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James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America.Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time.Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.

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A thoughtful and original analysis of the writings of influential French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.Gilles Deleuze is considered one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Eleanor Kaufman situates Deleuze in relation to others of his generation, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she engages the provocative readings of Deleuze by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.Deleuze, The Dark Precursor is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being. Kaufman argues that Deleuze's work is deeply concerned with these concepts, even when he advocates for the seemingly opposite notions of univocity, nonsense, and becoming. By drawing on scholastic thought and reading somewhat against the grain, Kaufman suggests that these often-maligned themes allow for a nuanced, even positive reflection on apparently negative states of being, such as extreme inertia. This attention to the negative or minor category has implications that extend beyond philosophy and into feminist theory, film, American studies, anthropology, and architecture.

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Do indigenous peoples have an unassailable right to the land they have worked and lived on, or are those rights conferred and protected only when a powerful political authority exists? In the tradition of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who vigorously debated the thorny concept of property rights, Sara L. Maurer here looks at the question as it applied to British ideas about Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century. This book connects the Victorian novel’s preoccupation with the landed estate to nineteenth-century debates about property, specifically as it played out in the English occupation of Ireland. Victorian writers were interested in the question of whether the Irish had rights to their land that could neither be bestowed nor taken away by England. In analyzing how these ideas were represented through a century of British and Irish fiction, journalism, and political theory, Maurer recovers the broad influence of Irish culture on the rest of the British Isles.By focusing on the ownership of land, The Dispossessed State challenges current scholarly tendencies to talk about Victorian property solely as a commodity. Maurer brings together canonical British novelists—Maria Edgeworth, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith—with the writings of major British political theorists—John Stuart Mill, Henry Sumner Maine, and William Gladstone—to illustrate Ireland’s central role in the literary imagination of Britain in the nineteenth century.The book addresses three key questions in Victorian studies—property, the state, and national identity—and will interest scholars of the period as well as those in Irish studies, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

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In this innovative study, Stephen Nimis applies the insights of semiotics to the analysis of the epic simile in works by Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Vergil, Dante, and Milton. Through close structural readings of the similes in these works, Nimis explores the ways texts relate to their narrative traditions and shows how changing cultural contexts produce different ways of conceiving and constructing meaning. He traces these transformations in the epic from the integrated warrior culture of the Iliad to the dissolution of the epic tradition in the cultural world of Milton's Paradise Lost.

Literary theory

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How might an understanding of semeiosis enrich our understanding and appreciation of the literary work? Micael Cabot Haley investigates the creative working of metaphor from the perspective of the semeiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. Haley bringes Peirce's sign theory, categories, philosophical realism, and objective idealism to bear upon metaphor, illustrating the role of figruative semeiosis as a creative principle of semantic growth in literature, language, and consciousness. The Peircean metaphor is shown to be a "metaicon," which appears in poetry as a perennially fresh srchetypal metaphor, generating a myriad of poetic diagrams and images. Peirce's central man-as-symbol metaphor is revealed as grounded in a symmetrical metaicon controlling and guiding abductive discovery of many kinds. Haley applies this Peircean scheme to actual literary uses of metaphor by such poets as William Shakespeare, John Keats, and T. S. Eliot, revealing in abundant detail just how Peircean conception works itself out in practice. Haley's clear-headed, perspicacious analysis takes a first step toward the founding of a Peircean semeiotic of figurative language.

Semiotics. --- Literary theory --- Literary theory