Literary Criticism

34 books

Must-Read 1958

A Raisin in the Sun

Lorraine Hansberry

Must-Read 1966

Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag

Must-Read 1957

Anatomy of Criticism

Northrop Frye

Must-Read 1993

Culture and Imperialism

Edward Said

Must-Read 2000

How to Read and Why

Harold Bloom

Must-Read 1978

Illness as Metaphor

Susan Sontag

Must-Read 1946

Mimesis

Erich Auerbach

Must-Read 1976

Of Grammatology

Jacques Derrida

Must-Read 2004

Preface to Shakespeare

Samuel Johnson

Must-Read 1984

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

Mikhail Bakhtin

Must-Read 1909

Sentimental Education

Gustave Flaubert

Must-Read 1994

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

Umberto Eco

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 1973

The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Must-Read 1953

The Mirror and the Lamp

M. H. Abrams

Must-Read 1975

The Pleasure of the Text

Roland Barthes

Must-Read 1725

The Sacred Wood

T.S. Eliot

Must-Read 1994

The Western Canon

Harold Bloom

Must-Read 2025

Tradition and the Individual Talent

T.S. Eliot

Must-Read 1986

Watchmen

Alan Moore

Must-Read 1953

Writing Degree Zero

Roland Barthes

Recommended 1975

Beginnings

Edward Said

Recommended 1980

Desire in Language

Julia Kristeva

Recommended 1983

How to Suppress Women's Writing

Joanna Russ

Recommended 1961

Illuminations

Walter Benjamin

Recommended 1762

On the Art of Reading

Thomas Sheridan

Recommended 2009

Our American Cousin

Tom Taylor

Recommended 1994

Teaching to Transgress

bell hooks

Recommended 1961

The Rhetoric of Fiction

Wayne C. Booth

Recommended 1958

The Theater and Its Double

Antonin Artaud

Recommended 1983

The World, the Text, and the Critic

Edward Said