Literary criticism once had an outsize reach, influencing the terms and concepts of disciplines like art and legal studies. With it came an outsize ego. During the 1970s and 80s, the heyday of ...

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, ...

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 ...

“Criticism,” according to Northrop Frye, “is badly in need of an organizing principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as ...

The truly interesting thing about those articles, however, is that they demonstrate the huge gap between the new literary criticism taking place online and the media’s ability to respond to it. In ...

The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two ...

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 ...