bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
S
trode,
W
illiam
Authors: Major Philip
Published: May 2017

William Strode (?1601–45) was a poet, playwright, and priest whose critical profile is enjoying a mini‐revival following three centuries of comparative neglect. Born in Devon, Strode was educated at Westminster School. In 1617 he entered Christ Church, Oxford and was appointed both proctor and public orator of the university in 1629. His recent part‐rehabilitation coincides with a modern scholarly stress on the significance, even centrality, of the circulation of manuscript verse miscellanies in seventeenth‐century English literary circles. Anthologies of this kind were a key vehicle for Strode's poetry, which comprises elegies, epistles, ballads, songs, devotional pieces, and answer poems in English and Latin, and which found particular favour at Oxford during the 1620s.
S
utcliffe,
A
lice
Authors: Stretter Robert
Published: May 2017

Alice Sutcliffe (
fl
. 1624–34) published only one known work, a religious treatise entitled
Meditations of man's mortalitie. Or a way to true blessedness
. Entered into the Stationers' Register in January 1633, the
Meditations
appeared in a second, ‘enlarged’ edition in 1634, consisting of a six‐part prose treatise followed by a long poem of 88 six‐line pentameter stanzas (
ababcc
). Since no copies of the first edition survive, the nature of the enlargement is unclear, but it may refer to the commendatory poems from such notables as Ben Jonson, Thomas May, George Wither, and Francis Lenton, and possibly to the long poem itself, which is not mentioned by the title page or the table of contents. The book's dedications to Katherine Villiers, duchess of Buckingham, her sister‐in‐law Susan Feilding, countess of Denbigh, and Philip Herbert, earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, link Sutcliffe to the court of Charles I (1625–49), as does the title page's identification of the author as ‘the wife of John Sutcliffe, Esquire, Groome of his Majesties most Honourable Privie Chamber’.
T
otney,
T
homas
Authors: Hessayon Ariel
Published: May 2017

Writing under the prophetic names Theaur‐auJohn Tany and Theauroam Tannijahhh, Thomas Totney (1608–59) was the author of a number of remarkable but elusive works that are unlike anything else in the English language. He was baptized on 21 January 1608 in the parish of South Hykeham, Lincolnshire. Nothing is known of his education, though he was bound as an apprentice at London in April 1626, learning the trade of a goldsmith. Between 1634 and 1638 Totney lived near Aldgate in St Katherine Cree‐church, a location favoured by small retailers for its inexpensive rents. Upon his father's death in 1638 he went to Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire to manage the family farm. In the summer of 1640, probably while serving as one of the parish's petty constables, he played an important part in resisting the collection of ship money. A series of payments in 1642 show his support for those opposed to Charles I. Moreover, he claims to have witnessed one of Captain Oliver Cromwell's orations, delivered at Huntingdon to newly mustered volunteers. Evidence suggests that Totney served as a harquebusier during the first English Civil War, before resuming his duties in December 1644 as a dedicated if insignificant local tax official at the bottom of the administrative pyramid erected by the Long Parliament.
V
aughan,
H
enry
Authors: Sullivan Ceri
Published: May 2017

Best known for his vision of the traces of God's presence in nature, Henry Vaughan (1621–95) was a devotional poet of the mid‐seventeenth century. He and his family were vigorously engaged on the Royalist side in the Civil War. There is currently a scholarly argument about whether his work should be seen in this context, or whether it is primarily concerned with the apprehension of an immanent God. Both readings are possible and only mutually exclusive if God is seen, in ‘weaker’ twentieth‐century terms, to have withdrawn from human history into a concern with the solitary soul – though the rising influence of fundamentalism in the new millennium may alter this rabbit/duck dichotomy.
Verse Miscellanies, Manuscript
Authors: Eckhardt Joshua
Published: May 2017

A manuscript verse miscellany is simply a handwritten poetry anthology. Its name,
miscellany
, designates its contents as ‘miscellaneous’, because the volume's contents originated from more than one poet, or because the volume contains texts in multiple genres (including some in prose), or texts on multiple subjects. Miscellanies therefore exhibit diversity, as opposed to the uniformity of a manuscript of a single author's works, especially works in a single genre or series. Despite a long‐standing confusion of terms, verse miscellanies distinguish themselves from ‘commonplace books’, which feature transcribed extracts from texts, ideally organized under alphabetical subject headings.
V
erstegan,
R
ichard
Authors: Monta Susannah Brietz
Published: May 2017

The polyglot writer Richard Verstegan (1548/50–1640) was a poet, translator, printer, journalist, propagandist, intelligencer, and antiquarian. A Catholic who lived most of his life in exile from England, he revealed in his writings the era's religious conflicts as well as the international dimension of contemporary literary and religious cultures.
W
alton,
I
zaak
Authors: de Groot Jerome
Published: May 2017

