Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (‘imitation’), hamartia (‘error’), and katharsis (‘purification’). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.Malcolm Heath’s lucid English translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. It is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail and includes suggestions for further reading.

    Indeed it was with a Salon review that he made his literary debut: and it is significant that even at this early stage - in 1845 - he was already articulating the need for a painter who could depict the heroism of modern life. This he was to find in Constantin Guys, whom he later celebrated in the famous essay which provides the title-piece for this collection. Other material in this volume includes important and extended studies of three of Baudelaire's contemporary heroes - Delacroix, Poe and Wagner - and some more general articles, such as those on the theory and practice of caricature, and on what Baudelaire, with intentional scorn, called philosophic art. This last article develops views only touched on in Baudelaire's other writings. This volume is extensively illustrated with reproductions of works referred to in the text and otherwise relevant to it. It provides a survey of some of the most important ideas and individuals in the critical world of the great poet who has been called the father of modern art criticism.

    Published originally in 1881, The Critic As Artist is one of Oscar Wilde's major aesthetic statements.

    Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

    Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

    Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaces them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times. Reflections the companion volume to this book, is also available as a Schocken paperback.Unpacking My Library, 1931The Task of the Translator, 1913The Storyteller, 1936Franz Kafka, 1934Some Reflections on Kafka, 1938What Is Epic Theater?, 1939On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939The Image of Proust, 1929The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Theses on the Philosophy of History, written 1940, pub. 1950

    We cannot refer to ?the tradition? or to ?a tradition?; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is ?traditional? or even ?too traditional.? Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing arch?ological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of arch?ology. Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are ?more critical? than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet?s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity."

    Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opens up appreciation of Heidegger beyond the study of philosophy to the reaches of poetry and our fundamental relationship to the world. Featuring "The Origin of the Work of Art," a milestone in Heidegger's canon, this enduring volume provides potent, accessible entry to one of the most brilliant thinkers of modern times.

    Borges's writings are models of succinct power; by temperament and by artistic ambition, he was a minimalist, given to working his wonders on the smallest scale possible. A master of fiction, Borges never published a novel -- or even, it seems, felt the lure of attempting one. He professed a heartfelt conservative piety for the older literary forms, for the saga and epic, the lyric and tale, but he made radically inventive uses of the traditional forms in his own literary labors.Borges possessed an uncommon complement of gifts. He was capable of launching startling, even unnerving flights of cerebral fantasy or metaphor but owned a first-rate mind and a critical intelligence entirely at ease with the metaphysical abstractions of the philosophers and theologians. All the same, in his intellectual bearing Borges was a skeptic, critical of but not disparaging or cynical toward the truth claims of systematic philosophical or religious thought. He was at once a genuine artist and a judicious, sympathetic critic.The posthumous publication of This Craft of Verse, Borges's 1967 Norton Lectures, reacquaints us with his splendid critical faculties. The volume is a welcome gift, too, reminding us of Borges's generous insistence on identifying with his fellow readers, who are ever ready to be transported by their love for literature. (Harvard University Press scheduled release of the remastered recordings for the fall of 2000.) Enough cause, then, to celebrate the recent discovery of these long-stored and forgotten tape recordings of lectures delivered at Cambridge more than three decades ago. By the late 1960s, Borges was quite blind and incapable of consulting notes when delivering an address. The lectures transcribed and collected here -- with their frequent quotations from the European languages, both ancient and modern -- were delivered extemporaneously, performances made possible by Borges's own powers of recollection (which were, it need hardly be said, formidable).In life and in literary manner Borges was a cosmopolitan, his range of reference almost inexhaustibly wide. His reading embraced Homer and Virgil, the Icelandic sagas and Beowulf, Chaucer and Milton, Rabelais and Cervantes, Kafka and Joyce. This Craft of Verse addresses issues central to the art of poetry: essential metaphors, epic poetry, the origins of verse, and poetic meaning. The lectures conclude with a statement of Borges's own "poetic creed." This slim but profound volume, however, ranges much farther afield. Borges serves up intriguing asides on the novel, on literary criticism and history, and on theories of translation. Ultimately, his comments touch on the largest questions raised by literature and language and the thornier puzzles of human communication.The lectures convey Borges's evident delight in English and his eloquence and ease in the language, even when facing a distinguished audience of native English speakers. But perhaps that is not so surprising, after all, for Borges carried on a lifelong love affair with the English language and the literatures of the British Isles and North America. His parents, who were fluent in English, introduced Borges to the language when he was a young boy, and Borges was allowed the run of his father's extensive library of English classics. Among the bookshelves of his father's study he first encountered authors he would admiringly cite over a long literary life: Wells and Kipling and Chesterton and Shaw, to name only a few. And the study of Old English became a hobby to which Borges remained passionately devoted until his death. The English language he counted as his second (and perhaps even preferred) home.Since the 1960s, when the then relatively obscure Buenos Aires writer was first introduced to English-speaking readers in translations of the classic Ficciones and the anthology Labyrinths, it has been apparent that Borges survives the ordeal of translation without obvious loss. His power remains intact on the page. This he owes to the virtues of his prose style, to the elegant simplicity and naturalness that, as the transcribed Norton Lectures demonstrate, were indistinguishable from the man. Borges's style is classical: concise, understated, cleanly cadenced, strict in its devotion to the old-fashioned values of clarity and logical order. Whether in his native Spanish or in his adopted English, Borges is a writer and lecturer who impresses us with his singular intellectual wit, charm, and refinement.This Craft of Verse makes an exquisite addition to a distinguished series and offers, moreover, invaluable insights into the mind and work of a true modern master. Between its covers, this small book holds the pleasures of the modest, warm voice of a writer who stands unquestionably with the strongest literary talents of the 20th century.--Gregory Tietjen, Academic & Scholarly Editor

