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 ...

Proposals are requested for a forthcoming number of the Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, to be published by Bucknell University Press/Associated Universities Press ...

For all the debates that have roiled literature departments over the past 60 years, the history of the discipline itself is a source of surprising consensus. According to the standard narrative, ...

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 ...

“C riticism” is a curiously protean word. In academic discourse, as in ordinary speech, it can refer simply to the act of appraisal, sometimes with a censorious edge. It’s used to describe reviews, ...

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” — ...

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 contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige. The 68th National Book Awards at Cipriani Wall Street, 2017. On Friday, ...

John Guillory’s “Cultural Capital,” published amid the 1990s canon wars, became a classic. In a follow-up, “Professing Criticism,” he takes on his field’s deep funk. By Jennifer Schuessler Thirty ...