The Critical Tradition

02 The most comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory from Plato to the present, with a highly praised critical apparatus, including introductions, headnotes, bibliographies, and glosses.

This bestseller balances a comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory -- from Plato to the present -- with the most thorough editorial support for understanding these challenging readings.

"The most comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory from Plato to the present, with a highly praised critical apparatus, including introductions, headnotes, bibliographies, and glosses." --Publisher.

Secondary edition statement from sticker on cover.

The final section explores concepts of the artist as a producing subject and of the viewer as a produced subject with respect to such artists as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Sherrie Levine.

This outstanding anthology traces major critical statements from classic theorists like Plato to the contemporary. This standard historical textbook in the field focuses on important individual thinkers, and not particular schools of thought or isms. Current selections bring the anthology into contemporary times and show students how critical theory has evolved and progressed over time.

Edward Lobb’s study, first published in 1981, is a thorough examination of Eliot’s relation to Romantic criticism. This title also makes extensive use of Eliot’s Clark Lectures on metaphysical poetry. Delivered in 1926, the lectures complete the picture of literary history set out in Eliot’s published work, and are, the author believes, essential to a full understanding of the poet’s ideas and their place in tradition. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources and earlier scholarship, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition will be of interest to students of literature.

The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture—that is, the logic of the capitalist system—is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.