The Structure of Literary Understanding

This is a paperback edition of what has become an important contribution to aesthetics and the theory of literature. The author analyses in detail how the reader responds to literature and how he begins to evaluate it. Mr Olsen characterizes literature as an institution and thus forges links with contemporary philosophy which sees all human action as ordered and defined by social institutions.

"Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire" surveys the world's greatest literature about empires and imperialism, written by citizens of these empires and the colonized people who lived under their rule. More than 200 A-to-Z entries examine authors, classic works, themes, and concepts, all related to particular empires in history or the general topics of imperialism and colonialism. These concepts are increasingly important to literary studies today, and this new book will be a welcome addition for high school and college students interested in this literary movement.

Writing can seriously damage your health - not to mention your relationships, your bank account and your career prospects. Here is a book that tells writers how to survive and prosper while struggling to make sense of the mad worlds of publishing, theatre, television and film. The early chapters help you to clarify your ideas about what you hope to achieve as a writer - money, fame or literary reputation; they also provide a realistic assessment of your chances of achieving those aims.

What happened to beauty?  How did the university literature classroom turn into a seminar on politics? Focusing on such writers as Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, and James Merrill, this book examines what has been lost to literature as a discipline, and to literary criticism as a practice, as a result of efforts to reduce the aesthetic to the ideological.  Green-Lewis and Soltan celebrate the return of beauty as a subject in its own right to literary studies, a return all the more urgent given beauty’s ability to provide not merely consolation but a sense of order and control in the context of a threatening political world.

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.