Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of "themes" in texts and how they…
"The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics revisits the work and place of eight scholars roughly contemporary with Anglo-American New Criticism: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Beguin, Jean Rousset, C.S. Lewis, F.O. Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. First, W…
The Limits of Literary Historicism is a collection of essays arguing that historicism, which has come to dominate the professional study of literature in recent decades, has become ossified. By drawing attention to the limits of historicism--its blind spots, overreach, and reluc…
Expectation is a major volume of Jean-Luc Nancy's writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English. More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature's relation to philosophy. Na…