Robert T. Tally Knihy

A comprehensive guide to Jameson's theoretical project and a convincing argument for the power of dialectical criticism to understand the world today.

Facing an uncertain future and an unstable present, our most urgent task today involves a ruthless critique of all that exists.

Divided into six chapters, each dealing with different aspects of the spatial in literary studies, the book provides: An overview of the spatial turn in literary theory - from modern philosophy and historicism to cartography and literary theory Introductions to the major theorists such as Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, and Mikhail Bakhtin An analysis of spatiality from a variety of perspectives - the writer as map-maker, different literary and critical 'spaces', the concept of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism. As the first guide to the literature and criticism of 'space', this clear and engaging book is essential reading.

Focusing on J.R.R. Tolkien's intricate world-building, this analysis delves into the historical and multicultural dimensions of Middle-earth as seen in his major works. It examines narrative forms and their social implications, alongside Tolkien's philosophical views on history and identity. By integrating Marxist literary theory, the book challenges conventional perspectives on race, class, and morality within Tolkien's narratives. Through close readings and theoretical insights, readers gain a fresh understanding of both Tolkien's creations and their relevance to contemporary issues.

In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and this book presents an array of concrete examples or readings, which also reveal the broad range of geocritical practices.

"In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe's satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe's work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe's life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe's varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice." Amazon.com

A history and examination of dystopia and angst in popular culture that speaks to our current climate of dread. At the dawn of the 20th century, a wide-ranging utopianism dominated popular and intellectual cultures throughout Europe and America. However, in the aftermathof the World Wars, with such canonical examples as Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, dystopia emerged as a dominant genre, in literature and in social thought. The continuing presence and eventual dominance of dystopian themes in popular culture-e.g., dismal authoritarian future states, sinister global conspiracies, post-apocalyptic landscapes, a proliferation of horrific monsters, and end-of-the-world fantasies-have confirmed the degree to which the 21st is also a dystopian century. Drawing on literature as varied as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, and on TV and film such as The Walking Dead, Black Mirror, and The Last of Us, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the landscape of angst created by the monstrous accumulation of dystopian material. The Fiction of Dread provides an innovative reading of contemporary culture and offers an alternative vision for critical theory and practice at a moment when, as has been famously observed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.