J onathan Kramnick’s book Criticism and Truth is more modest than its title suggests. Essentially an apologia for the nuts-and-bolts work of literary studies, it is best described not as “ambitious” — ...

I WANT to talk about the historical interpretation of literature — that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic, and political aspects. To begin with, it will be worth while ...

“Criticism,” according to Northrop Frye, “is badly in need of an organizing principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as ...

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...

In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response to Raymond Picard, a distinguished professor and the biographer of the French classical ...

Anyone who has taught a college literature course has likely heard a student say, “Can’t I just enjoy the book?” This frustration with literary theory is common. Many undergraduates feel that theory ...

Comparative Literature Studies publishes comparative critical essays that range across the rich traditions of Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America, and that examine the literary relations ...

They fear, with some justification, that the new national English curriculum framework to be hammered out by committee chairman Peter Freebody is fated to become a branch of communications and ...

After the so-called “end of the great narratives” – according to someone synonymous with the sunset of modernity – the theoretical frameworks founded on the concept of totality have given way to a ...