What is Literature? challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about the phenomenology of reading, and he goes on to provide a dashing example of how to write a history of literature that takes ideology and institutions into account.

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

A New Literary History of America contains essays on topics from the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoriccultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

An essential guide to understanding literary theory and criticism in the European tradition What is Literature? A Critical Anthology explores the most fundamental question in literary studies. ‘What is literature?’ is the name of a problem that emerges with the idea of literature in European modernity. This volume offers a cross-section of modern literary theory and reflects on the history of thinking about literature as a specific form. What is Literature? reveals how ideas of the literary draw on the foundations of Western thought in ancient Greece and Rome, charting the emergence of modern literature in the eighteenth century, and including selections from the present state of the art. The anthology includes the work of leading writers and critics of the last two thousand years including Plato, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Rancière, and many others. The book is an insightful examination of the nature of literature, its meanings and values, functions and forms, provocations and mysteries. What is Literature? brings together in one volume influential and intriguing essays that show our enduring fascination with the idea of literature. This important guide: Contains a broad selection of the most significant texts on the topic of literature Includes leading writers from ancient times to the most recent thinkers on literature and criticism Encourages readers to reflect on the varied meanings of “literature” What is Literature? A Critical Anthology is a unique collection of texts that will appeal to every student and scholar of literature and literary criticism in the European tradition.