Books by Catherine Belsey

This book traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. It draws on examples from across our culture to explain how poststructuralism explores the relationship between human beings, the world, and the practice of making and reproducing meanings.

In these essays, collected here for the first time, renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, she demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant's perspective, of some of its key implications. Written with verve and conviction, this book shows how texts can offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice.

Why is Shakespeare as highly regarded now as he ever has been? This book's answer to this question counters claims that Shakespeare's iconic status is no more than an accident of history. The plays, Belsey argues, entice us into a world we recognize by retelling traditional fairy tales with a difference, each chapter providing a detailed reading.

This book finds a way through often impenetrable recent theories, exploring key concepts of ideology, subjectivity and representation in the various forms put forward by different 'schools' of theorists.

Professor Belsey's explains the views of recent theorists, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, in order to take issue with their accounts of what it is to be human.

The second edition of this highly successful anthology makes available to the feminist reader a collection of essays which does justice to the range and diversity, as well as to the eloquence and the challenge of recent feminist critical theory and practice.