"Language is the most important of all the instruments of civilization." The authors state this premise boldly in their preface to "The Meaning of Meaning," a classic work whose significance--and challenge--to the study of language, literature, and philosophy has remained undiminished since its original publication.

Much about language continues to be only hazily understood, distorted by our habitual attitude--often one of indifference--toward words, or by lingering assumptions based on discredited theories. What IS the relationship between words and what the words refer to? Between words...

A landmark of twentieth-century criticism that provided new standards and new techniques for examining literature. "Richards is a master of the psychology of criticism" (Saturday Review). Index.

Bringing together essays that span the career of I.A. Richards--as both literary critic and pedagogue--this collection provides a much-needed re-introduction to a thinker whose works have been largely neglected of late. Carefully chosen, edited, and annotated, the selections make accessible a wide array of Richards's ideas on language and learning, focusing on his discussion of literacy, his critique of positivist linguistics, his explorations of C.S. Peirce's semiotics, and his theory of translation, which led not only to his well-known analysis of the structure and foundation of metaphor...

I. A. Richards was the most influential of the first generation of academic literary theorists. This definitive collection of his writing between 1919 and 1938 shows that Richards' position was distinct from the emerging consensus in university literary education.
Richards is often misunderstood as a master of a now superseded school of academic criticism and a forerunner of an institutionalised classroom method. This set will allow today's scholar and researcher to discover that Richards was actually one of its most severe critics.

Richards here offers anew the 1935 edition of his work (then entitled Science and Poetry) with commentary that reveals not only the development of his own criticism but also the ways in which the relationship between the two disciplines has evolved. He has also written a new essay entitled Re-Orientation and has included, as another kind of commentary on the basic text, his essay How Does a Poem Know When It Is Finished? "

DESCRIPTION OF BOOK: "THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER", "CHRISTABEL", "FEARS IN SOLITUDE," "KUBLA KHAN", AND MOST OF THE SHORTERPOEMS. MAJOR SECTIONS OF THE BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. SELECTIONS FROMSAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE'S LETTERS, LITERARY CRITICISM, NOTEBOOKS, POLITICAL ESSAYS, AND PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS.

2013 Reprint of 1927 American Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Revised second edition of this classic text. Although the original text was published in 1923 it has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics and semiotics in general. The book has been in print continuously since 1923. Richards sets forth a contextual theory of Signs: that Words and Things are connected through their occurrence together with things. The book would later...