Izaak Walton (1593–1683) is one of the most famous of all writers on leisure and sport, an author whose tract on angling is both charming and political, and which helped to sustain the caricature of the ‘Cavalier’ for several centuries. Born in Stafford in 1593, Walton was apprenticed to an ironmonger in London and went on to open his own shop on Fleet Street. He became friendly with John Donne, who was vicar of this parish, and through Donne became involved with Ben Jonson's literary and intellectual circle. By 1640 Walton's wife Rachael and all seven of their children had died; he remarried in 1646. In 1653 he published
The compleat angler or, the contemplative man's recreation
. This book, immensely popular ever since its publication, has ensured that Walton is associated with a particularly English sense of the countryside. Walton was also one of the foremost practitioners of literary biography England has produced: his example was to be the model followed by many after him, including James Boswell and Samuel Johnson. After 1662, when his second wife died, Walton lived at Farnham Castle, home of George Morley, bishop of Winchester, and he died in Winchester aged 90 in 1683. His close friend Charles Cotton added a second part to the fifth edition (1676) of
The compleat angler
.
W
atson,
T
homas
Authors: Hamrick Stephen
Published: May 2017

Chiefly remembered as the duelling defender of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Watson (1555/6–92) enjoyed a contemporary reputation as a poet, translator, and playwright. Considered one of the best Latin poets of the period, Watson also helped entertain Queen Elizabeth at Elvetham in Hampshire. Engaged in literature, translation, music, and government service, Watson markedly advanced the art of both the sonnet sequence and the madrigal, writing as an accomplished neoclassical humanist.
W
eston,
E
lizabeth
J
ane
Authors: Hosington Brenda M.
Published: May 2017

The English poet Elizabeth Jane Weston (1581–1612), known throughout the neo‐Latin republic of letters as ‘Westonia’, enjoyed a reputation as a talented and learned composer of Latin poetry. She was also an avid correspondent with a wide circle of men of letters, including German poet laureate Paul Melissus, who bestowed upon her a laurel wreath, and the Dutch poet and humanist scholar Jan Dousa. In England, she was praised by John Stradling in his 1607
Epigrammatum libri quatuor
and was the only woman to be included in Thomas Farnaby's 1634
Index poeticus
.
W
hitney,
G
eoffrey
Authors: Sullivan Garrett A.
Published: May 2017

The poet Geoffrey Whitney (?1548–1600/1) was author of A
choice of emblemes, and other devises
(1586), a significant English contribution to the emblem tradition inaugurated on the Continent by Andrea Alciato. Whitney was most probably born near Nantwich, Chesire, the son of minor gentry. He had at least five siblings, one of whom has been identified as the poet Isabella Whitney, although the relation is not certain. Whitney went to Audlam School near Nantwich, then continued his studies first at Oxford, then at Magdalene College, Cambridge, without ever taking a degree. From 1580 to 1586 Whitney served as under‐bailiff of Great Yarmouth. During this time, he secured the patronage of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, who was high steward of Great Yarmouth at that time. In late 1585, Whitney presented Leicester with a manuscript emblem book (now in Harvard University's Houghton Library, MS. Typ 14) that he might ‘looke vppon at some houres for [his] recreation’. This emblem book would serve as the basis for
A choice of emblemes
. In early 1586, Whitney visited Leiden, returning again later in the year to become a student at the university. It was in that same year that, partly at Leicester's urging, Whitney decided to print
A choice of emblemes
. Dedicated to Leicester, and featuring a coat of arms bearing the Dudley family motto ‘Droit et Loyal’ (‘Just and Loyal’), the volume was published at the Plantin press in Leiden.
W
hittinton,
R
obert
Authors: Knight Sarah
Published: May 2017

Robert Whittinton (Whittington) (c.1480–c.1553), a leading Tudor educational writer, was probably born in Lichfield, Staffordshire around 1480. He was taught by John Stanbridge, most likely at Lichfield College School. He was ordained as a priest in 1504. While embarking on his ecclesiastical career Whittinton also became interested in rhetoric and pedagogy, and he began a school‐teaching career in 1501.
W
roth,
M
ary
Authors: Sanchez Melissa E.
Published: May 2017

Mary Wroth (c.1587–1651/53) was the first English woman to publish an original prose romance and secular sonnet sequence, and the first English woman to write a pastoral tragicomedy. Her work has been important to scholars studying early modern women's writing, the history of gender and sexuality, and early modern culture and politics.
Alienation
Authors: Luk Sharon
Published: May 2017

