Theory / Culture

In this wide-ranging study, José Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures—French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian—testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. 

O’Neill investigates the extent to which narrative discourse subverts the story it tells in foregrounding its own performance.

A sophisticated analysis of Canadian literary writing and its role in national culture that 'worries' over the possibility of a national literature when the very idea of the nation as a viable conceptual/literary category has been called into question.

Examines the representation of masculinities in the work of some of Canada’s most exciting writers, including Michael Ondaatje, and Rohinton Mistry, to show how cross-cultural migration disrupts assumed codes for masculine behaviour and practice.

An important interdisciplinary study, that establishes a general theory that accounts for the varieties of body language encountered in literary narrative, based on a general history of the phenomenon in the English language.

Valdés gives his views of literature, cinema, and art to unravel what he calls, 'the imaginative configuration of the world, the cultural phenomenon of making sense, poetic sense, of life.'

O’Neill applies the principles of structuralist and poststructuralist narratology to a selection of narratives from both modernist and postmodernist German authors: Mann, Kafka, and Hesse, and Canetti, Grass, Johnson, Handke, and Bernhard.

McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse thus aims to retrace and synthesize McLuhan's work in order to illuminate his unexpected meaning and value for critical practice today.

Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years.

This anthology can be seen as a case-study, providing both a historical account of the outcome of the National Gallery's purchase of the painting and an understanding of why the gallery's actions provoked such strong opinions and feelings.

Nonsense both inhabits and challenges traditional forms simultaneously; in Touch Monkeys Parsons enters into the spirit of the genre.

Using historical and feminist psycho-linguistic studies as a base, Ty explores some of the complexities encountered in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith

Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars.