This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among other, less central figures. In a second part, Lentricchia turns to four exemplary theorists on the American scene--Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom--and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in part one....

""Criticism and Social Change" speaks with special timeliness to the role of the political intellectual (here embodied in Kenneth Burke). Lentricchia's provocative analysis demands serious reflection by American radicals." Frederic Jameson
"A profound meditation on relations obtaining among writing, political consciousness, and criticism this last taken in its most general sense. It is written with passion and grace; it is shot through with learning, intimate knowledge of the critical tradition, and a deep (though by no means uncritical) understanding of the work (as well as social...

Since its publication in 1990, Critical Terms for Literary Study has become a landmark introduction to the work of literary theory--giving tens of thousands of students an unparalleled encounter with what it means to do theory and criticism. Significantly expanded, this new edition features six new chapters that confront, in different ways, the growing understanding of literary works as cultural practices.

These six new chapters are "Popular Culture," "Diversity," "Imperialism/Nationalism," "Desire," "Ethics," and "Class," by John Fiske, Louis Menand, Seamus Deane, Judith Butler,...

In Ariel and the Police, Frank Lentricchia searches through the totalizing desires for power that have built and help to maintain tangible and intangible structures of confinement and purification within, and sometimes as, the house of modernism. And what he finds, in his lyrical effort to redeem the subject for history, is that someone lives there, slyly, sometimes even playfully defiant.

The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American fiction. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the novel's composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by a group of new essays, each specially commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, which together constitute a forum of interpretative methods...

Modernist Quartet is a study of the four major American modernist poets--Frost, Stevens, Pound, Eliot--in various historical environments (literary, philosophical, gender relations, the business of capitalist economics) with special attention given to their central poetic texts as they simultaneously reflect and shape our understanding of those environments. Frank Lentricchia presents the poems as stories of the poets seeking to sustain a life in noncommercial writing, in a culture that is only hospitable, for the most part, to commercial art.

Modernist Quartet is a study of the four major American modernist poets--Frost, Stevens, Pound, Eliot--in various historical environments (literary, philosophical, gender relations, the business of capitalist economics) with special attention given to their central poetic texts as they simultaneously reflect and shape our understanding of those environments. Frank Lentricchia presents the poems as stories of the poets seeking to sustain a life in noncommercial writing, in a culture that is only hospitable, for the most part, to commercial art.

If you want to find out what a rock critic, a syndicated columnist, and scholars of American literature have to say about one of America's most important contemporary novelists, turn to "Introducing Don DeLillo. "Placing the author's work in a cultural context, this is the first book-length collection on DeLillo, adding considerably to the emerging critical discourse on his work.
Diversity is the key to this striking assemblage of cultural criticism edited by Frank Lentricchia. Special features include an expanded version of the "Rolling Stone" interview with the author ("An Outsider in...

"Lucchesi and The Whale" is an unusual work of fiction by noted author and critic Frank Lentricchia. Its central character, Thomas Lucchesi Jr., is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life--because grief alone inspires him to write--and searching for secret meaning in Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick. "Himself a writer of "stories full of violence in a poetic style," Lucchesi tells his students that he teaches "only because his] fiction is commercially untouchable" and to "never forget that."...

Lucchesi and The Whale is an unusual work of fiction by noted author and critic Frank Lentricchia. Its central character, Thomas Lucchesi Jr., is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life because grief alone inspires him to write and searching for secret meaning in Herman Melville s Moby-Dick. Himself a writer of stories full of violence in a poetic style, Lucchesi tells his students that he teaches only because his] fiction is commercially untouchable and to never forget that....