The concept of alienation has two meanings in cultural theory. It refers to the way human productive activity is converted into objects or things in the capitalist production process with the result that the products of human labor belong not to the producers but to the owners of the means of production. The products of human labor are thus “alienated” from the producers and converted into private property, by which Karl Marx meant property that belongs to the owners of capital rather than to the collective public made up of productive workers who actually make that property. Alienation is the taking away of the product of labor from its producer. As a consequence, the products of creative human labor come to appear to be things or objects that exist independently of such labor. Human creative activity is thereby alienated from its source; its products cease to belong to the producers or workers who made them and become the property of capitalists. Commodities as a result appear to have no connection to human life or social relations. According to Marx, “private property” consists of the theft of the product of labor from workers and its conversion into the private wealth of the owners of capital.
Archetypal Criticism
Authors: Chirila Alexander
Published: May 2017

Archetypal criticism is a form of analysis based on the identification and study of recurring symbolic and mythic patterns. Although most commonly associated with the analysis of literature, art, and popular culture, archetypal criticism was originally employed in the discipline of anthropology by Sir James George Frazer in a compilation entitled
The Golden Bough
. First published in 1890, Frazer's seminal work comprised 12 volumes of extensive research into the myths, beliefs, and practices of various cultures and peoples. Nearly two decades later, C. G. Jung would pioneer analytical psychology, based on the hypothesis that inherited psychical images influenced human consciousness on a personal and collective scale. His work brought archetypal analysis into the realm of psychoanalysis, a field developed by Sigmund Freud during the turn of the century. For many years thereafter, Jung's work would continue to gain acclaim, and even today remains active in modified form. Archetypal criticism moved into the sphere of literary analysis following Maud Bodkin's groundbreaking
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry
(1934).
Base/Superstructure
Authors: Needham Tara
Published: May 2017

The concept of base/superstructure, which first appears in Karl Marx's
A Preface to The Critique of Political Economy
(1859), models the relationship between economic and productive forces in society and legal, cultural, educational, religious, and political forces. Because individuals must meet their material needs before anything else, and because they accomplish this in association with other people, these relations form the foundation – or base – of society on which all other forms of life – the superstructure – are built. The base/superstructure model is a cornerstone of Marx and Engels's materialist philosophy, which claims that social relations determine consciousness, in contradistinction to Hegelian idealism, which privileges immaterial and transcendent concepts such as Thought and Spirit as the driving forces of human civilization. Despite tremendous variation and debate regarding what actually constitutes the categories base and superstructure and the nature of their interaction, most Marxist thinkers agree that cultural analysis must adhere to a historicist methodology, a necessity famously summed up by Fredric Jameson's imperative, in
The Political Unconscious
: “Always historicize!” (Jameson 1981: 9). The base/superstructure model is part of a method that rejects any purely formal critique. Instead, culture, as an element of the superstructure, must be understood in relation to the material conditions of its production, distribution, and consumption, as well as its engagement with the social relations of production.
B
ataille,
G
eorges
Authors: Kaposy Tim
Published: May 2017

Georges Bataille (1897–1962), novelist and critic, flourished in Parisian intellectual circles in the period between World Wars I and II. Known for his erudite approach to eroticism and his iconoclastic writing style, Bataille focused his attention on a wide variety of themes and problems in anthropology, philosophy, literature, sociology, and economics. Although he was involved in contemporary literary and political groups in Paris throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, his writings did not have the kind of impact they would have on poststructuralists in the 1960s and ‘70s. He was in this sense an intellectual heir of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose own writings were not fully appreciated until after his death. In many ways critical of the French avantgarde in his lifetime, Bataille nevertheless managed posthumously to redefine it through his influence on writers like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva.
Burke,Kenneth
Authors: Mcgowan John
Published: May 2017

Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) was an American polymath whose work offered an alternative to the new criticism by focusing on the pragmatic ways that literature serves as “equipment for living.” His resolute refusal to understand the literary as a distinctive use of language or literary criticism as a discipline separate from wider sociological analyzes anticipated the move away from formalism and a return to context characteristic of literary theory in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Constellation
Authors: Cerniglia David
Published: May 2017

“Constellation” is a term generally used in philosophy and in literary and cultural studies to express the relationship between ideas or concepts and objects, especially the way in which the object retains its particularity in resistance to the universalizing tendencies of the idea or concept. It is most commonly associated with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and other critical theorists in the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (the Frankfurt School). Benjamin and Adorno use the term in slightly different ways, but in both cases a constellation involves various elements in array or juxtaposition, rather than in a ranked or se‐quenced order. In this way, the critic better understands the various relationships among the individual elements or the elements taken as a group.
Defamiliarization
Authors: Pangborn Matthew H.
Published: May 2017

