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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Cinema and psychoanalysis were born around the same time. In 1895 the Grand Café of Paris hosted the first movie event of history, while at the same time Studies in Hysteria by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud hit the shelves… Read More ›
In attempting to set itself up as ‘a genre of theoretical writing’ (Frow, 1997, 15), diaspora criticism takes as its object a thing called ‘diaspora’. The viability of the critical genre, it follows, rests on defining and delimiting the object… Read More ›
It would be difficult to claim that there is such a thing as a ‘school’ or even emerging tradition of ‘spectral criticism’. Rather, what use of the term might seek to bring together would be a series of images and… Read More ›
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. As You Like It (II. vii…. Read More ›
John Hawkes once divulged that when he began to write he assumed that “the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme”. Certainly many subsequent authors have done their best to sledgehammer these four literary cornerstones into… Read More ›
Many postmodernist writers disrupt the smooth production and reception of texts by welcoming chance into the compositional process. The infamous The Unfortunates (1969) by B. S.Johnson, for instance, is a novel-in-a-box which instructs the reader to riffle several loose-leaf chapters… Read More ›
Paranoia, or the threat of total engulfment by somebody else’s system, is keenly felt by many of the dramatis personae of postmodernist fiction. It is tempting to speculate that this is an indirect mimetic representation of the climate of fear… Read More ›
Postmodern cinema ironically has a history now. In 1984, Fredric Jameson observed that contemporary culture seemed to be expressing a new form of ‘depthlessness‘ – a concentration on style and ‘surface’. For Jameson these features represented a retreat from the… Read More ›
Cyberculture: cyberspace, technoculture, virtual communities, virtual realities, virtual identities, virtual space, cyborgs, cybernetics, cyberbodies, spectacles, simulations, simulacra and so forth. Cyberculture exists within the globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed and/or computer-generated multidimensional virtual realities. Originally existing in the pages of science… Read More ›
Chaos theory and complexity theory challenge some of our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality. The former claims that natural systems (for example, the weather) are controlled by mysterious forces, called ‘strange attractors‘, such that they are… Read More ›
Anthropological criticism refers, broadly speaking, to a form of criticism that situates the making, dissemination and reception of literature within the conventions and cultural practices of human societies. Such an undertaking has become increasingly suspect in the twentieth century as… Read More ›
Although Sigmund Freud himself inaugurated this field of study, he subsequently abandoned it. Early in his career, he assumed that a history of sexual seduction in childhood was responsible for the neurotic symptoms he observed in his patients. Gradually, however,… Read More ›
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), English poet, literary critic, and essayist, perceived reformative tendencies accompanying the burgeoning development of industrial society in nineteenth-century England that threatened the wavering hegemonic apparatus of secular and ecclesiastical order, and hindered the appreciation and expression of… Read More ›
German born (although naturalised American) political philosopher, who contributed significantly to the analysis of totalitarianism, and the fate of Jewry in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is perhaps best known for a single utterance, her response to the Nazi… Read More ›
German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist who was a leading member (and eventually director) of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (the institutional basis of the Frankfurt School of German critical theory), Theodor Adorno’s (1903-1969) work may be understood as an… Read More ›
German-born sociologist, who held academic posts in Germany, the United Kingdom, Ghana and the Netherlands, Norbert Elias‘s (1897-1990) approach to sociological inquiry is characterised by the use of highly detailed historical study, so that even theoretical questions are addressed in… Read More ›
Clifford Geertz’s (1926- 2006) work defined the field of interpretive social science, and he is regarded as one of the most influential and widely cited American cultural anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century. He has championed interpretative approaches to… Read More ›
Anthony Giddens (1938- ) is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists, the author of at least… Read More ›
Raymond Williams (1921-1988), Welsh cultural critic, who was a major forerunner of contemporary Cultural Studies. Books such as Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) served to map out much that is now taken as the basic… Read More ›
Austrian-born philosopher. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) originally studied engineering. In 1912, he went to Cambridge and became a student of one of the founders of the analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell (1872—1970). Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army during the First World… Read More ›
