Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents

This text offers a unique combination of British, European, American and Post-Colonial perspectives on literary study from the 1920s to the present day. Carefully introduced and arranged to highlight the development of debates, it is designed to engage newcomers to the field with some of the main themes and issues that will concern them as readers of modern literary texts of all genres. The book provides material that is exciting, original, and above all accessible, rather than simply representative of a certain critical approach. It includes the views of leading critics such as Terry Eagleton, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Umberto Eco and Paul de Man, as well as the originating voices of writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. In the second edition, there is an increased focus on questions of gender and identity and on recent debates, such as 'Literature and Nation' and 'Literature and Value'. The reach and relevance of the book has been extended, taking a more international voice, focusing on American and European writers and critics.

Table of Contents:
General Introduction Part One: General Approaches I Questioning the Canon Introduction 1: Marylin Butler: Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History 2: Frank Kermode: Canon and Period 3: Terry Eagleton: Literature and the Rise of English 4: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: Women Poets 5: Henry Louis Gates, Jnr.: Literary Theory and the Black Tradition II Interpretation Introduction 1: E. D. Hirsch, Jnr.: The Babel of Interpretations 2: Stanley Fish: Interpreting the Variorium 3: Robert Scholes: Who Cares About the Text? 4: Hans Robert Jauss: Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory 5: Geoffrey Hartman: The Interpreter's Freud III Commitment Introduction 1: Virginia Woolf: To Cambridge Women 2: Jean-Paul Sartre: Writing, Reading, and the Public 3: Theodor Adorno: Commitment 4: Italo Calvino: Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature Part Two: Themes and Issues I Form and Genre Introduction 1: Seymour Chatman: Story and Narrative 2: Umberto Eco: Semiotics of Theatrical Performance 3: Martin Esslin: The Signs of Drama John Barrell: Close Reading II Modernisms Introduction 1: Paul Valery: Remarks on Poetry 2: Gerard Genette: Order in Narrative 3: Robert Scholes: Towards a Semiotics of Literature 4: George Lukacs: The Ideology of Modernism 5: Raymond Williams: Modernism and the Metropolis 6: Bonnie Kime Scott: Gender and Modernism III Literature and Nation Introduction 1: C. L. R. James: Beyond a Boundary 2: Virginia Woolf: Woman and Nationalism 3: Ashis Nandy: The Intimate Enemy 4: Timothy Brennan: The National Longing for Form 5: Salman Rushdie: Imaginary Homelands IV Literature and Ideology Introduction 1: Bertolt Brecht: A Short Organum for the Theatre 2: Terry Eagleton: Marxist Criticism 3: Pierre Macherey: The Text Says What It Does Not Say 4: Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author 5: Michel Foucault: What is an Author? V Literature and Gender Introduction 1: Simone de Beauvoir: Woman and the Other 2: Cora Kaplan: Language and Gender 3: Helene Cixous: Laugh of the Medusa 4: Toni Morrison: Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation 5: Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick: Introduction to Between Men 6: Judith Butler: Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire VI End of Empire Introduction 1: Edward Said: The Discourse of the Orient 2: Seamus Heaney: Englands of the Mind 3: John McGrath: Behind the Cliches of Contemporary Theatre 4: Mary Louise Pratt: From the Victorian Nyanza to the Sheraton San Salvador VII From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial Introduction 1: Frantz Fanon: On National Culture 2: Chinua Achebe: Colonialist Criticism 3: Kamau Brathwaite: History of the Voice 4: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin: Post-Colonial Reconstruction 5: Anne McClintock: The Angel of Progress 6: Stuart Hall: When Was The Post-Colonial? VIII Literature and History Introduction 1: Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History 2: Laurence Lerner: History and Fiction 3: Hayden White: Introduction to Metahistory 4: Jerome McGann: The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method 5: Joseph Brodsky: The Keening Muse 6: George Steiner: The Hollow Miracle 7: Paul de Man: Literary History and Literary Modernity IX Literature and Value Introduction 1: T. S. Eliot: What is a Classic 2: Barbara Hernstein Smith: The Exile of Evaluation

About the Author :
Dennis Walder is Professor of Literature at the Open University and Founding Director of the Literature Department's Colonial and Post-Colonial Research Group. He has published widely on topics ranging from Dickens to V.S. Naipaul.