The sixteen essays in this volume form a series of related focuses upon various levels and areas of literary criticism. W.K. Wimsatt's assumption is that practice and theory of both the past and the present are integrally related-that there is a...

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant...

Part of T. S. Eliot's lofty standing among 20th-century poets is directly attributable to his vast knowledge and deep appreciation of his literary predecessors. The importance of Eliot's role as an erudite critic of literary and cultural matters cannot...

The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation. Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo...

Brook Thomas explores the new historicism and the challenges posed to it by a postmodern world that questions the very possibility of newness. He considers new historicism's engagement with poststructuralism and locates the former within a tradition of...

This acclaimed collection of essays begins with the title essay and a trip to Nevada, where, in the company of a brand inspector, John McPhee discovers that cattle rustling is not just history.

A fiftieth-anniversary edition of the cult classic of gonzo journalism, hailed as “the best book on the dope decade” (The New York Times Book Review), featuring Ralph Steadman’s original drawings and an introduction by Caity WeaverThe inspiration for the...

These days, who still has a soul? asks Julia Kristeva in her psychoanalytic exploration, New Maladies of the Soul. Hailed by Peter Brooks in the New York Times as "a critic of great psychoanalytic insight," Kristeva reveals to readers a new kind of...

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the...

Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Here...

Winner of the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, Proofs and Theories is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise Glück, whose most recent book of poems, The Wild Iris, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Glück brings to her prose the...

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated...

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from...

Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity—the...

In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant’s 'Critique of Pure Reason', another philosophical treatise - polemical in nature, with a title that consciously and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work - appeared in West Germany. Peter...

"A collection of numerous essays drawn from de Certeau’s writings, Heterologies illustrates the diverse concerns that inform his work. Each essay examines and questions the bases surrounding contemporary reorganization." -

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s...