Literature in the Modern World

General Introduction; PART ONE: GENERAL APPROACHES; I QUESTIONING THE CANON; Introduction; 1. Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History; 2. Canon and Period; 3. Literature and the Rise of English; 4. Women Poets; 5. Literary Theory and the Black Tradition; II INTERPRETATION; Introduction; 1. The Babel of Interpretations; 2. Interpreting the Variorium; 3. Who Cares About the Text?; 4. Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory; 5. The Interpreter's Freud; III COMMITMENT; Introduction; 1. To Cambridge Women; 2. Writing, Reading, and the Public; 3. Commitment; 4. Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature; PART TWO: THEMES AND ISSUES; I FORM AND GENRE; Introduction; 1. Story and Narrative; 2. Semiotics of Theatrical Performance; 3. The Signs of Drama; Close Reading; II MODERNISMS; Introduction; 1. Remarks on Poetry; 2. Order in Narrative; 3. Towards a Semiotics of Literature; 4. The Ideology of Modernism; 5. Modernism and the Metropolis; 6. Gender and Modernism; III LITERATURE AND NATION; Introduction; 1. Beyond a Boundary; 2. Woman and Nationalism; 3. The Intimate Enemy; 4. The National Longing for Form; 5. Imaginary Homelands; IV LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY; Introduction; 1. A Short Organum for the Theatre; 2. Marxist Criticism; 3. The Text Says What It Does Not Say; 4. The Death of the Author; 5. What is an Author?; V LITERATURE AND GENDER; Introduction; 1. Woman and the Other; 2. Language and Gender; 3. Laugh of the Medusa; 4. Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation; 5. Introduction to Between Men; 6. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire; VI END OF EMPIRE; Introduction; 1. The Discourse of the Orient; 2. Englands of the Mind; 3. Behind the Cliches of Contemporary Theatre; 4. From the Victorian Nyanza to the Sheraton San Salvador; VII FROM COMMONWEALTH TO POST-COLONIAL; Introduction; 1. On National Culture; 2. Colonialist Criticism; 3. History of the Voice; 4. Post-Colonial Reconstruction; 5. The Angel of Progress; 6. When Was The Post-Colonial?;

Dennis Walder is Professor of Literature at the Open University and Founding Director of the Literature Department's Colonial and Post-Colonial Research Group. He has published widely on topics ranging from Dickens to V.S. Naipaul.