Emil Staiger (1908-1987), a native of Switzerland, was one of the foremost scholars in the field of literary studies. Grundbegriffe der Poetik is a monument in the history of literary criticism that has been unavailable to the English reader until now. Of Staiger's works, Poetics is probably the most radical, the most disruptive, for it constructs a revolutionary new poetics and erects it alongside the old traditional Aristotelian one. Here Staiger challenges the usefulness of the most distinguished of Western literary critical paradigms, the genre theory, that since the...