Annoted Bibliography of Criticism & Theory

Robert ALTER, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), The Art of Biblical Poetry (1987).

A. ALVAREZ, The New Poetry (1962). This is an anthology of British poetry. In the introduction Alvarez rejects the gentility of the Movement and British verse in the 1950s.
Matthew ARNOLD, Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888), Culture and Anarchy, An Essay in Political and Social Criticism(1869).
Erich AUERBACH, Mimesis (1945).

J.L. AUSTIN, How to do Things with Words (1962).
Irving BABBIT, Literature and the American College (1908) emphasized the ethical component of art, and his ideas influenced T.S. Eliot, who studied under him at Harvard.

Roland BARTHES, Mythologies (1957).

F.W. BATESON, English Poetry and the English Language(1934) and English Poetry: A Critical introduction (1950) emphasize historical and linguistic contexts when studying texts. The Scholar-Critic (1972) insisted on high standards of historical and linguistic scholarship. Essays in Critical Dissent (1972).
Walter BENJAMIN, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), Illuminations (1955).

Eric BENTLEY, The Playwright as Thinker (1946), In Search of Theater ( ), The Life of Drama (1975).

R.P. BLACKMUR, Language as Gesture (1952).

Allan BLOOM, The Closing of the American Mind (1987) is a conservative assessment that scolds Americans for their renunciation of the traditional life of the mind.
Harold BLOOM, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) discusses how writers react to the weight of literary tradition.  The Western Canon (1994).

David BROMWICH, Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (2001).

Cleanth BROOKS, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939),The Well-Wrought Urn (1947).
Sterling BROWN, The Negro in American Fiction (1937), Negro Poetry and Drama (1939).
Seymour CHATMAN, Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics (1975).
Noam CHOMSKY, Language and Problems of Knowledge(1987).

Frederick CREWS, Skeptical Engagements (1986), The Critics Bear it Away (1992).

Jonathan CULLER, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (1975).
Guy DAVENPORT, The Geography of the Imagination (1997) notes the ways time and cultural setting weigh on the writer.
Jacques DERRIDA, Of Grammatology (tr. 1977): “There is nothing outside the text.”
Michel DE CERTEAU, The Practice of Everyday Life(tr.1984).
Paul DE MAN, Blindness and Insight (2nd ed., 1985).

Denis DONAGHUE, England, Their England (1988).
C.C. ELDRIDGE, The Imperial Experience (1996).

T.S. ELIOT, Selected Essays (1950).
William EMPSON, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Using Biography (1984).

Leslie FIELDER, Love and Death in the American Novel (2nd ed., 1992).

Stanley FISH
Michel FOUCAULT, The Archaeology of Knowledge (tr. 1972).

Joseph FRANK, The Widening Gyre (1963).

Northrup FRYE, Anatomy of Criticism (1957) divides literature into four categories/seasons: comedy/spring; romance/summer; tragedy/autumn; irony/winter.
Sandra GILBERT and Susan GUBAR, The Mad Woman in the Attic: 19th Century Literature (1980).
Stephen GREENBLATT, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) is a New Historicist approach that sees literature as political expression and discourse.

Elizabeth HARDWICK, Seduction and Betrayal (1974).

Geoffrey HARTMAN, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (1981), Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text (1985),  The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004).

William HAZLITT, The Spirit of the Age (1904).

Martin HEIDEGGER

Geoffrey HILL, Collected Critical Writings (2008).

John HOLLANDER, Rhyme's Reason: a guide to English Verse (1981).
Roman JAKOBSON, On Language (1990).
Frederic JAMESON

Randall JARRELL, Poetry and the Age (1955).

Pauline KAEL, I Lost it at the Movies (1994).

Alfred KAZIN, On Native Ground (1942), An American Procession (1984).

Hugh KENNER, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (1988), A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (1983).

Frank KERMODE, Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of An Ending (1968), Pieces of my Mind (2003).

G. Wilson KNIGHT, The Wheel of Fire (1930) concentrated on the spatial dimension of Shakespeare plays, viewing them as expanded poetic metaphors. Knight’s work influenced F.R. Leavis.

D.H. LAWRENCE, Studies in American Literature (reprint, 1964), Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers (1936).

F.R. LEAVIS, Revaluation (1936), The Great Tradition (1948), The Common Pursuit (1953).

Mary McCARTHY, On the Contrary ( ).

H. L. MENCKEN, The American Language (1919).

J. HILLIS MILLER
John MIDDLETON MURRY
Martha C. NUSSBAUM, Poetic Justice (1966) suggests that reading great works makes readers more critical citizens.

George ORWELL, Collected Essays (1961) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1970).

Camille PAGLIA, Sexual Personae (1990).

Richard POIRIER, The Performing Self (1971), The Renewal of Literature (1987).

Vladimir PROPP, Morphology of the Folktale (tr. 1968).
John Crowe RANSOM, The New Criticism (1941).

I.A. RICHARDS, Practical Criticism (1954).

Christopher RICKS, The Force of Poetry (1984).

Phyllis ROSE, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1984).

Edward SAID, Culture and Imperialism (1993).
George SANTAYANA, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900).

Jean-Paul SARTRE, Situations (1947).

Ferdinand de SAUSSURE, Course in General Linguistics(1915).

Roger SHATTUCK, The Banquet Years: the Origins of the Avant Garde in France (1958, revised 1968), The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (1984).

Elaine SHOWALTER, A Literature of Their Own (1977) helped to revise the canon to include women.

Alan SINFIELD Faultlines (1992).
Susan SONTAG, Against Interpretation and Other Essays(1966) wants to validate an artistic aesthetic based on concrete experience and pleasure where no intellectual response is needed. Instead of hermeneutics, “we need an erotics of art.”
George STEINER, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), On Difficulty (1978), Martin Heidegger(1978), Antigones (1984), Real Presences (1989).
Arthur SYMONS, The Symbolist Movement in Literature(1899) introduced French Symbolism to English Readers (cf. T.S. Eliot).
Allen TATE, On the Limits of Poetry (1948), The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1957).

Charles TAYLOR, Sources of the Self (1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), A Secular Age (2007).
Lionel TRILLING, The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1959), Sincerity and Authenticity (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1972), The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (2008).

Kenneth TYNAN, Curtains, selections from the drama criticism and related writings (1961).

Helen VENDLER, Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980).

WARSHOW, Robert, The Immediate Experience (enlarged edition, 2002) concerns film and popular culture.

René WELLEK and Austin WARREN, Theory of Literature (1949).
Edmond WILSON, Axel’s Castle (1931) about the symbolist movement, analyzing Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Proust, Stein.  The Shores of Light ( ), The Triple Thinkers ( ), The Wound and the Bow ( ), To the Finland Station ( ), Patriotic Gore (1962), Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s (Library of America, 2007).

W.K. WIMSATT and Monroe BEARDSLEY, The Verbal Icon(1954) contained the phrase “intentional fallacy” and proposed that the critic’s job was to discern what the text was actually saying, not what the author may have intended.
Yvor WINTERS, In Defense of Reason (1947), Forms of Discovery (1967).

James WOOD, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (2000).

Virginia WOOLF, The Common Reader (1929).

Theodore ZIOLKOWSKI, Varieties of Literary Thematics(1983).