Strongly emphasizing the works of major writers such as Hawthorne, Poe, James, Irving, Twain, and Faulkner, this latest edition of a remarkably successful text ranges from the traditional to the modern experimental fictions of Barth, Barthelme, and Coover. Edited by one of the most prominent experts in the field, the third edition addresses the needs of a changing readership by presenting more works by women, writers of color, and contemporary authors, including Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Stone, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, Leslie Marmon Silko, and...

Introduction by A. Walton Litz

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." So begins Jane Austen's comic masterpiece Emma. In Emma, Austen's prose brilliantly elevates, in the words of Virginia Woolf, "the trivialities of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances" of early-nineteenth-century life in the English countryside to an unrivaled...

This volume provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats), continuing with the New Critics (Richards, Empson, Burke, Winters), and feeding into the influential work of Leavis, Trilling and others. The book provides a companion to the other twentieth-century volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, and offers a systematic and stimulating coverage of the development of the key literary-critical movements, genres, and individual critics.