The Values of Literary Studies
Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas

In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars illuminate the purpose and priorities of literary criticism.

Rónán McDonald (Edited by)

9781107124165, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 November 2015

286 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

'The collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas is a timely and important response to the question: what is the value of literary studies? … these essays offer diverse approaches that firmly attest to literary studies' value in generating ways to critically evaluate and reimagine the self and the world.' Michelle Chiang, Journal of Modern Literature

What is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time when the humanities are increasingly called upon to justify themselves, this book seeks to clarify their myriad values and ideologies. Engaging the idea of literary value while at the same time remaining attuned to aesthetic, ethical, political and psychological principles, this book serves to underscore the enduring significance of literary studies in an academic climate that is ostensibly concerned with expediency and quantification. As a sophisticated examination of literary theory and criticism, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas provides a comprehensive and hopeful view of where the discipline is now and what avenues it is likely to take from here.

1. The value of criticism and the project of modernism Anthony Cascardi
2. Caprice: individual subjectivity in literary criticism Helen Small
3. The phenomenology of literary valuation Charles Altieri
4. Literature is history: aesthetic time and the ethics of literary will Alan Singer
5. Dead on arrival: time and the value of old books Kathleen McLuskie
6. The price of value Christopher Nealon
7. To shelter the nothing that happens Julian Murphet
8. When literary criticism mattered Simon During
9. Literature among the objects of modernist criticism: value, medium, genre James Chandler
10. 'Value!': Psychoanalysis, value, literature Jean-Michel Rabaté
11. Afterlives of comparison: literature, equivalence, value Natalie Melas
12. Feminism, gender and the literary commons Robin Truth Goodman
13. The value of world-making in global literacy studies Debjani Ganguly
14. Multiple versions of fictional minds: manuscript research, digital editing and enactive cognition in literary studies Dirk van Hulle
15. After suspicion: surface, method, value Rónán McDonald
16. Literary experience and the value of criticism Derek Attridge.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS]