bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
W
hitney,
I
sabella
Authors: Bartolovich Crystal
Published: May 2017

So far as we know, Isabella Whitney (
fl
. 1567–73) is the first woman in England to be identified in print as the author of collections of her own secular verse. Although recent reassessments have cast doubt on the commonplace that few women were writing at all in the sixteenth century, as scholars uncover more, and more varied, women‐authored manuscripts, Whitney's contribution remains striking. To be sure, in an age in which the circulation of manuscripts was still a frequent and prestigious mode of ‘publication’, new discoveries of, and attention to, female‐authored manuscripts is an extremely important development. It is however important to recognize that not only did Whitney's work deviate from the religious subject matter typical of other sixteenth‐century female writers who found their way into print (a very small number in the sixteenth century in any case), but she appears not to have belonged to the elite aristocratic or humanist circles from which that rare printed writing typically emerged.
W
ild,
R
obert
Authors: Southcombe George
Published: May 2017

Robert Wild (1615/16–79) rose to become one of the most popular satirical poets in Restoration England – a fact which since his death has been the cause of some surprise, given that he was also a Presbyterian minister. Wild was born in St Ives, Huntingdonshire in 1615 or 1616, where he was also schooled. He continued his education at St John's, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1636 and his MA in 1639, and he went on to obtain a BD from Oxford in 1642. In the late 1630s he entered the clergy, being ordained a deacon in February 1638 and a priest in December 1639.
W
ilkins,
J
ohn
Authors: Lewis Rhodri
Published: May 2017

John Wilkins (1614–72), natural philosopher, clergyman, and linguist, was born in Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire on 1 January 1614. Educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, he was ordained as a priest in 1638. Ten years later, his reputation for learning and for moderation helped him to be appointed warden of Wadham College, Oxford, where he remained – championing the new scientific learning under the banner of his Oxford Philosophy Club – until he became master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1659. He was obliged to give up this position on the Restoration in 1660, when he devoted his energies to the foundation of the Royal Society. In 1668 he was made bishop of Chester, a position he held until his premature death in 1672.
W
ilson,
R
obert
Authors: Kermode Lloyd Edward
Published: May 2017

Little is known about the life of Robert Wilson (d.1600) outside of theatrical records. In 1572, 1574, and 1581 Robert Wilson's name appears in documents that place him in the company of players of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. He was one of 12 star players culled in 1583 from various companies to form the Queen's Men, a troupe that would dominate London and provincial playing for the next decade. Wilson is not included in an incomplete 1588 list of Queen's Men's players; he may possibly have left the group by then, but other missing names belong to men known to be dead by this time, and there is some speculation that the actor died sometime in the mid‐1580s and that the author of the plays attributed to Robert Wilson was a second, younger man (the latter perhaps not an actor himself). Such a theory seems supported by a well‐known reference in Thomas Heywood's
Apology for actors
(1612) in which he talks of Wilson being ‘before my time’. But a Wilson who had been around since the 1570s, survived until 1600, and wrote ‘oldfashioned’ moral drama would probably not be considered by Heywood a strict contemporary. Francis Meres's
Palladis tamia
(1598), on the other hand, talks of ‘now our wittie Wilson’ presenting a ‘challenge at the Swan on the Bankside’, a reference that seems to place Wilson on stage in the late 1590s, a man still acting or at least entertaining as well as writing. The year 1588 did see the death of another famous clown, however, for it was in this year that Wilson's fellow comic actor in the Queen's Men, Richard Tarleton, died. Wilson includes a scene in his
The three lordes and three ladies of London
(1588–89) in which a ‘picture’ and ballad of Tarleton are presented on stage, and it would be a touching tribute from one Queen's player to another if this were played by the Queen's Men themselves.
W
instanley,
G
errard
Authors: Houston Chloë
Published: May 2017

Gerrard Winstanley (1609–76) was the founder of the group known as the Diggers or ‘True Levellers’, a collection of radical activists who formed a series of small farming colonies run on communal principles in 1649 and 1650. Winstanley's writings comprise around 20 tracts, which were published over a period of four years; the majority appeared during the active period of the Digger colonies and sought to promote and defend the Diggers’ work. Although not much is definitely known of Winstanley's life before the publication of his first pamphlet in 1648, or after the appearance of his last in 1652, he has become widely studied as a central figure in the development of radical political and religious fervour in England in the middle of the seventeenth century. His writings demonstrate his belief that a communal way of life was the solution to the ills of society and that widespread social change was possible, and in particular testify to his efforts to gain support for the Digger communities that embodied these beliefs.
W
olley,
H
annah
Authors: Tigner Amy L.
Published: May 2017

Hannah Wolley (?1622–74 or after), writer of books on cooking, preserving, medicine, cosmetics, conduct, household management, and domestic arts, was the first woman to publish cookbooks in English. These cookery books included recipes not just for food and drink but also for medicine, cosmetics, and household concoctions for cleaning, dyeing, and starching. Given the number of editions printed in her lifetime and afterwards, Wolley can certainly be considered a successful writer; some critics have suggested that she, rather than Aphra Behn, was the first professional female writer in Britain, though astrologer and almanac writer Sarah Jinner, who published her first work in 1558, is also a contender. Wolley's works were so popular that another author (probably male) pirated her reputation and published a book entitled
The gentlewomans companion
(1673) under her name; we know of the forgery because Wolley complains bitterly in her 1674
Supplement to the queen‐like closet
that she has been ‘much abused by a late printed book’.
W
right,
T
homas
Authors: Craik Katharine A.
Published: May 2017

Thomas Wright (c.1561–1623) was a moral philosopher, Catholic priest, and religious controversialist. His treatise
The passions of the minde
, completed in 1598 and published in 1601, is one of the most important Renaissance works on emotional experience, or what we now call psychology. Written during one of Wright's spells in prison for promoting Catholicism in England,
The passions
discusses the origins of passions (or emotions), the ways in which these prejudice the faculty of reason, and methods for controlling turbulent feeling in order to achieve Christian salvation. Wright argues that the wayward inclinations of the soul are always at risk of leading men into ungodliness. Properly harnessed by the forces of intellect and reason, however, passions allow men to achieve virtue in every aspect of private and public life.
The passions
reveals in fascinating detail how early modern men and women thought about their inner lives, especially the energetic forces of imagination, fantasy, and will. Directed towards English readers of all classes, the work was popular enough to be reprinted several times in expanded editions throughout the seventeenth century and was an important source for Robert Burton's
The anatomy of melancholy
(1621).
W
yatt,
T
homas
Authors: Gil Daniel Juan
Published: May 2017

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) was a poet, ambassador, and influential member of the court of Henry VIII. Through translations of Italian and French poetry, Wyatt introduced a number of new poetic forms into English literature, notably including the sonnet and terza rima. In both his translations and his original poetry, Wyatt artfully intertwined courtly politics and a complex vision of sexuality and eroticism. His poetry projects an artfully contrived voice that is by turns angry and plaintive, forceful and abject.
A
cidilobus
Authors: Prokofeva Maria I. , Merkel Alexander Y. , Lebedinsky Alexander V. , Bonch‐Osmoloskaya Elizaveta A.
Published: May 2017

A.ci.di.lo'bus L. masc. adj.
acidus
, acid; Gr. masc. n.
lobos
, lobe; N.L. masc. n.
Acidilobus
, the “acid lobe”.

Crenarchaeota / Thermoprotei / Acidilobales / Acidilobaceae / Acidilobus

Genus
Acidilobus
belongs to the family
Acidilobaceae
, order
Acidilobales
. Organisms of this genus have coccoid cells, with or without flagellation. They inhabit terrestrial acidic hot springs and have temperature and pH optima for growth at 81–92°C and 3.0–3.8, respectively, thus being hyperthermophiles and acidophiles. All known representatives of
Acidilobus
are obligate anaerobes growing on peptides, polysaccharides, and sugars, with or without elemental sulfur as the electron acceptor. Acetate is the major metabolic product, while molecular hydrogen has never been detected, which is in agreement with the absence of hydrogenase genes in the genome of
Acidilobus saccharovorans
. Analysis of the microbial diversity in acidic hot springs of Kamchatka and Yellowstone National Park showed that
Acidilobaceae
is a widespread group of prokaryotes abundant in these habitats.

DNA G + C content
(
mol%
): 53.8–54.5.

Type species
:
Acidilobus aceticus
Prokofeva, Miroshnichenko, Kostrikina, Chernyh, Kuznetsov, Tourova and Bonch‐Osmolovskaya 2000, 2007
VP
A
dorno,
T
heodor
Authors: Jenemann David
Published: May 2017

Musicologist, cultural critic, sociologist, philosopher: Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) was an astonishingly interdisciplinary and penetrating critical theorist and a central figure of the Frankfurt School. Among his many contributions to a number of fields, perhaps most noteworthy was Adorno's analysis of the ever‐tightening network of artistic production, social and economic administration, and the domination of human experience in modernity that is now widely known as “the culture industry.”
Aesthetics
Authors: Gilgen Peter
Published: May 2017

Although aesthetics is ostensibly preoccupied with beauty and art, there has been much contestation regarding its proper object among philosophers and artists. The first step toward understanding this debate is to distinguish between aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Not all aesthetic phenomena are art, and not all art is aesthetic. In practice, however, the two terms have been used more or less interchangeably for most of the history of the modern system of the arts and the philosophical discipline of aesthetics, both of which were established in the eighteenth century in close connection with the articulation of a unified theory of art (see Kristeller 1951/2). Mimetic (representational), expressive, and formalist theories share the assumption that art aims at beauty or, at least, at certain aesthetic qualities that it conveys in a more concentrated, intense, and complex way than other objects in the world. Yet it is apparent that even the traditional theories of art were not exclusively concerned with the aesthetic value of its objects. They often posed questions concerning the metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and semiotic status of art, the arts, and individual works of art. However, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the theory of art is simply more comprehensive than aesthetics, or that aesthetics is a subfield of the philosophy of art. For it is equally true that aesthetics has from the beginning been concerned with phenomena other than art, most notably, natural beauty and the sublime.
Affective Fallacy
Authors: Claborn John
Published: May 2017

The concept “affective fallacy” refers to a confusion between two elements of a literary text: what the text
is
(its linguistic and rhetorical elements) and what it
does
(its effects on the reader). William K. Wimsatt & Monroe C. Beardsley first introduced it into literary criticism and theory in a 1946 article in
Sewanee Review
. The concept was later developed in their seminal study
The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
(1954). In some respects, “The affective fallacy” was a follow‐up to another important 1946 work, “The intentional fallacy” (which was also revised in
The Verbal Icon)
, in which Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that in this particular “error” of reading, one locates meaning in the intentions of the author. Both concepts were fundamental in the development of the new criticism, the name given to various schools of criticism stressing formal analysis and close reading that gained prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.
A
ustin,
J. L.
Authors: McGowan John
Published: May 2017

J. L. Austin (1911–60), a philosopher who taught at Oxford University, introduced the concept of the “performative” into the philosophy of language as an alternative to the “correspondence theory” of language. Austin's work became increasingly important to literary theorists in the 1980s and 1990s and is now widely accepted as providing the best account of the nature of literary utterances.
B
akhtin,
M. M.
Authors: Kershner R. Brandon
Published: May 2017

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a Russian literary scholar and philosopher of language whose work would eventually have a profound influence on Western literary criticism as well as on linguistics, classical studies, sociology, and ethics. Working as the dominant member of several study groups on ethics and aesthetics, Bakhtin developed several concepts that became influential in Western literary studies during the late 1970s and the 1980s. These included what later critics, like Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, have called “prosaics,” a term meant to point both to his theory of literature that privileges prose, especially the novel, over poetry and to his emphasis on the importance of the prosaic details of everyday life. Many of Bakhtin's most influential concepts – dialogism, heteroglossia, and carnivalization – can be understood in the framework of a theory of prosaics that encompasses the structure of prose narratives as well as the impact of ideology on language and discourse.
B
arthes,
R
oland
Authors: Weber Steve
Published: May 2017

Roland Barthes (1915–80), French literary theorist and semiologist, was one of the most prominent and innovative structuralist thinkers. His analysis of narrative structure in literature and film established a framework for narratologists who followed him, while his semiological investigations of cultural phenomena – from advertising to cookery to toys – provided a theoretical basis for the study of popular culture. Barthes's career is unique insofar as he became, in the last 15 years of his life, one of the most important and perhaps the most widely influential poststructuralist at a time when poststructuralism dominated academic humanities departments in Europe, the UK, and the US.
de B
eauvoir,
S
imone
Authors: Chatterjee Ranita
Published: May 2017

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), French philosopher, essayist, novelist, autobiogra‐pher, and political activist, is best known for her contributions to the women's movement and feminist theory. Her celebrated claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes, awoman” (1989[1949]: 267) stems from her existentialist theories of “being” that reject an intrinsic human nature. Beauvoir offers a social constructionist critique of essentialist feminist theories that laid the foundation for the contentious debates between essentialist and antiessentialist theories in the 1980s and ‘90s. Her feminism and her lifelong relationship with existentialist philosopher Jean‐Paul Sartre tend to overshadow her other works, which include six novels, short stories, a play, several books of philosophy and cultural criticism, and extensive autobiographical writings.
B
lanchot,
M
aurice
Authors: Kates Joshua
Published: May 2017

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), often referred to as an “invisible” or “shadowy” figure (the subtitle of his definitive French biography is
Partenaire invisible
[Invisible Partner]), had an enormous impact on intellectual life in France, from the time of World War II until his death. Blanchot often removed himself from active social life; from 1948–58, for example, he dwelt exclusively in the small town of Eze. And despite holding an advanced degree in philosophy, he kept apart from the academy, making a living instead as a writer – at first of news and political columns, then of fiction and of critical and philosophical essays. The diversity of his interests, as well as his removal from scholarly institutions, left a clear mark on his work. His writing increasingly lessens or effaces the differences among genres, culminating in a late style (after he almost wholly abandoned the writing of fiction proper in 1962), in which fragmentary philosophical meditation and literary criticism are combined with second‐person address, reminiscent of a dialogue.
Colonialism/Imperialism
Authors: Parsons Cóilín
Published: May 2017

Colonialism and imperialism are two closely related but separate terms that have been used to describe the political, economic, and cultural domination of one group of people by another. Although colonies and empires have existed for millennia, “colonialism” and “imperialism” are most often understood to refer to the expansion of European commercial interests and political power overseas, beginning in the sixteenth century. Modern European colonialism and imperialism are inextricably bound to the development of capitalism in Europe; they both function within a context of nationalist consolidation and global expansion, with individual nation‐states (metropolitan centers) establishing control over areas that are distant and different from those states (peripheral territories). In the relation between center and periphery, dominance is predicated on the colonized territory being economically and culturally underdeveloped in comparison to the colonizing power.
Commodity
Authors: Hawkes David
Published: May 2017

The term “commodity” refers to an object for sale, and commodification is the psychological process by which an object for sale is conceptually differentiated from an object to be used. Although an apple growing wild may be physically identical to an apple for sale on a market stall, a vast array of legal, cultural, and mental differences attend the ways in which the two apples are regarded. An object for sale has become a qualitatively different thing from the same object in its natural condition: it has become a “commodity” by means of “commodification.” The process of commodification assumes the ability to exchange one thing for another, which involves the capacity to conceive of qualitatively different objects as quantitatively equivalent. A new kind of value, or significance, must be imposed on them if different objects are to be exchanged, and it must be possible to express this value in terms of a common denominator. This kind of value is known as “exchange value,” and the common denominator in which it is expressed is money.
C
roce,
B
enedetto
Authors: Selenu Stefano
Published: May 2017

Benedetto Croce – philosopher, historian, literary critic, and politician – was born in 1866 in Pescasseroli, in the Abruzzi region of Italy, and resided mostly in Naples. As a young student, Croce studied in Roman Catholic schools, but his relationship with religion remained problematic. He suffered a traumatic experience in 1883, when an earthquake in Casamicciola killed his parents and left him injured. He and his brother went to live in Rome with their uncle, the politician and intellectual Silvio Spaventa. In Rome he met the philosopher Antonio Labriola, whose teaching led Croce to philosophical inquiry. According to Croce [1927], his thought was most influenced by the works of literary critic and historian Francesco De Sanctis and Giambattista Vico, and by discussions with Labriola himself.
Dialogism and Heteroglossia
Authors: Kershner R. Brandon
Published: May 2017

From the 1920s through the 1940s the Russian literary theoretician and philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) developed a group of concepts bearing on the analysis of language in literature that have proved influential on Anglo‐American and European scholarship, especially during the 1980s and ‘90s. Of these concepts, the one with the widest implications is
dialogizm
, generally rendered into English as “dialogism”; it is most fully developed in the first collection of Bakhtin's writings to be translated into English under the title
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
(1981 [1975]). For Bakhtin, the basic condition of human communication is “heteroglossia,” the simultaneous presence of competing languages and their social, historical, psychological, and physical conditions of utterance. This insures that any statement will have a unique meaning dependent upon its immediate and global context. Under the condition of heteroglossia, dialogism is the necessary and characteristic mode of the production of meaning; both speech and writing, seen in this light, are always dialogical. We might also say that in a world dominated by heteroglossia, which insures the primacy of context over text, dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode.
Énoncé/Énonciation
Authors: Dye Dotty
Published: May 2017

The French term
“l'énoncé”
(often referred to as an “utterance” or “statement” in English) is a linguistic object – the words spoken or written through an act of
“énonciation.”
It operates on a narrative level and can be thought of as the thing being expressed, the content of communication. In speaking, the
énoncé
is limited either by a pause or by the intervention of another speaker, while in writing it is limited by the parameters of the text or work in question. The French term
énonciation
(enunciation in English) designates the written or verbal act or site of communication. In other words, the
énonciation
acts on a discursive level and consists of the
énoncé
in a particular context and by a particular subject (speaker or writer). Study of the
énonciation
permits consideration of the subjectivity of discourse, the markers of which – personal pronouns such as
I, you
, and adverbs such as
here, now, later
– are rendered meaningless without the specific spatial and temporal context that the
énonciation
provides.
F
reud,
S
igmund
Authors: Jones Jason B.
Published: May 2017

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) is best known as the founder of psychoanalysis, a school of thought and a psychotherapeutic method that assumes a division in the mind between consciousness and the “unconscious,” which Freud conceived of as a realm of repressed memory, desire, and instinct.
G
adamer,
H
ans‐Georg
Authors: Armstrong Paul B.
Published: May 2017

