Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents

by Dennis Walder (Editor)

A unique combination of English, European, feminist, and "New Writing" essays on literary studies from the 1920s to the 1980s, this book sheds new light on the main theoretical issues involved in the study of modern literary texts. The book includes the views of leading critics and theorists
such as Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling, as well as such renowned writers as W.H. Auden, Umberto Eco, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, and Virginia Woolf. Focusing on major critical topics--genre, interpretation, history and criticism, gender, and
race-- Literature in the Modern World provides a critical awareness of the debates likely to dominate future discussions of literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Reference, Criticism, Literature

386 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 1991

Reviews

[David Galloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection of literary criticism essays arranged by each critical school. This was required for my L4 Critical Theory course at Uni. Here are the essays from which I was greatly impacted in one way or another:

Terry Eagleton - Literature and the Rise of English
Stanley Fish - Interpreting the Variorum
Robert Scholes - Who Cares About the Text (a rebuke of Fish)
Geoffrey Hartman - The Interpreter's Freud
Seymour Chatman - Story and Narrative
Umberto Eco - Semiotics of Theatrical Performance
Terry Eagleton - Marxist Criticism
Pierre Macherey - The Text Says What it Does Not Say
Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author (one of the most controversial essays in the humanities)
Simone de Beauvoir - Woman and the Other
Helene Cixous - The Laugh of the Medusa
Edward Said - The Discourse of the Orient
Seamus Heaney - Englands of the Mind
T.S. Eliot - What is a Classic?

Along with Rifkin & Ryan's 'Literary Theory: An Anthology' the budding theorist would have the bulk of a decent library with two volumes.