“Criticism,” according to Northrop Frye, “is badly in need of an organizing principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as ...

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...

The truly interesting thing about those articles, however, is that they demonstrate the huge gap between the new literary criticism taking place online and the media’s ability to respond to it. In ...

T hese are bad times for literary studies. The catastrophically constricted job market for English Ph.D.s conveys the culture’s contempt for professional literary scholarship in the clearest terms.

What if every book was worth reading? Not just the books with silver medallions on their covers, but every hardcover featured at Barnes & Noble, every paperback foisted upon you by a friend or a ...

Women writers are all over the best-seller lists, but literary criticism is still predominantly a male field. That's according to the latest numbers from the volunteer organization VIDA: Women in the ...

The award of the Goncourt Prize, a prestigious French literature award, to Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr in 2021 marks the first recognition of a sub-Saharan author by this institution in ...

Provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through ...

About a year into my graduate education in English literature, I began to have the vague impression that something wasn't right. Both my peers and most of the faculty, I felt, valued literature at ...

The chair of this year’s Man Booker Prize, and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, does not like all The chair of this year’s Man Booker Prize, and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement ...

The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...