Hans‐Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002) is best known for his theory of understanding as a historical dialogue between the present and the past. His dialogical model of interpretation has played a leading role in debates about meaning, language, and art in philosophy and literary criticism.
H
usserl,
E
dmund
Authors: Armstrong Paul B.
Published: May 2017

Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) was the founder of phenomenology, a school of philosophy that analyzes the structures of consciousness and experience. Born in Moravia in the Austro‐Hungarian empire to Jewish parents and educated in Vienna and Berlin, Husserl first studied mathematics before turning to philosophy. He held prestigious professorships at the universities in Goöttingen and Freiburg before retiring in 1928. During the 1930s, he was persecuted by the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage (e.g., he was denied library privileges at his former university). After his death, his library and approximately 50,000 pages of manuscript and typescript were smuggled to Leuven, Belgium, where the Husserl Archive was established.
Implied Author/Reader
Authors: Sully Justin
Published: May 2017

The concepts “implied author” and “implied reader” were introduced into literary criticism by Wayne Booth inThe Rhetoric of Fiction(1961), which emerged from the neo‐Aristotelian school of formalism associated with the work of R. S. Crane. Booth's seminal text, an expanded second edition of which appeared in 1983, set out to examine what he calls “the technique of non‐didactic fiction, viewed as the art of communicating with readers” (xiii). This concern for the reader led Booth to reevaluate the conventions associated with authorship and reading; specifically, to identify the authors and readers implied by the reading process. The implied author and implied reader are figures imagined or “inferable” by the reader or critic based on formal and rhetorical elements of the text. The implications of these concepts for literary theory are significant, for they cast doubt upon readings of literary texts that rely on the real‐life experience of authors and readers – that is to say, that rely on extratextual elements that are difficult, if not impossible, to locate, measure, or substantiate.
J
akobson,
R
oman
Authors: Sully Justin
Published: May 2017

Roman Jakobson (1896 – 1982) was one of the twentieth century's most influential linguists, literary theorists, and semioticians. While he had a considerable impact on the study of linguistics in general, his role in the formation of Russian formalism and in the postwar development of structuralism established him as one of the pioneering figures of literary and cultural theory. His work has been influential in a wide variety of disciplines, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, translation studies, film and media studies, rhetoric, aesthetics, mu‐sicology, folklore studies, and art history. A lifelong advocate of the idea that the study of language is essential to the study of literature, Jakobson was one of the figures most instrumental in the “linguistic turn” in critical theory (Jameson 1974). Though his name and work may be unfamiliar to Anglo‐American students of poststructuralism, Jakobson's influence on that movement, and in related fields like narratology, was profound.
J
ung,
C. G.
Authors: Chirila Alexander
Published: May 2017

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) was a psychoanalyst whose most prominent theories concerned the influence of archetypal images on the individual psyche, the existence of a collective unconscious, and a categorization of personality types still employed by psychologists today. His work lies at the origin of archetypal psychoanalysis and criticism, and many disciplines of study refer to his hypotheses regarding the human drive to individuate, and the prevalence of mythic and religious symbolism in human consciousness.
L
ukács,
G
eorg
Authors: Cohen‐Vrignaud Gerard
Published: May 2017

Georg (or György) Lukács (1885 – 1971) was a major Marxist philosopher and art critic whose essays on the nineteenth‐century novel, realism, and modernism are still widely read in literary studies and whose lucid elaborations of reification, alienation, and class consciousness are considered major advances in Marxist thought. His career may be divided into two phases: his early writings, composed before he joined the Hungarian Communist Party at the end of 1918 and best represented by
The Theory of the Novel
(1916), and his mature critical work as a Marxist activist and intellectual, which produced
History and Class Consciousness
(1923) and
The Historical Novel
(1937).
M
arx,
K
arl
Authors: Cerniglia David
Published: May 2017

Karl Marx (1818 – 83), perhaps the most influential political economist after Adam Smith, was the intellectual force behind communism and socialism. He is famous for authoring, with the philosopher and political theorist Friedrich Engels, the
Communist Manifesto
(1848), but his most enduring accomplishment is
Capital
, the landmark study of capitalism that secured his reputation as the most important political thinker of the nineteenth century. He also wrote dozens of texts on a wide variety of topics, including philosophy, history, economics, and colonialism. Because of the decisive challenge it issued to the status quo in the West, Marxism has been both fervently embraced and violently opposed. Indeed, the originality of Marx's thinking led the French theorist Michel Foucault to identify his achievement, like that of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's, as the foundation of a discourse; he was not simply the author of his works, Foucault insists, but the founder of “the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts … an endless possibility of discourse” (Foucault 1972: 114). At the basis of Marx's philosophical and economic thought is the idea that humanity is fundamentally social and that only through social bonds (e.g., class solidarity), could human beings achieve freedom. Because capitalism worked to limit freedom and distort social relations, the critique of capitalism and its social and political implications should have the concrete material effect of restoring genuine social relations and thus individual freedom.
M
emmi,
A
lbert
Authors: El‐Hamel Chouki
Published: May 2017

