1st Edition

Literature and Theory Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys

Edited By Sk Sagir Ali Copyright 2022
    212 Pages
    by Routledge India

    212 Pages
    by Routledge India

    Literature and Theory is designed to assist students to apply key critical theories to literary texts. Focusing on representative works and authors widely taught across classrooms in the world – Joyce, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Beckett, Eliot, and Octavia Butler – it picks up different aspects of studying literature in an accessible format. The volume also brings together chapters that represent major modern literary schools of thought, including structuralism, poststructuralism, myth criticism, queer theory, feminism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction.

    This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and critical theory, as well as culture studies.

    Introduction – Literature and Theory: Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys

     

    Part I. Myth-Criticism

    1. Portrait of Mythical and Archetypal Colour: A Reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    Debaditya Mukhopadhyay

     

    Part II. Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

    2. Emily Dickinson’s ‘Nature’: A Poetic Metaphoricity and the Power of a Poststructuralist Hermeneutic

    Mausumi Guha Chatterjee

     

    3. Narrating the ‘New City/ies’: Urban Studies in Literature and Cityscapes in Graphic Novels

    Subashish Bhattacharjee

     

    4. “To Save the Tale from the Artist”: A Deconstructive Reading of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers

    Sankar Prasad Singha

     

    5. Orpheus’s Gaze and the Blanchotian Literature of the Unword: Locating the Ethical Finitudes of the Il y a in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

    Swayamdipta Das

     

    Part III. Psychoanalytic Criticism

    6. The Whore and the Virgin: Sexual Non-Rapport in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Dialectics of the Obsessional Subject

    Deeptesh Sen

     

    7. Truth in Literature: Lacan’s Joyce and the Question of Applied Psychoanalysis

    Dipanjan Maitra

     

    8. Re-writing the Psychotic Other of Author-Function in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake

    Arka Chattopadhyay

     

    Part IV. Queer Theory

    9. “He had beauty, though”: The Queerness of Ruskin Bond’s Delhi is not Far

    Niladri Ranjan Chatterjee

     

    Part V. Reader-Response Criticism

    10. The Problematic of Reading: The Intra-Textual Readers in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

    Mamata Sengupta

     

    Part VI. New Historicism

    11. Revisiting the Rushdiean “Peeling, Fragmenting Palimpsest” called Pakistan: A New Historicist-Feminist Approach

    Nasima Islam

     

    Part VII. Marxism

    12. Marxism and Literary Thought: A View

    Anand Prakash

     

    Part VIII. Postcolonialism

    13. “This is Not Knowledge; this is Vanity”: Phrenology and the Mimicry of Western Science in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

    Sakoon Singh

     

    Part IX. Cultural Study

    14. Politics of Purity and Pollution: A Study of Cultural Voyeurism in Kanthapura

    Sk Sagir Ali

     

    15. Abuse, Coercion, and Power in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”

    Shiladitya Sen

     

    Part X. Translation Study

    16. Intermediality and Translation: Pedagogical Possibilities

    Tutun Mukherjee

    Biography

    Sk Sagir Ali is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Midnapore College (Autonomous), West Bengal, India. His published works include the edited book Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance Margins and Extremism (Routledge) and the monograph, Culture, Community and Difference in Select Contemporary British Muslim Fictions (forthcoming, Routledge).