This introduction to social and cultural anthropology has become a modern classic, revealing the rich global variation in social life and culture across the world. Presenting a clear overview of anthropology, it focuses on central topics such as kinship, ethnicity, ritual and political systems, offering a wealth of examples that demonstrate the enormous scope of anthropology and the importance of a comparative perspective. Using reviews of key works to illustrate his argument, for over 25 yea...

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at The Beginning and concluding with The End, chapters range from the familiar, such as Character, Narrative and The Author, to the more unusual, such as Secrets, Pleasure and Ghosts. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royles classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane E...

This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism; and postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism. This ...