“Defamiliarization” is the most common English translation of the Russian
astrane‐niye
, the term given by Viktor Shklovsky to describe the essentially estranging purpose and effect of art. The term (sometimes translated as “estrangement”) was first introduced in 1917, in the article “Iskusstvo, kak priyom” (“Art as technique,” or “Art as device”), in the journal
Sborniki po teorii poeticheskovo yazyka
(Studies in the Theory of Poetic Language). Defamiliarization, which quickly became a key concept for formalist literary criticism, works by making everyday objects unfamiliar and thus recovering for the audience “the sensations of life” (Shklovsky 1965[1917]: 12). Shklovsky, widely viewed as the founder of Russian formalism, identifies defamiliarization as the artistic technique able, in his famous example, “to make the stone
stony”
(12).
Determination
Authors: Kim Koonyong
Published: May 2017

Determination refers to the idea that a certain event or phenomenon is caused or conditioned by external or internal laws and processes. Closely related to other concepts such as causality, condition of possibility, and the setting of limits, determination has garnered a good deal of critical attention in philosophy, religion, sociology, and other disciplines. In contemporary literary and cultural theory, however, the most useful context is the Marxian tradition of cultural materialism.
Fanon, Frantz
Authors: El Hamel Chouki
Published: May 2017

Frantz Fanon (1925 – 61) was one of the most influential theorists in postcolonial studies. In his short life, he combined political activism, an interest in race and race relations, and training as a psychiatrist to produce foundational works that described the psychology of colonialism as well as the politics of anticolonial resistance. His influence is hard to overestimate: his writings were central to the political struggle that sparked the Algerian war in the early 1950s, when French colonial power was challenged decisively by native Algerians, but they were also vitally important to the Black Power movement in the US in the 1960s. Fanon's message – when all else fails, violent revolution against oppression is the only option left open to colonized people – resonated at a time when European empires were, quite literally, falling apart as colonial territories fought for and achieved postcolonial independence. It is for this reason that Henry Louis Gates regards him as “a global theorist” (1991: 457) and Edward Said calls him a “true prophetic genius” (1994: 272). However, when his work was first published, its “worldly” aspect was underscored by European intellectuals like Jean‐Paul Sartre, who insisted that Fanon's work and the message it conveys was crucial for Europeans to read and acknowledge. Of Fanon's most influential work,
The Wretched of the Earth
, Sartre wrote, “Europeans, open this book, look inside…. Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling” (2004 [1963]: xlviii‐xlix).
Form
Authors: Petrov Petre
Published: May 2017

The concept of literary or artistic form has been evoked in a bewildering number of contexts, prominently in the works of Russian formalists. The name of this critical movement is a sufficient indication that “form” occupies a central place on its agenda. Yet this centrality is not tantamount to a single or unambiguous understanding on the part of the Russian formalists as to the nature of literary form. In fact, they often avoided providing any definitive meaning of the term, preferring terminology less burdened with prior significations and thus less susceptible to ambiguity. The formalist notion of form developed not so much as the result of explicit definitions, but as the corollary of concrete attempts to grasp and analyze the elusive artistic nature of texts. This, more than anything else, was the pursuit that shaped and distinguished the formalist movement. One of its members, Boris Eikhenbaum (1965 [1925]), noted that the question ofform eventually became synonymous with the question of literature, of what constitutes a “literary fact.” As the movement evolved, the formalists’ understanding of what makes literature a distinct and special realm of human practice developed new levels of complexity, as did the conception of literary form.
Frye,Northrop
Authors: Wills Jenny
Published: May 2017

Northrop Frye (1912 – 91) is one of Canada's best‐known literary theorists and is responsible for reinventing the way many scholars think about literary criticism. Frye employs the methods of archetypal criticism and genre theory, especially in his most noted work,Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays(1957), in which he devises a complex, multidimensional theory of literary criticism. Known for championing literary criticism as an autonomous and valuable field of analysis, Frye's writings have influenced a number of critics, including Harold Bloom and the historian Hayden White. Like his contemporary, Joseph Campbell, Frye believed that literature functioned in archetypal fashion and that the nature and value of humanity could be understood more clearly by reading literary texts in terms of their necessary and organic connection to specific historical epochs.
G
reimas,
A. J.
Authors: Perron Paul
Published: May 2017

Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917 – 92), long recognized as the leading authority in structural semiotics, was born in Tula, Russia, in 1917 and studied law in Kaunas (Lithuania) before enrolling for an undergraduate degree at the University of Grenoble (France) from 1936 to 1939, where he studied French medieval language and literature, specializing in Franco‐Provenpal dialectology. At the end of his studies in prewar France, he returned to Lithuania for his military service. His country was invaded, successively by the Soviets and the Germans before being reoccupied by the Soviets in 1944. At that time, he escaped to France, enrolled for a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris under Georges Matore and defended his
doctorat d'etat
with his primary thesis on fashion in France in 1830, a lexicographical study of the vocabulary of dress according to the journals of the time, and a secondary thesis on various aspects of social life in 1830 based on a synchronic model of analysis, where language is considered as a system at a given moment in time.
H
eidegger,
M
artin
Authors: Fenves Peter
Published: May 2017

