Lloyd Davis

Tony Thwaites

Warwick Mules

This core textbook offers a concise, direct and easy-to-use introduction to how semiotics can be employed to understand culture. It adopts a practical and versatile approach to cultural analysis, beginning not with an abstract body of theory but with a number of examples of social sign use which are examined critically using basic semiotic terms and concepts to build up the reader's analytic vocabulary in a practical way. This book is designed to be read in several ways. First of all, it offers a structured approach to its subject with successive chapters reconsidering and building upon issues raised in earlier chapters. The layout of the text supports alternative pathways through the material, however. Written principally with the undergraduate student reader in mind, this is the essential research tool for students and lecturers. It is the ideal international starting-point for a very wide range of courses both in cultural and media studies and related subjects such as film studies, literature and sociology.

A Semiotic Approach

Introducing Cultural and Media Studies

Philippa Kelly

Ronald Bedford

Early Modern English Lives examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century autobiographical practices in key contexts and modes of self-representation. Moving between diaries, letters, journals, memoirs, household and personal accounts, and major autobiographical texts, the study explores the social and historical conditions that shaped early modern life-writing. The authors argue that expressions of personal identity, along with the notion of privacy itself, involved an elaborate interplay of generic roles and cultural discourses.

Autobiography and Self-representation, 1500-1660

Early Modern English Lives

Early Modern Autobiography considers the many ways in which autobiographical selves emerged from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, with the aim of understanding the interaction between those individuals' lives and their worlds, the ways in which they could be recorded, and the contexts in which they are read. In addressing this historical arc, the volume develops new readings of significant autobiographical works, while also suggesting the importance of texts and contexts that have rarely been analyzed in detail, enabling the contributors to reflect on, and challenge, some prevailing ideas about what it means to write autobiographically and about the development of notions of self-representation.

Theories, Genres, Practices

Early Modern Autobiography

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents

Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance

This book examines the figure of the virgin, a symbol central to many aspects of society and sexuality in nineteenth-century England, and its effects on the Victorian literary imagination. Studying the virgin as a social, sexual, and literary phenomenon, the volume contributes to current critical accounts of the relations among the body and language, gender, and discourse. These essays explore the ways in which virginity is not a natural ideal but a complex cultural and literary sign. The authors rethink the virginal as a textual counter-example to the idealization of "natural sexuality."

Lloyd Davis

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