Albert Memmi, novelist and one of the earliest theorists of the postcolonial condition, was arguably the first to describe the complex psychological and political interactions between colonized peoples and the colonists who ruled over them. Like that of so many other indigenous intellectuals, Memmi's own life experiences provided the foundation of his theoretical point of view. He was born in 1920 in Tunis, Tunisia, to a modest Jewish family. His father earned a meager income as a saddler‐maker, an income barely sufficient to provide for a large household of eight children. Memmi, like most Jews under French colonial rule, gained a new status and a relatively better position than his Muslim compatriots because, as Memmi describes it, “The Jewish population identified as much with the colonizers as with the colonized” (Memmi 1991b [1957]: xiv).
Mimesis
Authors: Potolsky Matthew
Published: May 2017

Mimesis is, simply put, imitation, but it also refers to modes of representation in which the external world is presented to the reader or viewer in as transparent a medium as possible. It is among the oldest concepts in literary theory, and continues to be of critical importance in contemporary narrative theory, aesthetics, and philosophy. For Plato (1968), who first brought the term into critical discourse, mimesis refers to the ways in which images and poetry (chiefly epic and tragedy) imitate reality; he did not believe that the imitations were real themselves. Art is secondary and derivative, a mirror of nature. Aristotle largely accepted Plato's assertion that poetry is a form of mimesis, and should therefore be measured against some other reality, but he also reframed the theory. In the
Poetics
(1987), he describes mimesis as a microcosm or simulation of reality itself; a tragic plot is effective and has a sense of reality when the relationship among its events is internally consistent, and thereby accords with our sense of cause and effect. For Aristotle, mimesis imitates rational thought processes, not material or conceptual realities.
Modernism
Authors: Levenson Michael
Published: May 2017

Modernism was a cultural movement with roots in late nineteenth‐century aestheticism and symbolism, prominent in Europe and the US, but with practitioners and theorists around the globe. While there is no general accord as to the precise dating of the “modernist era,” most critics and theorists work within a period that extends from the latter decades of the nineteenth century to World War II. As a cultural movement, modernism was characterized by technical innovations in narrative, dramatic, and poetic forms as well as in the materials and composition of the plastic arts. New and often provocative subject matter, including the critical representation of gender, race, and class, are found throughout the spectrum of modernist cultural practices. In addition to the prominence of nineteenth‐century aesthetic movements, the revolutionary aspirations of Romanticism, especially the willingness to contest inherited literary norms and to claim the arts as a historically transformative practice, were one decisive precedent. Equally important were the massive social changes of the nineteenth century – political, technological, economic – which produced, among other effects, a growing and heterogeneous urban culture, where artistic novelty could win small but responsive audiences, indispensable to its experimental ambitions. The emergence of bohemian colonies within the metropolis offered sites for gathering, while an expanding press enjoyed the spectacle of cultural transgression. By the beginning of the twentieth century the recognition of cultural upheaval was inescapable.
Other/Alterity
Authors: Türkkan Sevinç
Published: May 2017

“Other” and “alterity” are two interrelated concepts. As a condition of “otherness,” alterity is defined as “the state of being other or different; diversity”
(OED)
. The term was adopted as an alternative to “otherness” to register a change in the twentieth‐century Western perception of the relationship between consciousness and the world outside. Since Descartes, individual consciousness has been taken as the privileged center of identity while “the other” is seen as an epistemological problem, or as an inferior, reduced, or negated form of the “same.” Descartes's humanist position, based on his well‐known proposition “I think, therefore I am” poses the question of “the other” in relation to the subject. In similar manner, “How can I know the other?” questions the existence of the “other” relationally to the subject. The term “alterity” shifts the focus from earlier philosophical concerns with otherness – the “epistemic other” or the dialectical other – to a more “concrete and moral other,” materially located in social and cultural institutions. In social contexts, as in logical systems, the construction of the subject is inseparable from the construction of its other. The
other
is not something outside or beyond the
self
, as the traditional Cartesian perspective would have it; rather, it is deeply implicated in and with the
self
. Thus we are inclined to ask: “What is my relationship to ‘the other’?” and “How should I act towards ‘the other’?” The term “alterity” suggests that the other involved in these questions is neither an abstract proposition, nor unrelated and therefore irrelevant to considerations of
the self
. It is this emphasis on relationality that gives alterity its value in contemporary critical thinking.
Phenomenology
Authors: Landes Donald A.
Published: May 2017