Among the two or three most influential German‐speaking philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) played a decisive role in the development of phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, and deconstruction. After completing a dissertation on speculative grammar in late scholasticism, Heidegger came into contact with the originator of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, whom he assisted for several years. In the 1920s, as a young professor in Marburg, with few publications to his credit, his magisterial teaching style attracted an impressive group of students, including Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. In Marburg he also prepared the work for which he would henceforth be known,
Being and Time
. Immediately hailed as a landmark, it remains Heidegger's pivotal work. Although the direction of his inquiry changed in the ensuing decades, these alterations cannot be understood without an appreciation of what he tried to accomplish in his first major work. As it stands,
Being and Time
is a fragment; a second part was to be written under the title “Time and Being,” and a third part would complete the “destruction” (i.e., dismantling or deconstruction) of the Western philosophical tradition. Upon the publication of
Being and Time
in 1927, Heidegger moved to Freiburg, where he began to doubt that his initial conception of the project could be sustained.
Hermeneutics
Authors: Armstrong Paul B.
Published: May 2017

Hermeneutics is the study of the theory and practice of interpretation. It is closely related to semiotics, the theory of signs. There is a problem for interpretation, it is said, whenever there is the possibility of misinterpretation, and this is the case every time signs are used. Hermeneutics has traditionally been of special interest in such fields as biblical and legal interpretation, where the stakes are high in determining which of various competing meanings to regard as correct. Renewed attention has come to be paid to hermeneutics as many different movements in modern philosophy have recognized that problems of language and communication are central to understanding human life. In contemporary literary theory, questions about how to adjudicate the conflicts between opposing critical methodologies, along with controversies about how to understand language and signification, have also made hermeneutics a prominent concern.
L
évi‐
S
trauss,
C
laude
Authors: Dye Dotty
Published: May 2017

Claude Lévi‐Strauss (1908 – 2009), French anthropologist, theorist, and essayist, often cited as the father of structuralism, founded the movement known as structural anthropology in which he used linguistics as a theoretical framework to study cultural phenomena. He is considered one of the most important modern French intellectuals for his studies in primitive mythology and for his far‐reaching influence on a diverse range of fields including history, psychology, and cultural and literary studies. He was awarded numerous honors including the Erasmus Prize in 1971 for significant contribution to European culture and was elected to the prestigious Académie française in 1973.
Narrative Theory
Authors: Dubord Matthew , Castle Gregory
Published: May 2017

The term “narrative theory” refers to the systematic study of narrative forms, whether they occur in literary texts (e.g., novels, epic poetry), film, historical works, or other cultural productions. Contemporary theorists (Todorov 1977; Prince 2005) have adopted the term “narratology” to refer to a poetics or “science” of narrative whose origins lie in Russian formalism and the structuralism of Roland Barthes and the structuralist semiotics of A. J. Greimas. Though these points of emergence are varied, they share the same principal aim: to devise a system or “grammar” by which narrative can be described and interpreted according to formal rather than thematic or ideological criteria.
N
ietzsche,
F
riedrich
Authors: Bixby Patrick
Published: May 2017

German philologist, philosopher, and cultural critic, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) was, with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, one of the thinkers who had the most influence on twentieth‐century literary and cultural theory. He challenged conventional beliefs about truth, morality, and modernity (e.g., democracy, progress, rationality) by noting how all knowledge is perspectival and a human interpretation for human ends. He believed that the apparent meaning of a truth statement, a moral value, or a cultural practice conceals the “will to power” that produced it. Humans seek power over each other and over the world around them, according to Nietzsche. Nietzsche felt the ideals and beliefs of Christian civilization especially were illusions, and he attacked them in a style that is at times polemical, at times aphoristic, at times prophetic, at many times dazzling – a style that departs markedly from standard philosophical argumentation and often veers into literary virtuosity. Nietzsche's work has influenced a wide range of readers, including literary modernists, conservative ideologues, and existential thinkers, though perhaps its most lasting and powerful impact was on poststructuralist philosophers and literary theorists, who learned from him the importance of style, the pervasiveness of interpretation, and the inseparability of power and knowledge.
P
ater,
W
alter
Authors: Friedman Dustin
Published: May 2017

An art historian and Oxford professor, novelist, and critic, Walter Pater (1839 – 94) was one of the pre‐eminent figures associated with the Victorian aesthetic movement. Famous for his stylistic elegance, his writings were a direct influence on subsequent generations of authors and critics (including, most notably, Oscar Wilde), and his theory of “critical impressionism” would play an important role in the development of literary modernism.
P
eirce,
C
harles
S
anders
Authors: Peters Michael
Published: May 2017

