It has become quite commonplace, even fashionable, to deride academics for being hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of the reading public. What, many would ask, is so important about a clique ...

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 ...

Self-consciousness, self-reflexivity [1] and metafiction are terms often used to describe a particular characteristic common to postmodern fiction. Robert Alter has defined the “self-conscious novel” ...

University of Oklahoma English professor Leitch (American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s, 2nd edition) offers a spirited defense of literary theory. Defying those who feel criticism is in a ...

“It was perhaps in 1995 or 1996 that I got issued the book titled Postmodern American poets from the library of Islamabad’s American consulate,” writes Amjad Tufail in one of the articles included in ...

The status of literature - its meaning, structure, truth value, and social function - has proven, throughout history, to be surprisingly controversial, and has generated endless commentary. This class ...

Writers and literary academics have never been closer, and never further apart. Since the New Criticism of the 1950s, there have been two developments that should be contradictory but whose agreement ...

With her latest novel, A.S. Byatt returns to some of the elements that made “Possession” a bestseller and Booker Prize winner in 1990: an attempt to unearth the secrets of a dead writer, a parody of ...