Read More ›
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Romanticism in Germany
During the 1760s and 1770s, Germany witnessed the rise of the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement in which writers and critics such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Goethe, and Schiller experimented with new subjective modes of expression… Read More ›
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Romanticism in England
In England, the ground for Romanticism was prepared in the latter half of the eighteenth century through the economic, political, and cultural transformations mentioned in the preceding chapters. The system of absolute government crumbled even earlier in Britain than elsewhere;… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge
The genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge extended over many domains. In poetry he is best known for compositions such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, as well as Lyrical Ballads (1798), which he co-authored… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth
It was Wordsworth who wrote the following famous lines about the French Revolution as it first appeared to many of its sympathizers: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven! O times,… Read More ›
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Agenda Setting Media Theory
The argument that television news and other genres such as documentaries and current affairs straightforwardly transmit an obviously biased view of the world has been rejected in most quarters of media studies. Nevertheless, while the majority acknowledge that television has… Read More ›
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Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and the Search for Identity in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Among other things, tragedy dramatizes identity crises. At the root of such crises lie feelings of shame. You might ask: what about guilt? There is no question that guilt plays a major role in tragedy, but tragedy also dramatizes the… Read More ›
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Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and the Poetry of War
1 In The Owl, written in February 1915, three months before he enlisted, Edward Thomas characteristically sets himself on the open road: walking at night feeling hungry, cold and tired. When he enters an inn, though, the exterior world is… Read More ›
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Body Language in Harold Pinter’s Plays
In the millennium year, Harold Pinter reached his seventieth birthday. Looking back over his achievements (as actor, pacifist, playwright, poet, critic, director, creator-adaptor of scripts that have sensitively translated the artistry of novelists into the medium of film, campaigner for… Read More ›
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Violence in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry
hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity (The Grauballe Man) If, as Seamus Heaney says, quoting Borges, ‘poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on pages’,1 then we might recognise… Read More ›
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Female Characters in Eugene O’Neill’s Plays
Like many other male writers, Eugene O’Neill created a world populated primarily by men. From the sea plays at the beginning of his career to such late works as The Iceman Cometh and Hughie, men dominate his theatrical space. A… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of John Dryden
John Dryden (1631–1700) occupies a seminal place in English critical history. Samuel Johnson called him “the father of English criticism,” and affirmed of his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) that “modern English prose begins here.” Dryden’s critical work was extensive, treating… Read More ›
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Literary Criticism of Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) is often cited as an archetype of the well-rounded “Renaissance man”: his talents were multifold, encompassing not only poetry and cultivated learning but also the virtues of statesmanship and military service. He was born into an aristocratic… Read More ›
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Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism
While he was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Greenblatt helped to found a journal called Representations, in which some of the earlier important New Historicist criticism appeared. As mentioned earlier, however, it was his introduction to The Power… Read More ›
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Walter Pater and Aestheticism
Walter Pater (1839–1894) is best known for his phrase “art for art’s sake.” In his insistence on artistic autonomy, on aesthetic experience as opposed to aesthetic object, and on experience in general as an ever vanishing flux, he is a… Read More ›
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Symbolism, Aestheticism and Charles Baudelaire
Known as the founder of French symbolism (though not himself part of the movement), and often associated with the artistic decadence and aestheticism of the later nineteenth century, Baudelaire was born in Paris where he lived a bohemian life, adopting… Read More ›
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Postmodern British Poetry
If the era of ‘postmodernity’ is increasingly seen as ‘a socio-economic mode that has intensified and surpassed modernity itself’ then poetry produced under this new ‘socio-economic mode’ might rightly be dismissed as another form of ‘postmodern’ candyfloss neatly packaged for… Read More ›
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Psychoanalytic Reading of Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared
Kafka’s first novel, The Man who Disappeared (Der Verschollene), still better known in the English-speaking world at least under Max Brod’s title, Amerika, is set against the realist backdrop of the most modern and technologically advanced society in the world,… Read More ›
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Experimental Form in Victorian Poetry
In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wanted to write “a poem of a new class,” one that included “[conversations & events” and “philosophical dreaming & digression.”1 She also wanted to purify George Gordon Byron‘s sexually contentious poetry, to write “a Don Juan,… Read More ›
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Gender Matters: The Women in Donne’s Poems
For Donne as for us, gender matters, deeply, passionately, disturbingly. Donne is constantly writing about women and gender roles, both explicitly and indirectly through analogy and metaphor. Yet unlike his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Donne rarely… Read More ›
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SET QUESTION PAPERS
To view Previous 9 Years Kerala State Eligibility Test Question Papers – 36 Subjects Click here www.lbscentre.info/set/questions.htm (PDF) To View SET English Question Papers, Click on the Hyperlink 2010 SET 2010 2011 SET 2011 2012 SET 2012 2013 SET 2013 2013 December 2013 dec 2015 June… Read More ›
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HSST 2017 Syllabus
Download PDF HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHER HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHER – ENGLISH (JUNIOR) HSST SYLLABUS PART I MODULE I – CHAUCER TO NEO CLASSICISM Poetry • Geoffrey Chaucer “The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales • Edmund Spenser “Prothalamion” • William Shakespeare… Read More ›
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UGC CBSE NET ENGLISH EXAM NOVEMBER 2017 ANSWER KEY
PAPER II ENGLISH CODE N03017 UGC CBSE NET ENGLISH EXAM NOVEMBER 2017 ANSWER KEY PAPER III ENGLISH CODE N03017 UGC CBSE NET ENGLISH EXAM NOVEMBER 2017 ANSWER KE1 All attempts have been made to prepare the answer key without errors. If… Read More ›
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Phenomenology
Phenomenology refers to a cluster of approaches to philosophical and sociological enquiry and to the study of art, deriving from the work of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). The diversity of approaches that have been described as phenomenology, not… Read More ›
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Gender Stereotype
The concept of a stereotype was introduced into social science in 1922, when Walter Lippman used it to describe the ‘typical picture’ that comes to mind when thinking about a particular social group (Macrae et al. 1996). A stereotype can… Read More ›
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Masculinity/ Masculinities
Masculinity is the set of social practices and cultural representations associated with being a man. The plural ‘masculinities’ is also used in recognition that ways of being a man and cultural representations of/about men vary, both historically and culturally, between… Read More ›
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Men’s Movements/ Men’s Studies
Men’s movements emerged at the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the groupings gathered together under this umbrella title were as heterogeneous as early radical feminist groups. In a sense they all seemed to be a reaction to… Read More ›
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Heterosexism
The word ‘heterosexism’ derives directly from the feminist creation of the term ‘sexism’ during the late 1960s. The first usage of the term heterosexism is given as 1979 by the Oxford English Dictionary and it is defined as ‘prejudice and… Read More ›
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Gender Order
The gender order is a patterned system of ideological and material practices, performed by individuals in a society, through which power relations between women and men are made, and remade, as meaningful. It is through the gender order of a… Read More ›
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Psycholinguistics: An Essay
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and the mind. This distinguishes it from sociolinguistics, on the one hand, where the focus is on the social dimension of language, and stylistics, on the other, where it is on the… Read More ›
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Assemblage and Asseblage Theory
“Assemblage” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to counter all claims to presence or center in favor of the many material ways that objects come together over time. As they explain in A Thousand Plateaus (1987),… Read More ›
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Third Wave Feminism
Third wave feminism has numerous definitions, but perhaps is best described in the most general terms as the feminism of a younger generation of women who acknowledge the legacy of second wave feminism, but also identify what they see as… Read More ›
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Second Wave Feminism
Second wave feminism is a term used to describe a new period of feminist collective political activism and militancy which emerged in the late 1960s. The concept of ‘waves’ of feminism was itself only applied in the late 1960s and… Read More ›