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) was one of the foundational theorists of pragmatism and semiotics. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard University mathematics professor who helped found the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and the Smithsonian Institute. He attended Harvard, graduating in 1859 with a degree in philosophy, and in 1863 received a degree in chemistry. He took a position at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, which he held until 1891; he taught mathematics intermittently at Harvard and, for a short period in the early 1880s, at Johns Hopkins University.
W
oolf,
V
irginia
Authors: Fothergill Anthony
Published: May 2017

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was a novelist whose innovations in narrative form and point of view have earned her acclaim as one of the most accomplished modernist writers. She was also an active literary critic, who composed nearly 500 critical pieces (more than 1,000,000 words) over almost 40 years as a professional writer. Her essays, reviews, lectures, journalistic articles, biographical studies, and two books –
A Room of One's Own
(1929) and
Three Guineas
(1938) – also mark her out as one of the greatest of English essayists. If it had not been for the central role played by her novels in defining the literary revolution of “high Modernism” and in forming a crucial model and inspiration for feminism and women's writing since 1920, Woolf's essays alone would have guaranteed her a central position in twentieth‐century literature.
A
lthusser,
L
ouis
Authors: Hughes Joe
Published: May 2017

Louis Althusser (1918–90) was a Marxist philosopher whose work exercised an enormous influence on the evolution of French Marxism and on the course of literary theory. Althusser always thought of his work as providing Marxism with a
philosophy
. For this reason, with the exception of his late work on “aleatory materialism,” almost all of Althusser's theoretical writings take the form of a commentary on Marx.
Cixous,Hélène
Authors: Rine Abigail
Published: May 2017

Hélène Cixous is a highly prolific Francophone theorist, poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, and literary critic: indeed, she is a writer whose work resists easy categorization. Although the majority of her publications are works of experimental fiction, she is most widely known in the English‐speaking world for her contributions to French feminist and literary theory and for formulating the concept ofécriture féminine, or feminine writing.
Disability Studies
Authors: Couser Tom
Published: May 2017

Lennard Davis has memorably characterized the historical plight of disabled people: “For centuries, people with disabilities … have been isolated, incarcerated, observed, written about, operated on, instructed, implanted, regulated, treated, institutionalized, and controlled to a degree probably unequal to that experienced by any other minority group” (2006: xv). Although it is difficult to know how many people belong in this category (because of definitional issues), widely accepted estimates hover around 15 percent of the US population; that number will grow as life expectancy rises. The percentage is probably higher in developing countries, where poverty is a strong contributing factor. Activism among members of this minority has gained force and momentum in developed countries since the 1970s, and the roots of disability studies are as much in advocacy as in theory. A relatively new addition to “minority studies” fields like African American studies and women's studies, disability studies emerged as a by‐product of the political struggle of a group of marginalized people for access and rights, and it continues to be associated with that goal. Like other minority studies, then, disability studies is closely linked to a civil rights movement, in this case the Disability Rights Movement.
Essentialism/Authenticity
Authors: Waters Melanie
Published: May 2017

Essentialism is a metaphysical doctrine which proposes that any being, object, or concept possesses certain fixed, or “essential,” properties by which it is defined and without which it would not be what it is. While broad, this definition usefully foregrounds the vital coordinates of essentialism as they are set forth by Aristotle in
The Metaphysics
. In this paradigmatic philosophical treatise, which continues to function as the foundation text for contemporary debates about essentialism, Aristotle situates the concept of essence at the heart of his epistemological project, arguing that it is the fundamental objective of scientific inquiry to uncover the natural “essences” of things in order to understand why they exist and what they contribute to the universe. In clarifying his position, Aristotle makes a keen distinction between the “essential” properties of a thing, by which it is imperatively defined, and its “accidental” characteristics, which are contingent and can be acquired (or lost) by chance without altering the fundamental identity of the thing in question. Once the essence of a thing has been distinguished from its accidental properties it can be positioned in a fixed relation to other orders of things within a larger, hierarchical scheme of classification. In accordance with the logic of this scheme, those things which share the same essential characteristics must necessarily belong to the same category, regardless of any other properties they may or may not possess. In this context, the variable or “accidental” features of a thing are rendered wholly negligible; all that matters is that which is viewed as intrinsic, definitive, and immutable. Classical essentialism, then, not only holds that the “true” essence of a thing can be meaningfully and definitively located, but also identifies that essence as natural, causative, and unchanging. Taking these things into account, essentialism significantly complicates theoretical formulations of a concept with which it is intricately entangled, and which is necessarily central to contemporary critiques of essentialist thought: authenticity.
G
reenblatt,
S
tephen
Authors: Robson Mark
Published: May 2017

Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) has pursued a form of cultural criticism that is known either as new historicism or – in his own preferred term – as cultural poetics, in a series of influential texts mainly devoted to Shakespeare and early modern English literature. Beginning from an interest in literary texts, Greenblatt's historicist practice brings these texts into relation with other aspects of a broadly conceived notion of culture, and as a consequence Greenblatt's writings touch on art, architecture, politics, and religion alongside more traditional literary concerns.
Ideology
Authors: Ryan Michael
Published: May 2017

