The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies.Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from “past/future” and “anticipation/unexpected” to “extinction/adaptation” and “serial/simultaneous.” Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time―not space, as the postmoderns had it―is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live.

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Product Description: Toni Morrison's 1987 tale of Sethe, an escaped slave living in Cincinnati and struggling to overcome her past, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 along with instant international acclaim. Several essays in this volume study major themes of Beloved, including motherhood, the psychological impacts of slavery, and repression of memory, as well as connections to the real-life slave who inspired Morrison's story...read more

Product Description: Considered one of the greatest films of the twentieth century, Casablanca earned three Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and instant critical and commercial success following its release in 1942. This inaugural volume in the Critical Insights Film series contains insightful essays analyzing the reasons for this film classic's acclaim, as well as its influences on the film industry as we know it today...read more

Product Description: This charming classic of film literature was originally published in 1914 and hence represents an early attempt to catalogue the allure of cinema and how the motion picture industry began. This tale of life in the early days of cinema will be of interest to film historians and anyone interested in that period of history...read more

Phallic Critiques, first published in 1984, is a study of ‘masculine’ styles of writing in the twentieth century – an age, according to Virginia Woolf, when ‘virility has become self-conscious’. Writers who carry macho values to their extreme often subscribe to the popular feeling that writing is an effeminate activity for a real man to be engaged in. Consequently they attempt to forge ‘masculine’ style of writing in an effort to redeem language from its sexually suspect nature. These styles reveal much about the ambiguous and paradoxical attitudes of men towards their own masculine role. Peter Schwenger demonstrates the international nature of ‘masculine’ styles. His study ranges from such American authors as Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Philip Roth, to figures like Yukio Mishima, Alberto Moravia and Michel Leiris. This book should be of interest to students of literature.

Product Description: This book, first published in 1962, is a collection of twenty-four essays written by Frank Kermode between 1958 and early 1961, and are all concerned with criticism and fiction. Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 includes essays on the works of James Joyce, William Golding, E...read more

This collection of seventeen original essays by leading authorities offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the significant authors and important aspects of fifteenth-century English poetry. The major poets of the century, John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, receive detailed analysis, alongside perhaps lesser-known authors: John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenham, Peter Idley, George Ashby and John Audelay. In addition, several essays examine genres and topics, including romance, popular, historical and scientific poetry, and translations from the classics. Other chapters investigate the crucial contexts for approaching poetry of this period: manuscript circulation, patronage and the influence of Chaucer. Julia Boffey is Professor of Medieval Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; A.S.G. Edwards is Professor of Medieval Manuscripts at the University of Kent. Contributors: Anthony Bale, Julia Boffey, A.S.G. Edwards, Susanna Fein, Alfred Hiatt, Simon Horobin, Sarah James, Andrew King, Sheila Lindenbaum, Joanna Martin, Carol Meale, Robert Meyer-Lee, Ad Putter, John Scattergood, Anke Timmermann, Daniel Wakelin, David Watt.

Product Description: This user-friendly resource is the perfect reference for English-language readers who are eager to explore fiction from around the world. Profiling hundreds of titles and authors from 1945 to today, with an emphasis on fiction published in the past two decades, this guide introduces the styles, trends, and genres of the world's literatures, from Scandinavian crime thrillers and cutting-edge Chinese works to Latin American narco-fiction and award-winning French novels...read more