The critical tradition: classic texts and contemporary trends

Republic. Book X / Plato

Ion / Plato

from Phaedrus / Plato

from What is art? / Leo Tolstoy

from Poetics / Aristotle

The art of poetry / Horace

from On the sublime / Longinus

On the intellectual beauty / Plotinus

from Letter to Can Grande della Scala / Dante Allighieri

from La querelle de la rose / Christine de Pisan

An apology for poetry / Sir Philip Sidney

from An essay of dramatic poesy / John Dryden

An epistle to the reader, from The Dutch lover / Aphra Behn

Preface to The lucky chance / Aphra Behn

An essay on criticism / Alexander Pope

The rambler, no. 4 / Samuel Johnson

Rasselas, chapter 10 / Samuel Johnson

from Preface to Shakespeare / Samuel Johnson

Of the standard of taste / David Hume

from Contingencies of value / Barbara Hernstein Smith

from Critique of judgment / Immanuel Kant

from A vindication of the rights of women / Mary Wollstonecraft

from Essay on fictions / Germaine de Staël

On women writers / Germaine de Staël

from On naïve and sentimental poetry / Friedrich von Schiller

Preface to Lyrical ballads / William Wordsworth

Shakespeare's judgment equal to his genius / Samuel Taylor Coleridge

from Biographia literaria / Samuel Taylor Coleridge

from a Letter to Benjamin Bailey / John Keats

from a Letter to George and Thomas Keats / John Keats

The four ages of poetry / Thomas Love Peacock

A defence of poetry / Percy Bysshe Shelley

The romantic artist, from Culture and society 1780-1950 / Raymond Williams

Introduction to the philosophy of art / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The poet / Ralph Waldo Emerson

The alienation of labor, from Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 / Karl Marx

Consciousness derived from material conditions, from The German ideology / Karl Marx

On Greek art in its time, from A contribution to the critique of political economy / Karl Marx

The function of criticism at the present time / Matthew Arnold

from The study of poetry / Matthew Arnold

from The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music / Friedrich Nietzsche

On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense / Friedrich Nietzsche

from Twilight of the idols / Friedrich Nietzsche

The art of fiction / Henry James

The decay of lying / Oscar Wilde

The dream-work, from The interpretation of dreams / Sigmund Freud

Creative writers and daydreaming / Sigmund Freud

The "uncanny" / Sigmund Freud

Medusa's head / Sigmund Freud

Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot

On the relation of analytical psychology to poetry / Carl Gustav Jung

The principal archetypes / Carl Gustav Jung

On double consciousness, from The souls of black folk / W.E.B. Du Bois

Criteria of negro art / W.E.B. Du Bois

The topic of the speaking person, from Discourse in the novel / Mikhail Bakhtin

Heteroglossia in the novel, from Discourse in the novel / Mikhail Bakhtin

from Problems in Dostoevsky's poetics / Mikhail Bakhtin

Shakespeare's sister, from A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf

Austen, Brontë, Eliot, from A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf

The androgynous vision, from A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf

Hölderlin and the essence of poetry / Martin Heidegger

from Dickens : the two scrooges / Edmund Wilson

Symbolic action in a poem by Keats / Kenneth Burke

Literature as equipment for living / Kenneth Burke

from The great tradition / F.R. Leavis

Why write? / Jean-Paul Sartre

Myths : of women in five authors / Simone de Beauvoir

Constatives and performatives, from How to do things with words / J.L. Austin

Speech acts : locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary, from How to do things with words / J.L. Austin

The archetypes of literature / Northrop Frye

Odysseus' scar / Erich Auerbach

The elevation of the historicality of understanding to the status of hermeneutical principle / Hans-Georg Gadamer

Against interpretation / Susan Sontag.