QI: The Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson“To impress friends with your cleverness, beg, borrow or buy John Lloyd and John Mitchinson’s The Book of General Ignorance, an extraordinary collection of 230 common misperceptions compiled for the BBC panel game QI (Quite Interesting).”
—Financial Times

“This book would make even Edison feel small and silly, for it offers answers to questions you never thought to ask or had no need of asking as you already knew, or thought you knew, the answer.”
—The Economist

This volume in The History of Literary Criticism brings together a wide range of highly informative essays on developments in literary criticism and theory during the twentieth century. The main focus is on historical, philosophical and sociocultural approaches to literature and it offers both authoritative treatments of the topics under review and a lively sense of engagement and dialogue among the contributors. It has a full bibliographical apparatus and provides an invaluable resource for readers who are seeking to orient themselves in this complex and often bewildering field.

Volume 8 of The History of Literary Criticism (the second to be published) deals with the most hotly debated areas of literary theory, including Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Semiotics, and Hermeneutics. Also incorporating a reflective chapter by Richard Rorty on Deconstruction, and culminating in accounts of the reader-oriented criticism of critics such as Stanley Fish, this is the first book to engage systematically with the history of the twentieth century's most profound and extensive set of cross-cultural intellectual movements.

his volume provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats), continuing with the New Critics (Richards, Empson, Burke, Winters), and feeding into the influential work of Leavis, Trilling and others. The book provides a companion to the other twentieth-century volumes of The  History of Literary Criticism, and offers a systematic and stimulating coverage of the development of the key literary-critical movements, genres, and individual critics.

This is the most comprehensive account to date of the history of literary criticism in Britain and Europe between 1660 and 1800. Unlike previous histories, it is not just a chronological survey, but a multi-disciplinary study of how the understanding of literature in the modern era was shaped by developments in intellectual, cultural and social history. It provides an authoritative historical overview in all areas of literary studies. Extensive bibliographies supply detailed guidance for further research.