The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."

As readers, we develop an impression of characters and their settings in a novel based on the author’s description of their physical characteristics and surroundings. This process, known as physiognomy, can be seen throughout history including in the English Realist novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. Vision and Character: Physiognomics and the English Realist Novel offers a study into the physiognomics and aesthetics as presented by some of the best known authors in this genre, like Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. In this highly original approach to the issues of representation, visuality and aesthetics in the nineteenth-century realist novel, and even the question of literary interpretation, Eike Kronshage argues that physiognomics has enabled writers to access their characters’ inner lives without interfering in an authoritative way.

Mieke Bal is one of Europe's leading theorists and critics. Her work within feminist art history and cultural studies provides a fascinating alternative to prevailing thinking in these fields. The essays in this collection include Bal's brilliant analyses of the: Myth of Rembrandt Imagery of Vermeer Baroque of Caravaggio Neo-Baroque of David Reed Culture of the museum Visual representation of rape Closet in Proust Bal brings a keen visual sense to these studies, as well as an understanding of how literature represents visuality and how the ethics and aesthetics present within museums affect the cultural artifacts displayed. In his engaging commentary, eminent art historian Norman Bryson shows how Bal's original approach to the interdisciplinary study of art and visual culture has had wide- reaching influence.

The term “vulnerable realism” can imply two different understandings: one presenting weak realism as incomplete, and mixed with other literary styles; the other bringing realistic vulnerable experience into narration. The second is the key concern of this work, though it does not exclude the first, as it asks questions about realism as such, entering into a polemic with the tradition of literary realism. Realism, then, is not primarily understood as a narrative style, but as a narration that tests the probability of nonhuman vulnerable experience and makes it real. The book consists of three parts. The first presents examples of how realism has been redefined in trauma studies and how it may refer to animal experience. The second explores what is added to the narrative by literature, including the animal perspective (the zoonarrative) and how it is conducted (zoocriticism). The third analyses cultural texts, such as painting, circuses, and memorials, which realistically generate animal vulnerability and provide non-anthropocentric frameworks, anchoring our knowledge in the experience of fragile historical reality.

What is the “real Russia”? What is the relationship between national dreams and kitsch, between political and artistic utopia and everyday existence? Commonplaces of daily living would be perfect clues for those seeking to understand a culture. But all who write big books on Russian life confess their failure to get properly inside Russia, to understand its “doublespeak.” Svetlana Boym is a unique guide. A member of the last Soviet Generation, the Russian equivalent of our Generation X, she grew up in Leningrad and has lived in the West for the past thirteen years. Her book provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and everywhere stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, Boym conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality. Armed with a Dictionary of Untranslatable Terms, we step around Uncle Fedia asleep in the hall, surrounded by a puddle of urine, and enter the Communal Apartment, the central exhibit of the book. It is the ruin of the communal utopia and a unique institution of Soviet daily life; a model Soviet home and a breeding ground for grassroots informants. Here, privacy is forbidden; here the inhabitants defiantly treasure their bits of “domestic trash,” targets of ideological campaigns for the transformation (perestroika) of everyday life. Against the Russian and Soviet myths of national destiny, the trivial, the ordinary, even the trashy, take on a utopian dimension. Boym studies Russian culture in a broad sense of the word; she ranges from nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual thought to art and popular culture. With her we go walking in Moscow and Leningrad, eavesdrop on domestic life, and discover jokes, films, and TV programs. Boym then reflects on the 1991 coup that marked the end of the Soviet Union and evoked fin-de-siècle apocalyptic visions. The book ends with a poignant reflection on the nature of communal utopia and nostalgia, on homesickness and the sickness of being home.

This book of ten original essays provides a showcase of currently diverse theoretical agendas in the field of international relations. Contributors address the theoretical analysis that their perspective brings to the issue of change in global politics. Written for readers with a general interest in and knowledge of world affairs, New Thinking in International Relations Theory can also be assigned in international relations theory courses.The volume begins with an essay on the classical tradition at the end of the Cold War. Essays explore work outside the mainstream, such as Jean Bethke Elshtain on feminist theory and James Der Derian on postmodern theory as well as those developing theoretical advances within traditional realms from James DeNardo's formal modeling to the more descriptive analyses of Miles Kahler and Steve Weber. Other essays include Matthew Evangelista on domestics structure, Daniel Deudney on naturalist and geopolitical theory, and Joseph Grieco on international structuralist theory.

The argument presented in this book is that the recent ‘spiritual’ trajectory of Roy Bhaskar’s work, upon which he first embarked with the publication of his From East to West, undermines the fundamental achievements of his earlier work. The problem with Bhaskar’s new philosophical system (Transcendental Dialectical Critical Realism or simply Meta-Reality), from the critical-realist Marxist perspective endorsed here, is that it marks both a departure from and a negation of the earlier concerns of Bhaskar to develop a realist philosophy of science and under-labour for an emancipatory materialist socio-historical science. The end-result is a meta-philosophy which is irrealist, speculative, under-theorized, internally self-contradictory, and which cannot provide philosophical guidance to liberatory social practices. In opposition to theist ontological logics more generally (including the rather more rational theism presented by Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Doug Porpora), the argument of this book is that the earth-bound materialist dialectics of the classical Marxist tradition, and the naturalistic humanism these dialectics under-labour on the terrain of socio-historical being, offer a much more promising way forward for critical realist theory and for liberatory politics and ethics.