Through a study of works of the contemporary Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, as well as of other exponents of the ancient doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy, Professor Livingston develops and explicates a traditional theory of literature. Coomar.

Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.

The Traditional Theory of Literature was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Through a study of works of the contemporary Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, as well as of other exponents of the ancient doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy, Professor Livingston develops and explicates a traditional theory of literature. Coomaraswamy, who died in 1947, published widely on a broad range of subjects in art, philosophy, literature, and other fields. Although he is relatively little known, those acquainted with is work acclaim him as one of the great thinkers of our time. His study and writing were devoted primarily to bridging the gap between Oriental and Western cultures. From the treasury of traditional learning which Coomaraswamy amassed in his profusion of books and articles, Professor Livingston has drawn those elements which contribute to an essential theory of literature. Although he quotes from some of Coomaraswamy's Oriental sources, he delineates the theory in an idiom that is more familiar to the West, as stated or implied in the works of Dante, Milton, and Blake, among others.

This comprehensive guide to the history of literary criticism from antiquity to the present day provides an authoritative overview of the major movements, figures, and texts of literary criticism, as well as surveying their cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts. Supplies the cultural, historical and philosophical background to the literary criticism of each era Enables students to see the development of literary criticism in context Organised chronologically, from classical literary criticism through to deconstruction Considers a wide range of thinkers and events from the French Revolution to Freud’s views on civilization Can be used alongside any anthology of literary criticism or as a coherent stand-alone introduction

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation. Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities. Easterlin develops her biocultural method by comparing it to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders them in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson’s “Old Barnard,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver’s “I Could See the Smallest Things.” A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.

Russian Formalism is widely considered the foundation of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the movement in light of the current commitment to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms. Jessica Merrill provides a novel reconstruction of the intellectual historical context that enabled the emergence of Formalism in the 1910s. Formalists adopted a mode of thought Merrill calls the philological paradigm, a framework for thinking about language, literature, and folklore that lumped them together as verbal tradition. For those who thought in these terms, verbal tradition was understood to be inseparable from cultural history. Merrill situates early literary theories within this paradigm to reveal abandoned paths in the history of the discipline—ideas that were discounted by the structuralist and post-structuralist accounts that would emerge after World War II. The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.