" . . . the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." -Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism " . . . draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship . . . raises many fascinating questions." -Language in Society " . . . a major contribution to the field of semiotic studies." -Robert Scholes, Journal of Aesthetics and Art...

Desire in Language presents a selection of Julia Kristeva's essays that trace the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. Probing beyond the claims of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and

How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he was also professor of English at Victoria College. His books include Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton). David Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature and director of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. A landmark work of literary criticism Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism...

The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms-such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"-have become...

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the considerable response and commentary the book has,...

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites--supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums--that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social...