A German philosopher and sociologist, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is frequently cited as one of the founders of sociology. His work is at times impressionistic, covering a wide range of issues and ideas. His most consistent and rigorous development of a… Read More ›
French philosopher, novelist and playwright, who was in many respects the model of a politically engaged intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was offered, but refused, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 . An indication of the esteem in which he was… Read More ›
American literary critic, postcolonial theorist and political commentator who was born in the Middle East. In 1963 Edward Said (1935- 2003) was made Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at Columbia University, New York, where he has remained to… Read More ›
British social theorist, who through a profound reading of Hegel sought to navigate between the excesses and dangers of modernist absolutism and postmodernist relativism, Gillian Rose‘s (1947-1995) work draws upon philosophy (not least in a close knowledge of the German tradition),… Read More ›
Although trained within the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition, Richard Rorty (1931-2007) espouses an approach to philosophy that is generally referred to as ‘neo-pragmatist’. Rorty draws heavily on the works of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey, and also displays an… Read More ›
John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American philosopher, whose defence of liberalism was responsible for the revitalisation of English-language political philosophy from the late 1960s onwards. His philosophy, presented in A Theory of Justice (1972), draws its inspiration in large part… Read More ›
Prior to Karl Popper (1902-1994), the philosophers of science had generally sought to explain how scientific theories could be proven to be true. Popper, building upon the doubts expressed in the eighteenth century by David Hume, rejected the possibility of… Read More ›
American sociologist who, as the principal exponent of what is known as structural functionalism, exerted a major influence over social theory in the middle part of the twentieth century. Parsons Talcott‘s (1902-1979), work continues to have an impact in German sociology,… Read More ›
British philosopher and political theorist. Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) read for a history degree at Cambridge, but while doing so took courses in philosophy and political theory. In the 1920s he visited Germany, where he attended lectures in theology at Marburg… Read More ›
English philosopher, social critic, political economist, civil servant and liberal. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was educated by his father. As Mill notes in his Autobiography, the latter handled his son’s education by introducing him to a wide range of very… Read More ›
French philosopher and psychologist, who developed an approach to phenomenology that centred upon the embodied nature of human existence, Merleau-Ponty’s (1907-1961) work encompasses psychology (1963) and the attempt to articulate a humanist Marxism (1964a, 1973a) as well as the philosophies… Read More ›
A French philosopher of the post-structuralist school, Jean Francois Lyotard (1925-1998) is perhaps best known for his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). In that work, Lyotard attempted to define the principle aspects of postmodernity in the wake… Read More ›
The Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Gyorgy (or Georg) Lukacs (1885-1971) had a major influence on the development of Western Marxism (that is to say, the largely Hegelian Marxism developed in Western Europe), while also being the most sophisticated literary… Read More ›
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967) and Margins of Philosophy (1972). Derrida’s name is inextricably linked with the term ‘deconstruction‘. Largely because… Read More ›
American linguist, whose work was fundamental to the development of modern approaches to the study of language. In addition to his research in linguistics he has a sustained role in political activism and reflection, and has written copiously from an… Read More ›
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) French sociologist, regarded as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. His early work developed a theory of society as a transcendent reality that constrained individuals, and proposed the methodology necessary to study that reality. His work… Read More ›
Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was an Economist, Psychoanalyst, Philosopher and social thinker, a founding and leading member of the French revolutionary journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, and author of numerous books and articles. In his The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis (1987)… Read More ›
French cultural anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), whose work, characterised as it is by an equal commitment to empirical as well as theoretical research, has embraced the ethnography of Algerian peasant communities (Bourdieu 1979), the sociology of culture (1977b, 1990) and… Read More ›
German Marxist philosopher, whose interest in Utopian thought has perhaps had as much, if not more, influence on theology (Moltmann 1967) than on philosophy or cultural theory. It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to suggest that Ernst Bloch’s (1885-1977)… Read More ›