    Describing the silliness and feminine fatuity of many popular books by lady novelists, George Eliot perfectly skewers the formulaic yet bestselling works that dominated her time, with their loveably flawed heroines.Essay first published for Westminster Review in 1856.

    Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become 'real' at all" writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of "the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things."

    The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accesible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their applications demonstrated.Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspiring writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.Beginning (Jane Austen, Ford Madox Ford) --The intrusive author (George Eliot, E.M. Forster) --Suspense (Thomas Hardy) --Teenage Skaz (J.D. Salinger) --The epistolary novel (Michael Frayn) --Point of view (Henry James) --Mystery (Rudyard Kipling) --Names (David Lodge, Paul Auster) --The stream of consciousness (Virginia Woolf) --Interior monologue (James Joyce) --Defamiliarization (Charlotte Bronte) --The sense of place (Martin Amis) --Lists (F. Scott Fitzgerald) --Introducing a character (Christopher Isherwood) --Surprise (William Makepeace Thackeray) --Time-shift (Muriel Spark) --The reader in the text (Laurence Sterne) --Weather (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens) --Repetition (Ernest Hemingway) --Fancy prose (Vladimir Nabokov) --Intertextuality (Joseph Conrad) --The experimental novel (Henry Green) --The comic novel (Kingsley Amis) --Magic realism (Milan Kundera) --Staying on the surface (Malcolm Bradbury) --Showing and telling (Henry Fielding) --Telling in different voices (Fay Weldon) --A sense of the past (John Fowles). Imagining the future (George Orwell) --Symbolism (D.H. Lawrence) --Allegory (Samuel Butler) --Epiphany (John Updike) --Coincidence (Henry James) --The unreliable narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro) --The exotic (Graham Greene) --Chapters etc. (Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Sil Walter Scott, George Eliot, James Joyce) --The telephone (Evelyn Waugh) --Surrealism (Leonora Carringotn) --Irony (Arnold Bennett) --Motivation (George Eliot) --Duration (Donald Barthelme) --Implication (William Cooper) --The title (George Gissing) --Ideas (Anthony Burgess) --The non-fiction novel (Thomas Carlyle) --Metafiction (John Barth) --The uncanny (Edgar Allen Poe) --Narrative structure (Leonard Michaels) --Aporia (Samuel Beckett) --Ending (Jane Austen, William Golding)

    Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, is a collection of thematically related essays that trace the connection between imperialism and culture throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

    Although his private life shocked his contemporaries his poetry was immensely popular and influential, especially in Europe. This comprehensive edition includes the complete texts of his two poetic masterpieces Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, as well as the dramatic poems Manfred and Cain. There are many other shorter poems and part of the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In addition there is a selection from Byron's inimitable letters, extracts from his journals and conversations, as well as more formal writings.

    In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.