Yun Lee Too offers a sustained reading of the social function of the body of texts we identify as 'ancient literary criticism' with major implications for how we understand this discourse and also modern criticism and literary theory. The author argues that when Greek and Roman authors discuss what and how to read in works, they are attempting to create and maintain the political community and its identity by regulating the languages available to it. Literary criticism is a process of discrimination between competing discourses, serving as a strategy by which certain forms of speech or writing may be pronounced legitimate at the expense of others. The volume traces ancient criticism from its origins in archaic Greek poetry through to the early Christian era. As well as reading the familiar texts of ancient criticism - Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, [Longinus] On the Sublime, amongst others - it shows how ancient law, history, and rhetoric participate in the critical process.

This book focuses on the practice and pedagogical value of rhetorical reading. Its readings follow an itinerary from poetic texts (such as those by Wordsworth and Keats) through theoretical or philosophical texts (by Descartes and Nietzsche) to narrative

Mezzaluna gathers work from Michele Leggott's nine books of poetry. As reviewer David Eggleton writes: "Leggott shows us that the ordinary is full of marvels which... stitched, flow together into sequences and episodes that in turn form an ongoing serial, or bricolage: a single poem, then, rejecting exactness, literalism, naturalism in favor of resonance, currents, patterns of ebb and flow." In complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision, Leggott creates lush textured soundscapes. Her poetry covers a wide range of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal. She focuses on appearance and disappearance as modes of memory, familial until we lose sight of that horizon line and must settle instead for a series of intersecting arcs. Leggott writes with tenderness and courage about the paradoxes of losing her sight and remaking the world in words.

Ontology and the Art of Tragedy is a sustained reflection on the principles and criteria from which to guide one's approach to Aristotle's Poetics. Its scope is twofold: historical and systematic. In its historical aspect it develops an approach to Aristotle's Poetics, which brings his distinctive philosophy of being to bear on the reception of this text. In its systematic aspect it relates Aristotle's theory of art to the perennial desiderata of any theory of art, and particularly to Kandinsky's.

On Interpretation challenges a number of entrenched assumptions about being and knowing that have long kept theorists debating at cross purposes. Patrick Colm Hogan first sets forth a theory of meaning and interpretation and then develops it in the context of the practices and goals of law, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism. In his preface, Hogan discusses developments in semantics and related fields that have occurred over the decade since the book first appeared.

Novel Definitions captures the lively critical debate surrounding the invention of the English novel, showing how the rise of the novel is accompanied by a rise in popular literary criticism. The over 135 pieces here, many newly-discovered, include essays, prefaces, reviews, and sermons written by authors ranging from Aphra Behn to Walter Scott. Novel Definitions brings together authors' commentary on their work; debates concerning the novel’s formal qualities and cultural position, including who should read novels; reviewers' definitions of the qualities that make a novel successful; and literary historians' first attempts to write the history of the novel.

This volume begins with an extended discussion of Jenson's methodology, and addresses questions on the nature of the Christian God, including the classic christological and trinitarian questions.

Explores diverse cultural identities, both theoretically and through concrete, specific interpretations of selected major texts from former British colonies.