What if every book was worth reading? Not just the books with silver medallions on their covers, but every hardcover featured at Barnes & Noble, every paperback foisted upon you by a friend or a ...

Literary criticism is in deep trouble in the United States today. Aside from a couple of lucid voices (Louis Menand, for instance), what passes for reflection on books and literary themes is generally ...

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” — ...

John Guillory’s “Cultural Capital,” published amid the 1990s canon wars, became a classic. In a follow-up, “Professing Criticism,” he takes on his field’s deep funk. By Jennifer Schuessler Thirty ...

This month’s new releases include ‘Autobiography of Cotton’ by Cristina Rivera Garza, ‘Language as Liberation’ by Toni ...

As a literary critic who says he aims to study books without actually reading them, Franco Moretti has positioned himself as an iconoclast. He has described what most non-academics think of as the ...

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 ...

Mary Poovey, a professor of English and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University, examines a parallel between the foundations of contemporary ...

About a year into my graduate education in English literature, I began to have the vague impression that something wasn't right. Both my peers and most of the faculty, I felt, valued literature at ...

Does reading make you a better person? Will fiction improve your empathy? Can great literature fix your relationship? The publishing industry seems to think so: literary appreciation as self-help is ...