Books in the Readers in Cultural Criticism series

A new kind of writing about Irish culture has emerged in recent years, the best examples of which are gathered in this volume.

Questions about how and why we read the past continue to demand the attention of cultural critics. Reading the Past introduces key debates about history, historiography, and historicism which have transformed approaches to the past in departments of History and Literature.

These are just some of the questions that are explored in this book. Postmodern Debates introduces modernity, postmodernism and postmodernity through a series of debates between prominent thinkers in literary theory, philosophy and cultural studies.

What is posthumanism and why does it matter? This reader offers an introduction to the ways in which humanism's belief in the natural supremacy of the Family of Man has been called into question at different moments and from different theoretical positions. Can posthumanism have a politics - post-colonial or feminist?

What do we mean when we talk about 'the body'? The essays collected here foreground the historical construction of 'the body' throughout a range of discourses from the modern to the postmodern, and seek to present it not as a biological 'given', but as a contestable signifier in the articulation of identities.