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Literary Criticism

36 books

Must-Read 1966

Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag

Must-Read 1957

Anatomy of Criticism

Northrop Frye

Must-Read 1869

Culture and Anarchy

Matthew Arnold

Must-Read 1869

Essays in Criticism

Matthew Arnold

Must-Read 2000

How to Read and Why

Harold Bloom

Must-Read 1978

Illness as Metaphor

Susan Sontag

Must-Read 1977

Image-Music-Text

Roland Barthes

Must-Read 1779

Lives of the Poets

Samuel Johnson

Must-Read 1742

Longinus On the Sublime

Longinus

Must-Read 1946

Mimesis

Erich Auerbach

Must-Read 1957

Mythologies

Roland Barthes

Must-Read 1976

Of Grammatology

Jacques Derrida

Must-Read 1977

On Photography

Susan Sontag

Must-Read 1978

Orientalism

Edward Said

Must-Read 1536

Poetics

Aristotle

Must-Read 2004

Preface to Shakespeare

Samuel Johnson

Must-Read 1984

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

Mikhail Bakhtin

Must-Read 1968

Rabelais and His World

Mikhail Bakhtin

Must-Read 1970

S/Z

Roland Barthes

Must-Read 1973

The Anxiety of Influence

Harold Bloom

Must-Read 2018

The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes

Must-Read 1981

The Dialogic Imagination

Mikhail Bakhtin

Must-Read 1982

The Great Code

Northrop Frye

Must-Read 1953

The Mirror and the Lamp

M. H. Abrams

Must-Read 1975

The Pleasure of the Text

Roland Barthes

Must-Read 1934

The Sacred Wood

T.S. Eliot

Must-Read 1994

The Western Canon

Harold Bloom

Must-Read 1956

Theory of Literature

René Wellek and Austin Warren

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Must-Read 2025

Tradition and the Individual Talent

T.S. Eliot

Recommended 2000

All About Love

bell hooks

Recommended 1975

Beginnings

Edward Said

Recommended 1994

Teaching to Transgress

bell hooks

Recommended 1950

The Liberal Imagination

Lionel Trilling

Recommended 1961

The Rhetoric of Fiction

Wayne C. Booth

Recommended 1947

The Well Wrought Urn

Cleanth Brooks

Recommended 1983

The World, the Text, and the Critic

Edward Said