New Critical Thinking

Introduces advanced students of literature to the latest critical thinking Following a scene-setting Introduction which reflects on the state of ‘theory’ today, the 11 chapters in this volume introduce new areas of critical thinking which go beyond the standard ‘isms’: Literary Reading in a Digital Age; Critical Making in the Digital Humanities; Thing Theory; Memory Work and Criticism; Body, Objects, Technology; Criticism and ‘The Animal’; Multimodality and Linguistic Approaches to Literary Study; Critical and Creative Practice: Conditions for Success in the Writing Workshop; Affect Theory; Spectrality; Critical Climate Change. A final rounding off chapter on Historicising presents debates around historically oriented criticism, including a ‘round table’ among the contributors. Each chapter also provides a critical ‘case study’ of a text or texts, including poetry writing guides, a Seamus Heaney poem, film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, e-readers and kindles, First World War poetry and prose, steampunk, and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. From ‘Thing Theory’ to animal theory, multimodality to film adaptation, and from acts of reading in a digital age to the creative writing workshop, the volume reflects a radical reorientation in critical modes of thinking. Key Features: Presents cutting-edge debates presented to more advanced students in an engaging yet sophisticated wayProvides a wide range of ‘case studies’ including poetry, film, reading devices, popular fiction & non-fiction proseReflects newly emerging ways of teaching critical ideas in the classroomOpens criticism to dialogue and possibility

Julian Wolfeys is Professor of English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, where he is also Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature. He is author and editor of more than 40 books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature and literary theory. Most recently he has published Dickens’s London and The Derrida Wordbook, both with Edinburgh University Press. He recently published his first novel, Silent Music.