“Ideology” is a word that was first used to name a “science of ideas” in the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the word began to be used in its modern sense to name a systematic body of ideas or doctrines. One therefore today speaks of “liberal ideology” or “conservative ideology” or of “the ideology of racism.” The modern use of the word often has a mildly derogatory sense. It names a doctrine that is overly prescriptive and not supported by rational argumentation.
Johnson,Barbara
Authors: Weiner Allison
Published: May 2017

Barbara Johnson (1947–2009) was an American literary critic known for her exemplary deconstructive readings that engage textually and politically with feminism, psychoanalysis, legal theory, and race. Her astute translation of Jacques Derrida'sDisseminationallowed English audiences access to some of the French philosopher's most significant essays. She was Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University, having previously taught at Yale University.
K
risteva,
J
ulia
Authors: Bari Shahidha
Published: May 2017

One of few women working in modern Continental philosophy, Julia Kristeva is a significant contributor to poststructuralist, psychoanalytical, and feminist thought. Born in Bulgaria in 1941, Kristeva completed her doctoral thesis in Paris and established a career as an eminent writer, theorist, and literary critic in France and abroad. Her doctoral thesis was published as
The Revolution in Poetic Language
in 1974 and secured her a chair in linguistics at Paris Diderot University. She is married to the French novelist and critic Philippe Sollers, and was a contributor to
Tel Quel
, a journal for avant‐garde literary‐philosophical thought, published by Editions du Seuil in Paris between 1960 and 1982. Fellow contributors included Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Kristeva's early work for the journal indicate her particular interests in semiotics, language, and linguistics, and demonstrate the strong psychoanalytical influences that later prompted her to train as an analyst. She was made a Chevaliere de la legion d'honneur in 1997.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Authors: Helmers Matthew
Published: May 2017

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies are interlinked fields of critical theory that address a very wide range of issues around these minorities. In order to understand the development of this field and the activism it accompanies, it is necessary to understand the history of its development.
N
ancy,
J
ean‐
L
uc
Authors: James Ian
Published: May 2017

Jean‐Luc Nancy's philosophy emerges in the wake of the twentieth‐century French reception of Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought most commonly associated with thinkers such as, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. His early work of the 1970s includes important readings of key modern philosophers such as Descartes, Hegel, and Kant, and also develops critiques of German Romanticism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and philosophical subjectivity. His more mature work of the 1980s, 1990s, and early twenty‐first century offers a radical reformulation of Heideggerian ontology in the context of which he publishes a number of important works which engage with a range of major philosophical questions: community, the nature of the political, freedom, embodiment, and shared worldly existence. Since the mid‐1990s his work has increasingly focused on questions relating to aesthetics, to the inner structure of monotheism, and to the legacy of Christianity within Western thought and culture.
Poststructuralism
Authors: Colebrook Claire
Published: May 2017

Poststructuralism is a mode of theory in which the necessary dependence of thinking on systems of difference – such as language – is deemed to preclude any capacity to grasp a single foundation of determining origin. Unlike postmodernism, with which it is often aligned, confused, or contrasted, poststructuralism can be given two quite specific senses: chronological and logical.
R
onell,
A
vital
Authors: Wortham Simon Morgan
Published: May 2017

Avital Ronell was born in Prague in 1952. Her parents were Israeli diplomats of German‐Jewish descent who settled in New York having first returned to Israel, where Ronell spent her early childhood. She studied with Jacob Taubes at the Hermeneutic Institute of Berlin, earned her doctoral degree at Princeton in the late 1970s, and subsequently worked in Paris with Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to New York to take up a chair in German and comparative literature at New York University, where for several years she taught a seminar alongside Derrida, whose texts she has helped to translate. Alongside her position at NYU, Ronell also holds the Jacques Derrida Chair at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Ronell's critical encounters with Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, and Freud – and also Kathy Acker and George Bush – have lead to compelling texts on such disparate subjects as AIDS, crack, stupidity, trauma, haunting, pornography, war, and technology. Once a performance artist, she is also credited as having established addiction studies in the US.
R
ose,
J
acqueline
Authors: Bari Shahidha
Published: May 2017