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition that begins with the work of Edmund Husserl and has produced some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, including Martin Heidegger, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur. Taken in its literal sense, “phenomenology” names the science of phenomena, just as “biology” names the science of life. In practice, however, phenomenology describes our experience of things as they appear to us, without allowing our presuppositions about the world to shape that description. It is the radical attempt to get “back to the things themselves” (
zurück zu den Sachen selbst
); but the subject is a key component in this process, for phenomena appear
to
a subject. Phenomenological description, then, differs from a subjective description of inner feelings and from a scientific description of the objective world. Thus phenomenology is at the crossroads between subjectivity and objectivity, between passivity and activity, between idealism and empiricism.
P
oulet,
G
eorges
Authors: Anderson Grey
Published: May 2017

Georges Poulet (1902 – 91), teacher and literary critic, is known for his application of the phenomenology of consciousness to critical practice and theories of reading and interpretation. He was born in Chenee, Belgium, and received his doctorate from the University of Liege in 1927. Over the course of his long career, Poulet taught at the University of Edinburgh, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Z
ö
urich, and the University of Nice. Along with his younger colleague at Hopkins, Jean Starobinski, Poulet was closely associated with the Geneva School, a group of critics including Albert Beguin, Marcel Raymond, JeanPierre Richard, and Jean Rousset. The members of this circle, loosely centered around the University of Geneva, shared an indebtedness to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology and a commitment to personal, empathetic forms of reading. As the group's most prolific and well‐known representative, Poulet's “criticism of consciousness” has exercised a significant influence on French literary scholarship as well as on some aspects of reader‐response studies.
Psychoanalysis (to 1966)
Authors: Castle Gregory
Published: May 2017

Psychoanalysis is distinguished from psychology, which is concerned with the conscious operations of the mind, and cognitive science, which is concerned with the mind's neural architecture, by its concern for the dynamic interactions between the conscious mind and the unconscious, and between the human subject and its social environment. Literary and cultural scholars who use psychoanalysis usually focus on the way the unconscious manifests itself in character, story, symbol, and theme and on the way character in literature is interactive, a nexus of desire directed toward others that often emerges from the unconscious. Sigmund Freud first formulated the scientific principles of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century. His major discovery was that the conscious mind is only one component of the self. He discovered the unconscious by examining the symptoms of mental illness and ordinary dreams. Each, he found, were ways for conflicts, concerns, desires, and fears to emerge into consciousness. In certain forms of mental illness such as hysteria, the clue to the illness was to be found in how symptoms related to memories or concerns that had been banished from consciousness. Similarly, dreams, Freud found, were places where unconscious material manifested itself in quasi‐conscious form. The repercussions of these early discoveries by Freud were enormous, and a new science grew out of them.
Reification
Authors: Hawkes David
Published: May 2017

Reification is the form taken by commodity fetishism when the market has become the dominant mode of economic organization. To the degree that the market rises to power within the economy, the economy rises to power within society. As it rises to economic pre‐eminence, the market projects its economic assumptions onto other areas of life and thought, so that commodity fetishism comes to influence politics, philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and everyday social life. When generalized and expanded to noneconomic spheres, the term “commodity fetishism” becomes inadequate to capture the range of this phenomenon's effects, and “reification” is used to designate the universal form of this ideological condition.
S
artre,
J
ean‐
P
aul
Authors: Dye Dotty
Published: May 2017

Jean‐Paul Sartre (1905 – 80), French novelist, playwright, and philosopher, formulated an existential phenomenology that had a profound impact on European intellectual life in the decades after World War II. In the final year of the war, he delivered a lecture in Paris,
L'Existentialisme est un humanisme [Existentialism is a Humanism]
(2007 [1946]), in which he defended existentialist ideas against the Communist reproach that existentialism was a bourgeois philosophy because it amounted to “a state of quietism and despair” (Sartre 2007[1946]: 27) forcing a purely contemplative state rather than a productive one. He also addressed the objection from Christian critics that a perspective denying all eternal values leaves us to our own devices, unable to condemn the actions or perspectives of another. Finally he addressed the challenge from both sides that existential thought failed to encompass the whole of the human experience, having focused attention on all that is base about humankind, forgetting both the beauty and solidarity of which it is capable. The lecture was received enthusiastically by an audience who regarded it as a kind of manifesto for the movement. Though his contemporaries Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus would later repudiate the title of “existentialist philosopher,” Sartre remained committed to existentialism. Although he was a prolific and celebrated writer of fiction and won numerous awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, which he refused, he was also influential throughout his life as a literary critic, biographer, and political activist.
S
aussure,
F
erdinand
de
Authors: Hsu Joanne A.
Published: May 2017

