Lit Crit

From our finest radical literary analyst, a classic study of the great philosopher and cultural theorist.

“Eagleton is second to none among cultural critics writing in the English language today.” --Guardian

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most pre-eminent postcolonial theorists writing today and a scholar of genuinely global reputation. This collection, first published in 1993, presents some of Spivak’s most engaging essays on works of literature such as Salman Rushdie's controversial Satanic Verses, and twentieth century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Karl Marx. Spivak relentlessly questions and deconstructs power structures where ever they operate. In doing so, she provides a voice for those who can not speak, proving that the true work of resistance takes place in the margins, Outside in the Teaching Machine.

Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti's The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel's two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth--as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where modernity itself is unimaginable without the genre.

By viewing the novel as much more than an aesthetic form, this landmark collection demonstrates how the genre has transformed human emotions and behavior, and the very perception of reality. Historical, statistical, and formal analyses show the novel as a complex literary system, in which new forms proliferate in every period and place.

Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, looks at the novel mostly from the outside, treating the transition from oral to written storytelling and the rise of narrative and fictionality, and covering the ancient Greek novel, the novel in premodern China, the early Spanish novel, and much else, including readings of novels from around the world.

These books will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literature.

Michael McKeon, author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, here assembles a collection of influential essays on the theory of the novel. Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss, Lukács, Bakhtin, and other prominent theorists explore the historical significance of the novel as a genre, from its early beginnings to its modern variations in the postmodern novel and postcolonial novel.

Offering a generous selection of key theoretical texts for students and scholars alike, Theory of the Novel also presents a provocative argument for studying the genre. In his introduction to the volume and in headnotes to each section, McKeon argues that genre theory and history provide the best approach to understanding the novel. All the selections in this anthology date from the twentieth century -- most from the last forty years -- and represent the attempts of different theorists, and different theoretical schools, to describe the historical stages of the genre's formal development.

The 'great iconoclast of literary criticism' reinvents the study of the novel.

Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new lustre to a tired field, one that in some respects is among "the most backwards disciplines in the academy." Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.

Conversations with Sonia Sanchez is a diverse collection of engagements with poet, teacher, and activist Sonia Sanchez. While it is common to associate Sanchez with the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, these interviews reveal that Sanchez is a poet whose craft and subjects have evolved over three decades. The interviews from 1979 to 2005 include a previously unpublished interview conducted by the editor specifically for this book. Taken together, the pieces illuminate Sanchez's conscious and consistent work at honing her craft, her skill at raising the highly political to the level of art, and her engagement with black studies and women's studies.

In these interviews, we see how her travels, her career as a teacher, and her work as a mother, as a political activist, and as a cultural critic have changed her writing. Her experiences in women's studies and her friendships with other artists--such as Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Margaret Walker, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Amiri Baraka--have all influenced her poetry.

Joyce A. Joyce is professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews; Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition; Warriors, Conjurers, and Priests: Defining African-centered Literary Criticism, and other books.