The Values of Literary Studies

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.

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.

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.