The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
10 best books like The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Frank Kermode): Narrative Discourse, A Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, The Function of Criticism, Anatomy of Criticism, The Rise of the Novel, Updated Edition, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
| Author | Gérard Genette |
| ISBN | 0801492599 |
Gerard Genette, a critic of international stature, here builds a systematic theory of narrative upon an analysis of the writings of Marcel Proust, particularly Remembrance of Things Past. Adopting what is essentially a structuralist approach, the author identifies and names the basic constituents...
A Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
| Author | Janice A. Radway |
| ISBN | 0807848301 |
Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading....
| Author | C.S. Lewis |
| ISBN | 0198812981 |
This book is intended for students of English literature at `A' level and above; general readers interested in a complete history of literature from Middle English to the earlier twentieth century..
| Author | Cleanth Brooks |
| ISBN | 0156957051 |
In my freshman year of college, I remembered reading Brooks' essay on Keats: A Sylvan Historian, I was completely engulfed with Mr. Brooks interpretation of the poem. It gave me a different perspective on how to further analyze Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Moreover, when I read the essay, I felt like I...
| Author | Jonathan Culler |
| ISBN | 0415289890 |
A work of technical skill as well as outstanding literary merit, Structuralist Poetics was awarded the 1975 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. It was during the writing of this book that Culler developed his now famous and remarkably complex theory of poetics and narrative,...
| Author | M.H. Abrams |
| ISBN | 0195014715 |
It's the first time I've had this reaction when reading an 'academic' book: awe and envy. I usually have 2 stock reactions: 1. interesting, but the author's argument was screwed in A and B manner and 2. how did this guy even get his phd?! in a cereal box!?
M.H. Abrams is too good to be anywhere near...
| Author | Terry Eagleton |
| ISBN | 1844670554 |
A history and critique of the last 200 years of cultural criticism, from Addison and Steele to Barthes and Derrida.
This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois society as a central feature of a “public sphere” in which political, ethical, and literary judgements...
| Author | Northrop Frye |
| ISBN | 0691069999 |
Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. Employing examples of world literature from ancient times to...
| Author | Ian P. Watt |
| ISBN | 0520230698 |
The Rise of the Novel is Ian Watt's classic description of the interworkings of social conditions, changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era.
In a new foreword, W. B. Carnochan accounts for the...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0374529272 |
Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust,...
Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism
| Author | Matei Călinescu |
| ISBN | 0822307677 |
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 notion that we, the living, are different and...
| Author | David Lodge |
| ISBN | 0582312876 |
'In our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding body of knowledge in its own right.' (David Lodge)
This new edition of David Lodge's Modern Criticism and Theory is fully revised and expanded to...
Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition,...
A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught...
| Author | Lionel Trilling |
| ISBN | 0151511977 |
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays...
| Author | T.S. Eliot |
| ISBN | 0674931505 |
The 1932-33 Norton Lectures are among the best and most important of Eliot's critical writings. Tracing the rise of literary self-consciousness from the Elizabethan period to his own day, Eliot does not simply examine the relation of criticism to poetry, but invites us to "start with the supposition...
| Author | René Wellek |
| ISBN | 0156890844 |
«باید یقین داشته باشیم که لذت ادبیات لذتی نیست که از میان لذتهای ممکن دیگر برگزیده شده باشد، بلکه لذتی است «والاتر». زیرا محصول کوشش والاتری است که همان...
Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
| Author | Stanley Fish |
| ISBN | 0674467264 |
Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers...
| Author | Tzvetan Todorov |
| ISBN | 0801491460 |
In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between...
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
| Author | Peter Brooks |
| ISBN | 0674748921 |
Più che di lettura, si è trattato di studio appassionato e attento. Matita sempre pronta. Un testo per cultori, studiosi e appassionati. Accademico, serrato, profondo, impegnativo. Entusiasmante. Vi si analizzano a fondo la storia, le tecniche, le ragioni e gli esiti della necessità di una trama,...
| Author | George Steiner |
| ISBN | 0226772349 |
Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication.
"A real tour de force. . . . All the...
| Author | Henry James |
| ISBN | 0684150506 |
This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James's fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing :character, plot, point...
