Oscar Mandel, Professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology, is the author of numerous acclaimed books of poetry, drama, essays, fiction, literary criticism, translation, and art history.
This groundbreaking collection brings the range and diversity of post-Jungian thought into the realm of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. These essays explore, expand, critique, and apply post-Jungian critical theory as they revisit and reread Jung's own writings from numerous perspectives.
This new edition of the classic guide offers a thorough and accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory. It provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African-American criticism, and postcolonial criticism.
Volume 1 of The History of Literary Criticism focuses on criticism in the Classical period up to about A.D. 325. This first survey examines the beginnings of critical consciousness in Greece, including the functions of poetry and the role of poets in early Greek society, and continues with authoritative discussion of the critical writings of Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic scholars. It examines Roman figures including Horace, Cicero, Quintilian and Tacitus, and also considers Greek critics of the Augustan and imperial periods such as Longinus, and the neo-platonic, Christian and grammatical writers of later antiquity.
Romanticism and the Rise of English addresses a peculiar development in contemporary literary criticism: the disappearance of the history of the English language as a relevant topic. Elfenbein argues for a return not to older modes of criticism, but to questions about the relation between literature and language that have vanished from contemporary investigation.
