Literature, Culture and Society, Second Edition
Routledge, London and New York, xii + 336 pp., 2005
As Cultural Studies has grown from its origins on the margins of literary studies, it has tended to discard both literature and sociology in favour of the semiotics of popular culture. Literature, Culture and Society makes a determined attempt to re-establish the connections between literary studies, cultural studies and sociology.
Andrew Milner provides a lucid critical overview of the various theoretical approaches to textual analysis, from hermeneutics to postmodernism, and presents a substantive account of the processes by which literary, film and television texts are produced and consumed.
This new second edition has been fully revised and rewritten. There are entirely new sections on major theorists and critical approaches including Bourdieu, Zizek and psychoanalysis, Moretti and world systems theory. Existing case studies of Genesis, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein and Blade Runner have been updated and there are new case studies of Karel Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Chris Carter's The X-Files and Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.