Critical Writings

The Futurist movement was founded and promoted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, beginning in 1909 with the First Futurist Manifesto, in which he inveighed against the complacency of "cultural necrophiliacs" and sought to annihilate the values of the past, writing that "there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece." In the years that followed, up until his death in 1944, Marinetti, through both his polemical writings and his political activities, sought to transform society in all its aspects. As Günter Berghaus writes in his introduction, "Futurism sought to bridge the gap between art and life and to bring aesthetic innovation into the real world. Life was to be changed through art, and art was to become a form of life." This volume includes more than seventy of Marinetti's most important writings—many of them translated into English for the first time—offering the reader a representative and still startling selection of texts concerned with Futurist art, literature, politics, and philosophy.

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction. Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading literature as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.

Novelist, poet, literary critic, editor, a founding father of English Modernism, and one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century, Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was the author of over eighty books, editor of The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, and collaborator with Joseph Conrad on The Inheritors, Romance, and other works. His most famous novel is The Good Soldier (1915). This collection contains essays and letters on the English novel, impressionism, vers libre, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Herbert Read, and Ernest Hemingway.

Selections of the influential author's best nonfiction include "The Study of Languages," "The Irish Literary Renaissance," "Oscar Wilde: The Poet of 'Salomé'," "Ibsen's New Drama," "The Centenary of Charles Dickens," more.

This collection of Geoffrey Hill's criticism spans the length of his career as a pre-eminent poet-critic. The topics range widely across English literature since the Renaissance and include extended studies of major writers as well as essays which confront the problems of language and the nature of value.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

The first English translation of the essays, lectures, and other critical writings of the celebrated Austrian poet, novelist, and public intellectual, one of the most influential postwar writers in German.

In the past few years, a new generation of progressive intellectuals has dramatically transformed how law, race, and racial power are understood and discussed in America. Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This reader, edited by the principal founders and leading theoreticians of the critical race theory movement, gathers together for the first time the movement's most important essays.