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Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book's discussion is a series of underlying questions: What is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose? Fry engages with the major themes and strands in twentieth-century literary theory, among them the hermeneutic circle, New Criticism, structuralism, linguistics and literature, Freud and fiction, Jacques Lacan's theories, the postmodern psyche, the political unconscious, New Historicism, the classical feminist tradition, African American criticism, queer theory, and gender performativity. By incorporating philosophical and social perspectives to connect these many trends, the author offers readers a coherent overall context for a deeper and richer reading of literature.
Where others have oriented Wordsworth towards ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or - more recently - political repression, Paul H. Fry argues that underlying all this is a more fundamental insight - Wordsworth is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities, but rather that it simply exists.
A Defense of Poetry argues that literature can be defined - pragmatist and historicist arguments notwithstanding - and that in its definition its unique value can be discovered. In qualified opposition to the most sophisticated Formalist definitions involving redundancy or economy of expression, the author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the "ostensive moment" that discloses neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but existence itself, revealed in its nonhuman register.
Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.
Discussing such major themes and strands in 20th-century literary theory as hermeneutics, modes of formalism and Marxist and historicist approaches, the author, incorporating philosophical and social perspectives on these trends, offers a deeper and richer reading of literature. Original.
This accessible collection of essays provides an essential introduction to the volume of poetry that defined British Romanticism.
This book provides the essential contexts for an understanding of all aspects of the major English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.
The history of the most hotly debated areas of literary theory, including structuralism and deconstruction.
Lament for America explores the major challenges to the status of the United States as a world superpower. In delving into the fundamental question of whether or not a relative decline is inevitable, the author recognizes that the changes faced over the next few decades will be more rapid and transformational than at any other period in American history. Lament for America offers concrete recommendations for renewal in areas such as defense policy, health care, education, and the environment, and serves as a useful guide to understanding how decisions will shape both the U.S. and global landscapes.
02 The most comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory from Plato to the present, with a highly praised critical apparatus, including introductions, headnotes, bibliographies, and glosses.