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913), one of the founders of modern linguistics, transformed the discipline's historical and comparative methodologies, grounding them in a structuralist approach that focused on systems and the relations of words within them. He introduced a view of language in which the sign, consisting of a signifier and a signified, constitutes the basic unit of linguistic analysis. By viewing language as a system based on signs, Saussure also defined the foundational principles ofsemiotics. His theory of language, outlined in his
Course in General Linguistics
(1916), so dominated the field in the human sciences that it gave rise both to structuralism and its ongoing critique, poststructuralism.
Aesthetic Theory
Authors: Otty Lisa
Published: May 2017

Aesthetic theory examines the relationship between perceptual, sensory experience and value judgments and raises questions about taste, art, value, and truth. While aesthetic theory is often held to be synonymous with the philosophy of art, its importance extends far beyond this realm. Indeed, as reflection on a fundamental part of human experience, aesthetic theory has consequences for many different discourses, impacting on notions of subjectivity, politics, and ethics. Having fallen out of fashion in the mid‐twentieth century, the field has been brought back to the fore recently and is currently recognized as an area of critical importance in contemporary philosophical inquiry.
A
gamben,
G
iorgio
Authors: Murray Alex
Published: May 2017

The work of Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) has been influential in political philosophy, legal theory, and cultural studies, with his critique of the Western political and juridical traditions gaining him a wide readership in the past 10 years. Yet his work is much broader in scope and his more than 15 book‐length projects have explored a diverse range of areas. His early education saw the influence of Martin Heidegger, whose understanding of the relationship between language and being profoundly influenced Agamben's early work.
A
sian
A
merican Literary Theory
Authors: Mannur Anita
Published: May 2017

The term “Asian American literary theory” describes collective concerns about, on the one hand, aesthetics, literature, and the construction of “Asian American” identity, and on the other, the racial and ethnic politics of Asian American cultural formation. Since its inception, it has systematically problematized the dominant way in which race is understood, especially in the US, by questioning the binary opposition of black and white.
B
adiou,
A
lain
Authors: Murray Alex
Published: May 2017

The work of Alain Badiou (b. 1937) has emerged as one of the most innovative and comprehensive philosophical projects in postwar France. Badiou's work is characterized by a desire to bring about the “return of philosophy itself.” By this Badiou means to introduce an understanding of both subjectivity and ontology, which seeks its foundation in a return to the basic question of philosophy: What is being? Yet this is not done in the name of some sort of analytic formalism, but for largely political ends. Badiou's Maoist heritage and his commitment to a radical collective politics are never far from the surface. He is not simply an academic philosopher and he routinely engages in French and world politics in an accessible and polemical manner, including an introductory book on
Ethics
(2000 [1993]) and
The Meaning of Sarkozy
(2008b) in which he provides a historicization and anatomization of the Sarkozy phenomenon.
Cognitive Studies
Authors: Salisbury Laura
Published: May 2017

Cognitive studies is a mode of critical analysis of literary texts that takes as its basic premise the belief that the mind and its reasoning processes, alongside its cultural products and affective experiences, can be analyzed systematically in terms of underlying biological and evolutionary frameworks. Cognitive science has its roots in research into theories of mind based upon computational procedures from the 1950s, although it emerged as a field of study in its own right in the mid‐1970s. Since that time, work to understand the functional and systematic nature of mental states has developed into a complex intersection of different disciplines, including those of neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, the philosophy of mind, computer science (particularly as it is concerned with artificial intelligence), biology, and sociology. As cognitive science has become an increasingly dominant paradigm for understanding the human, using this knowledge to form ways of interpreting cultural products has also become more influential, with cognitive studies being institutionalized as a distinct branch of literary theory after the establishment of a discussion group on the topic at the Conference of the Modern Language Association in the United States in 1998.
D
errida,
J
acques
Authors: Ryan Michael , Sands Danielle
Published: May 2017

Algerian born philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, is best known for developing “deconstruction,” a critical approach to philosophy that interrogated that philosophy's founding assumptions. Although affirmative as well as critical, Derrida's mode of engagement uses textual analysis initially to critique the Western philosophical tradition, then to displace its conceptual framework toward a new, more complex mode of differential thought. His influences include the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Hegel, and Emanuel Levinas, as well as the writers Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Blanchot. Although the impact of his own work is primarily in philosophy and literary theory, Derrida's influence extends much further, to disciplines including law, religion, architecture, and psychology.
E
agleton,
T
erry
Authors: Grindon Gavin
Published: May 2017

Terry Eagleton is a British literary critic working in the Marxist tradition. His writing has covered a very broad range of topics, including literary theory, Marxism, nineteenth‐century literature, and Irish culture. He was a fellow at both Cambridge and Oxford before moving to Manchester University in 2004. Eagleton was born in 1943 and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. While there, he was a student of another renowned British Marxist, Raymond Williams. Eagleton belongs to the same New Left tradition of English literary Marxist studies, although bringing to it the theoretical concerns of Continental thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser.