Ruth Robbins

Oscar Wilde's reputation has shifted dramatically during the twentieth century from outcast in the wake of his trials for homosexual offences, to martyr to the gay cause in the 1980s and '90s, to important figure in the history of writing in English. Ruth Robbins introduces Wilde through a focus on his manipulations of genre and sets Wilde's life and work in its literary and cultural context.

"Literary Feminisms provides a map for charting the difficult waters that feminist theories have created in literary studies. Ruth Robbins shows the reasons for the development of feminist literary critiques, explains the difficulties and exposes some of feminism's blindspots. A wide range of theorists is discussed from Wollstonecraft to Kristeva, showing the ways in which materialist, psychoanalytic and literary accounts of feminist thinking creatively intersect. Through a series of exemplary readings of texts such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gilman's The Yellow Wall-paper she also points out how the student reader can begin to make her or his own feminist criticism, and can learn to engage with both the politics and poetics of the literature." "'This is a lively, straightforward and highly accessible introduction to the varieties of feminist criticism which are found today. Robbins gives a brief and very useful overview of the history of recent feminist thought ... Particularly useful are the feminist readings she offers: exemplar of how to turn theory into practice. I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to my own students Robbins writes with confidence and clarity. She explains critical concepts lucidly: her aim is to enable not over-awe, her audience. Even a student sceptical about feminist theory would gain greatly from this work, and those who already believe themselves familiar with the field will be led to see familiar texts - both theoretical and literary - in fresh ways. Literary Feminisms provides an invaluable introduction to its field' - Kate Flint, Linacre College, Oxford."--Jacket.

The French Connections of Jacques Derrida offers stimulating and accessible essays that address, for the first time, the issue of Derrida's relation to French poetics, writing, thought, and culture. In addition to offering considerations of Derrida through studies of such significant French authors as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Valery, Laporte, Ponge, Perec, Blanchot, and Barthes, the book also reassesses the development of Derrida's work in the context of structuralism, biology, and linguistics in the 1960s, and looks at the possible relationships between Derrida's writing and that of the Surrealist and Oulipa groups. Derrida is introduced as one whose work is as much poetic as it is philosophical, and who is strikingly French and yet not unproblematically so.

"The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory offers the student of literary and cultural studies a comprehensive, single-volume guide to the history and development of criticism in the humanities as the twenty-first century opens. While emphasizing the theory and practice of literary and cultural criticism, it provides extensive coverage of related and contextual discourses, as well as critical overviews of the work and reception of major figures responsible, directly or indirectly, for the development of those discourses in the now-related areas of philosophy, poetics, politics, aesthetics, linguistics and psychoanalysis."--From the "Foreword."