Jacqueline Rose (b. 1949) is a British academic working in the fields of psychoanalysis, feminism and visual culture. A lecturer in English at Queen Mary College, University of London since 1993, her critical work is characterized by its interdisciplinary approach and political commitment. Rose's first published work,
The Case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children's Fiction
(1984), explored the production and dissemination of children's literature, deploying a psychoanalytical approach to identify the determinedly ideological ends of such works. Rose's
Sexuality in the Field of Vision
, which explored the intersection of feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and film criticism, supplied an important contribution to a developing field of cultural studies. The essays in the book probe the production of normative gender and sexual identities across a variety of texts, including Freud's case notes on Dora, and T. S Eliot's essay on
Hamlet
. In her readings, Rose identifies the key fantasies operating in Western culture which enforce fundamental differences in gender identity and sexuality. For Rose, the issue of sexual difference remains a primary law of subject formation, and psychoanalysis diagnoses the problems of identification that arise from such laws. Since psychoanalysis supplies terms for understanding how identity is constituted and explains the mechanisms by which ideological processes are transformed into human actions, and psychoanalysis is able to recognize the political nature of identification.
Textual Studies
Authors: Fordham Finn
Published: May 2017

Textual studies are concerned, among other things, with the relations between texts: their multiplicity and singularity, their iterability and corruptibility, their fluidity and monumentality. Given such a wide field of investigation, questions about the status of texts are never far away from developments in literary and cultural theory. Most works of literature – thinking of literature in a broad sense – exist in different, sometimes multiple, versions, and each version may have a different text. This is true of the King James Bible, plays by Aeschylus or Shakespeare, novels by Mary Shelley, Henry James, or James Joyce, poems by Emily Dickinson or John Donne, critical essays by Paul de Man or Coleridge, or studies of evolution by Charles Darwin. Readers often consider works as embodied in a single text – usually the one they are reading – but more often than not, this is a mistake.
W
hite,
H
ayden
Authors: Russell Deirdre
Published: May 2017

Hayden White (b. 1928) is a prominent American historian whose work has had a decisive impact on thought about historiography and substantial influence among literary critics. White gained his BA degree in 1951 from Wayne State University, and his MA in 1952 and PhD in 1955, both from the University of Michigan. After holding positions at Wayne State (1955–8), the University of Rochester in New York (1958–68), University of California, Los Angeles (1968–73), and Wesleyan University in Connecticut (1973–8), in 1978 White went to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was later appointed Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness, in addition to serving as Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
Y
oung,
R
obert
Authors: Bari Shahidha
Published: May 2017

Robert Young's
White Mythologies: Writing History and the West
was published in 1990 and has since undergone several reprints, having swiftly established itself as a touchstone text for postcolonial criticism.
White Mythologies
offers an investigation into the privileged conception of “history” that is often posed in antagonism to “theory” and whose “reality” is considered a sober counter to theory's textuality. Rather than pose poststructuralism as a theoretical alternative to history, Young (b. 1950) identifies the complicity of theory and history in the long and ongoing narrative of European colonialism, which continues to determine the formations of knowledge that extend beyond the academy. In
White Mythologies
Young examines a range of theoretical thinkers in order to uncover the totalizing logic of their own thought. Signaling the Eurocentrism of writers usually affiliated with the materialist projects of independence and emancipation such as Marx, Althusser, Sartre, and Foucault, Young sketches the possible futures of postcolonial criticism through the work of Said, Bhabha, and Spivak.
White Mythologies
questions the limits of Western knowledge and opens up a continuing line of inquiry in postcolonial criticism.
A
nzaldúa,
G
loria
Authors: Sanchez‐Casal Susan
Published: May 2017

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942–2004) was a renowned Chicana lesbian feminist poet, cultural theorist, fiction writer, independent scholar, and activist. She was an award‐winning writer, as well as editor of
This Bridge Called My Back
(2002[1981], with Cherríe Moraga),
Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras
(1990),
Interviews/ Entrevistas
(with Analouise Keating, 2000), and
This Bridge We Call Home
(with Analouise Keating, 2002). Her children's books include
Prietita Has a Friend
(1991),
Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado
(1993), and
Prietita y La Llorona
(1996). She authored the theoretically and politically compelling
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
in 1987. In her work, Anzaldúa made crucial theoretical contributions to the fields of postcolonial feminism, cultural theory, Chicana/o theory, and queer theory.
Culture Wars
Authors: Bain J. Grant
Published: May 2017

“Culture wars” most broadly refers to publicized conflicts between two or more major camps concerning various factions' attempts to define and control the social practices of their community, state, or nation. These debates and struggles often take the form of traditional versus emergent social policies or practices, and are most often a struggle between dominant and resistant groups. Although popularized in America by debates over education, practically any other large public debate – religious practices, family issues, abortion, civil liberties, etc. – falls under the umbrella term. The phrase “culture wars” originated in Germany during the late 1800s, during the public turmoil erupting from Otto von Bismarck's attempted unification of the German nation‐state. Termed
Kulturkampf
in German, this early culture war pitted Protestants against Catholics for control of Germany's public education, and therefore of its future. Despite its broad applicability, “culture wars” still most frequently refers to debates over public and higher education, even if other debates are more sharply divisive.