What is the importance of deconstruction, and the writing of Jacques Derrida in particular, for literary criticism today? Derek Attridge argues we still haven’t discovered Derrida’s true value for our…

First published in 1988, Peculiar Language this book challenges traditional notions of literary criticism, arguing that all attempts by writers, critics and literary theorists to define the language of literature…

Nobel prize winning novelist, Coetzee is one of the most widely taught contemporary writers, but also one of the most elusive.

An account of the performance of poetry from late Antiquity to the Renaissance that explores the role and importance of poetry in western culture.

During the final years of the apartheid era and the subsequent transition to democracy, South African literary writing caught the world’s attention as never before. This book examines that literary…

If ‘event’ is a proper name we reserve for monumental changes, crises, transitions and ruptures that are by their very nature unnameable or unthinkable, then this volume is an attempt…

This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call dialogical poetics. This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like…

This collection of essays is unique in focusing on this central debate in literary studies today: the relation between post-structuralist and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism.