J onathan Kramnick’s book Criticism and Truth is more modest than its title suggests. Essentially an apologia for the nuts-and-bolts work of literary studies, it is best described not as “ambitious” — ...

THERE are five groups interested in literary criticism: publishers of books, authors, publishers of reviews, critics, and, finally, the reading public. An obvious interest of all the groups but the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Perhaps, you may have caught a glimpse of me milling around campus these past few weeks. If so, you would likely have noticed my trendsetting new accessory: a rotund, corpulent book. If you were ...

This season’s essays take a turn toward joy, laughter, and survival. In addition to collections from notable names, be on the lookout for a feminist biography of the Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s The ...

T hese are bad times for literary studies. The catastrophically constricted job market for English Ph.D.s conveys the culture’s contempt for professional literary scholarship in the clearest terms.

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 ...

I WANT to talk about the historical interpretation of literature — that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic, and political aspects. To begin with, it will be worth while ...

Fittingly for uncertain times, this fall authors emphasize the value of returning to old literary favorites. The season won’t be strictly nostalgic, however, and will see its fair share of debuts and ...