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First Wave Feminism
The historical development of feminism (especially in Britain and the USA) is commonly divided into several key periods, some characterised by a relative absence of feminist thought and mobilisation, and others by the sustained growth both of feminist criticism and… Read More ›
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Identity Politics/ the Politics of Identity
The utopian vision of ‘sisterhood’ – the collecting together of all women under the same political banner – was in part responsible for the burgeoning interest in feminism and the emergent Women’s Liberation Movement. It was inevitably going to come… Read More ›
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Post-Feminism: An Essay
It must first be stated that there is no agreement about how postfeminism can be defined and consequently definitions essentially contradict each other in what they say about the term. At its most straightforward, the prefix ‘post’ in this context… Read More ›
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Lesbian Continuum: A Brief Note
The ‘lesbian continuum’ was a phrase coined by Adrienne Rich in her pathfinding essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980, reprinted in Rich 1986). Rich’s notion of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ here extends the definition of lesbian beyond that of sexual identity… Read More ›
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The Other, The Big Other, and Othering
Critical theorists are particularly committed to opposing binary oppositions where one side is seen as privileged over or defining itself against an Other (often capitalized), for example, male/female, Occident/Orient, center/margin. Through such binary oppositions, Homi Bhabha explains, “The Other loses… Read More ›
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Postcolonial Magical Realism
The majority of magical realist writing can be described as postcolonial. That is to say much of it is set in a postcolonial context and written from a postcolonial perspective that challenges the assumptions of an authoritative colonialist attitude. As… Read More ›
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Introduction to Comics Studies
Although both film and comics in their currently recognized forms emerged in the nineteenth century, film acquired much earlier critical academic recognition, even though as early as the 1830s the comic strip began to distinguish itself from already established fields… Read More ›
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Introduction to Whiteness Studies
Whiteness studies investigates the parameters of white racial identity, locating its scope and function in systems of representation. This field of study takes as its founding premise the constructed nature of identity, a poststructuralist concept heralded by race theorists who… Read More ›
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Hegemony
Hegemony, initially a term referring to the dominance of one state within a confederation, is now generally understood to mean domination by consent. This broader meaning was coined and popularized in the 1930s by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who investigated… Read More ›
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Glocalization
First popularized in the English-speaking world by the British sociologist Roland Robertson in the 1990s, and later developed by Zygmunt Bauman, the term ‘glocal’ and the process noun ‘glocalization’ are formed by blending the words ‘global’ and ‘local’. Both terms… Read More ›
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Fanonism
A term for the anti-colonial liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Fanon’s work in Algeria led him to become actively involved in the Algerian liberation movement and to publish a number of foundational works on racism… Read More ›
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Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism has become an increasingly important field in both contemporary feminist and environmental studies. Although, as Diamond and Orenstein note, ecofeminism is really ‘a new term for an ancient wisdom’ (Mies and Shiva 1993: 13), it first came to prominence… Read More ›
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Decolonization
Decolonization is the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms. This includes dismantling the hidden aspects of those institutional and cultural forces that had maintained the colonialist power and that remain even after political independence is… Read More ›
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Paul Gilroy and His Theory of Black Atlantic
The term Black Atlantic was employed first by the Black British critic Paul Gilroy (Gilroy 1993). In that study, he addressed the cultural and historical linkages, which unified the peoples of African descent on both sides of the ocean that… Read More ›
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Binarism in Post-colonial Theory
From ‘binary’, meaning a combination of two things, a pair, ‘two’, duality (OED), this is a widely used term with distinctive meanings in several fields and one that has had particular sets of meanings in post-colonial theory. The concern with… Read More ›
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Appropriation in Post-colonialism
A term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those aspects of the imperial culture – language, forms of writing, film, theatre, even modes of thought and argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis – that… Read More ›