Literary Criticism: A New History

Literary Criticism: A New History
Gary Day

Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9780748615636
March, 2009
Hard Back 352 pages
Price :$95.00

Did you know that Aristotle thought the best tragedies ended happily? Or that the first mention of the motor car in literature was in Boswell's Life of Johnson, written in 1791? In the nineteenth century, it was not unusual for book reviews to be 30,000 words long.
These are just a few of the fascinating facts to be found in this absorbing history of literary criticism. From the Ancient Greeks to the present day, Gary Day gets the scoop on the lives of critics, the times in which they lived, and the problems of interpretation and valuation that have persist throughout the ages. Day questions whether the “theory wars” of recent years have lost sight of literature itself, and makes surprising connections between criticism and a range of subjects, including the growing influence of money.
General readers will appreciate this informative, intriguing, and often provocative account of the history of literary criticism, students will value the clear way in which criticism is put into context, and academics will enjoy the inherent challenge to prevailing views about the current nature of theory.
Gary Day is principal lecturer in English at De Montfort University.

The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays

The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays
Lawrence D. Kritzman

Colombia University Press
ISBN: 9780231119924
June, 2009
Hard Back 240 pages
Price :$29.50 / £20.50

Michel de Montaigne's (1533-1592) Essais was a profound study of human subjectivity. More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Montaigne embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. Through the questions How shall I live? How can I know myself? he explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumatic memories; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the act of anticipating and coping with death.
In this book, Lawrence D. Kritzman traces Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self. For Montaigne, imagination lies at the core of an internal universe that influences both the body and the mind. Imagination is essential to human experience. Although Montaigne recognized that the imagination can confuse the individual, "the fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship.
Kritzman begins with Montaigne's study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death. Kritzman concludes with Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion. His reading demonstrates that the mind's I, as Montaigne envisioned it, sees by imagining that which is not visible, thus offering an alternative to the logical positivism of our age.

Lawrence D. Kritzman is professor of French and comparative literature at Dartmouth and director of the Institute of French Cultural Studies. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford universities and is the author of several books on the French Renaissance. A frequent contributor to the media on French intellectual life, he is also editor of the Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought and the Columbia University Press series European Perspectives.