Jonathan Culler

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today. In particular, the book describes the many projects, which Barthes explored and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena--from literature, fashion, wrestling, and advertising to notions of the self, of history, and of nature.

Benedict Anderson is best known for his book 'Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism'. This volume includes essays on Anderson's themes and ideas by such scholars as Andrew Parker, Lydia Liu, Doris Sommer, Harry Harootunian, Partha Chatterjee and Marc Redfield.

This classic work covers all of the major movements in literary studies in this century. Noted for its clear, engaging style and unpretentious treatment, Literary Theory has become the introduction of choice for anyone interested in learning about the world of contemporary literary thought.

Examining ancient as well as modern poems in many European languages, Culler underscores lyric's surprising continuities across centuries of change--its rhythmical resources, its strange modes of address, its use of the present tense, and the intriguing tension between its ritualistic and fictional dimensions.

Explores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm?s role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre. This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism?s most important, most vested, and perhaps least well-defined or definable terms. Rhythm in these essays is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. It is a key term through which Romantic, Modern, and contemporary literary theory define form, either in conversation with or opposition to meter. It has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice if not identity as such.