Recent commentators have portrayed feminist critics as grim-faced ideologues who are destroying the study of literature. Feminists, they claim, reduce art to politics and are hostile to any form of aesthetic pleasure. "Literature After Feminism" is the first work to comprehensively rebut such carica[...]

Contemporary theory is full of references to the modern and the postmodern. How useful are these terms? What exactly do they mean? And how is our sense of these terms changing under the pressure of feminist analysis? In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern[...]

Uses of Literature bridges the gap between literary theory and common-sense beliefs about why we read literature. * Explores the diverse motives and mysteries of why we read* Offers four different ways of thinking about why we read literature - for recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock* Arg[...]