Books in the Language, Discourse, Society series

This book addresses itself to the problem of understanding the relations between psychoanalysis and language not only in terms of contemporary linguistic and philosophical conceptions of language but also in relation to the wider field of the human sciences.

Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of "women" in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social.

We celebrate Jane Austen as the mother of the English realist novel, but have you ever wondered why she insists on giving her mature heroines the 'perfect happiness' that can only be realized in the romance?

This collection features the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars in the UK and US, with contributors including Peter Goodrich, Lorna Hutson, Erica Sheen and David Colclough studying the period of the English Renaissance from the 1520s to the 1660s.

Lecercle draws on the resources of pragmatics, literary theory and the philosophy of language to propose a new theory of literary, but also of face-to-face, dialogue that charts the interaction between the five participants in the fields of dialogue and/or interpretation: author, reader, text, language and encyclopaedia.

Inspired by Baudelaire's art criticism and contemporary theories of emotions, and developing a new aesthetic approach based on the idea that memory and imagination are strongly connected, Lombardo analyzes films by Scorsese, Lynch, Jarmusch and Van Sant as imaginative uses of the history of cinema as well as of other media.

While the arms race of the post-war period has been widely discussed, Purcell explores the under-acknowledged but critical role another kind of 'race' - that is, race as a biological and sociological concept - played within the global and cultural Cold War.

On the basis of a distinctive 'material-cultural' approach to ethics Questions of Conduct puts the case for radically changing the conventional terms of debate on the problem of sexual harassment, and the place of 'citizenship' in socialist political theory and programmes.

In the field of philosophy of language, is there life beyond Chomsky? Deleuze's deep distrust for, and fascination with language provide a positive answer - nothing less than a brand new philosophy of language, where pragmatics replaces structural linguistics, and where the literary text and the concept of style have pride of place.

Richard Robinson examines the representation of shifting European borders in twentieth-century narrative, drawing together an unusual grouping of texts from different national canons and comparing the various ways that fictional settings transmute European placelessness into narrative.

Stokes's Kleinian-based concepts of carving and modelling are analysed in relation to film, arguing that they replace the traditional notions of realism and montage in film theory and provide a set of aesthetics which encompasses mainstream and 'art' cinema.

This collection of essays and articles from Mark Nash, one of the former editors of Screen magazine, explores the classical period of Screen theory and film culture, as well as that of contemporary art.

Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy explains the appeal of reality television in terms of the affective power of the mediated image. In place of common objections that reality TV is 'not real', Misha Kavka argues that the feelings of intimacy engendered by unscripted drama are both real and socially informative.

Ten leading commentators explore the interfaces between art and aesthetics in dialogue with a philosophical text (Theodor Adorno's draft introduction to Aesthetic Theory ), a piece of literary writing (Franz Kafka's A Report to an Academy ), and a major contemporary painting (Gerhard Richter's Betty , 1988).

Your guest at dinner kisses you. What does it mean? Where does it lead? Does kissing necessarily imply more, and if so how much? These and similar questions of amorous ethics and erotic disquisition are central to our everyday intimate public lives and they are the lost object of the law of love, the lex amatoria collated and presented here.