This comprehensive 1997 account of eighteenth-century literary criticism is now available in paperback.

This is a comprehensive 1997 account of the history of literary criticism in Britain and Europe between 1660 and 1800. Unlike previous histories, it is not just a chronological survey of critical writing, but a multidisciplinary investigation of how the understanding of literature and its various genres was transformed, at the start of the modern era, by developments in philosophy, psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, and other disciplines, as well as in society at large. In the process, modern literary theory - at first often implicit in literary texts themselves - emancipated itself from classical poetics and rhetoric, and literary criticism emerged as a full-time professional activity catering for an expanding literate public. The volume is international both in coverage and in authorship. Extensive bibliographies provide guidance for further specialised study.

Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (the second to be published) deals with the most hotly debated areas of literary theory, including Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Semiotics, and Hermeneutics. Also incorporating a reflective chapter by Richard Rorty on Deconstruction, and culminating in accounts of the reader-oriented criticism of critics such as Stanley Fish, this is the first book to engage systematically with the history of the twentieth century's most profound and extensive set of cross-cultural intellectual movements.

The history of the most hotly debated areas of literary theory, including structuralism and deconstruction.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism focuses on criticism in the Classical period up to about A.D. 325. This first survey examines the beginnings of critical consciousness in Greece, including the functions of poetry and the role of poets in early Greek society, and continues with authoritative discussion of the critical writings of Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic scholars. It examines Roman figures including Horace, Cicero, Quintilian and Tacitus, and also considers Greek critics of the Augustan and imperial periods such as Longinus, and the neo-platonic, Christian and grammatical writers of later antiquity.

In the nineteenth century, literary criticism first developed into an autonomous, professional discipline in the universities. This volume provides a comprehensive and authoritative study of the vast field of literary criticism between 1830 and 1914. In over thirty essays written from a broad range of perspectives, international scholars examine the growth of literary criticism as an institution, and the major critical developments in diverse national traditions and in different genres, as well as the major movements of Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism and Decadence. The History offers a detailed focus on some of the era's great critical figures, such as Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine and Matthew Arnold, and includes essays devoted to the connections of literary criticism with other disciplines in science, the arts and Biblical studies. The publication of this volume marks the completion of the monumental Cambridge History of Literary Criticism from antiquity to the present day.

This 1999 volume was the first to explore as part of an unbroken continuum the critical legacy both of the humanist rediscovery of ancient learning and of its neoclassical reformulation. Focused on what is arguably the most complex phase in the transmission of the Western literary-critical heritage, the book encompasses those issues that helped shape the way European writers thought about literature from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century. These issues touched almost every facet of Western intellectual endeavour, as well as the historical, cultural, social, scientific, and technological contexts in which that activity evolved. From the interpretative reassessment of the major ancient poetic texts, this volume addresses the emergence of the literary critic in Europe by exploring poetics, prose fiction, contexts of criticism, neoclassicism, and national developments. Sixty-one chapters by internationally respected scholars are supported by an introduction, detailed bibliographies for further investigation and a full index.

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.

An authoritative and lively account of the development of the genre, by leading experts in the field.

A survey of influential thinkers and their ideas in eighteenth-century British philosophy, science, religion, history, law, and economics.