*APPROVED*
Interdisciplinary collection exploring the inseparability of 'theory' and 'practice' in critical thinking
New Critical Thinking introduces the reader to different ways of thinking about criticism and offers new approaches to interdisciplinary reading. The twelve chapters in this volume introduce new areas of critical thinking which go beyond the standard 'isms' and offer a timely intervention in the debate around the crisis in the humanities, in the understanding and reassessment of the idea of modernity as well as the need for a return to close reading. Each essay starts from a dual premise: the personal experience of reading and the necessity of beginning any critical act through a close reading of that text, however theoretically informed the reading may be. New Critical Thinking resists the conventions of assigning a single theory to a given act of reading; instead, it reintroduces the significance of transforming critical engagement through a challenging, adventurous series of arguments that question implicitly the institutional status quo of the critical act, while imagining a criticism to come that exceeds the programmed work of the mechanical application of literary theory.
Key Features
. Presents cutting-edge debates for more advanced students in an engaging and sophisticated way
. Provides a wide range of 'case studies' including poetry, film, reading devices, popular fiction and non-fiction prose
. Reflects newly emerging ways of teaching critical ideas in the classroom
. Opens criticism to dialogue and possibility
Julian Wolfreys is the author and editor of more than 40 books on literary theory and nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Literature. His most recent publications are two collections of poetry, Draping the Sky for a Snowfall (2016) and The Grand European Bestiary (2016).
Cover image: Julian Wolfreys
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ISBN (cover): 978-0-7486-9964-3
ISBN (PPC): 978-0-7486-9966-7
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Julian Wolfeys is Professor of English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, where he is also Director of the Centre for Studies in LIterature. He is author and editor of more than 40 books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature and literary theory. Most recently he has published Dickens's London and The Derrida Wordbook, both with Edinburgh University Press. He recently published his first novel, Silent Music.

Introduction: New Critical Thinking, to Read so as to Become Acquainted, Julian Wolfreys; 1. Turnings and Re-Turnings, Mary Ann Caws; 2. 'Peering into the dark machinery': Modernity, Perception, and the Self in John Burnside's Poetry, Monika Szuba; 3. Modernity's Sylvan Subjectivity, from Gainsborough to Gallaccio, Catherine Bernard; 4. Little Did They Know: Toward an Experiential Approach, Sarah Pardon; 5. 'The Heart cannot forget / Unless it contemplates / What it declines': Emily Dickinson, Frank Ankersmit, and the Art of Forgetting, Páraic Finnerty; 6. Reading Microhistory: Three Layers of Meaning, Anton Froeyman; 7. Writing Fiction, Making History: Historical Narrative and the Process of Creating History, Christine Berberich; 8. Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics, Kelly Oliver; 9. A Norwegian Abroad: Camilla Collett's Travelogues from Berlin to Paris, Tone Selboe; 10. Alfred Jarry's Nietzschean Modernism, Jean-Michel Rabaté; 11. On First Looking into Derrida's Glas, J. Hillis Miller; 12. 'A very black and little Arab Jew': Experience and Experimentation or, Two Words for Jacques Derrida, Julian Wolfreys.