Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...

For all the debates that have roiled literature departments over the past 60 years, the history of the discipline itself is a source of surprising consensus. According to the standard narrative, ...

In The Books That Made Us, Rebecca Bratten Weiss argues that the texts we regard as Christian classics should be studied with ...

J onathan Kramnick’s book Criticism and Truth is more modest than its title suggests. Essentially an apologia for the nuts-and-bolts work of literary studies, it is best described not as “ambitious” — ...

I WANT to talk about the historical interpretation of literature — that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic, and political aspects. To begin with, it will be worth while ...

Literature is important, not so much because it is entertainment but because it brightens our humdrum lives. Journalism – what we read or see every day in the news, or sometimes the narration of ...

After the so-called “end of the great narratives” – according to someone synonymous with the sunset of modernity – the theoretical frameworks founded on the concept of totality have given way to a ...

As theories of literary criticism in Urdu are being maligned and violently discarded, here’s an attempt to unravel the reasons Literary criticism in general and contemporary Urdu criticism in ...