What Is Literature? and Other Essays (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780674950849)

"What is Literature?" remains the most significant critical landmark of French literature since World War II. Neither abstract nor abstruse, it is a brilliant, provocative performance by a writer more inspired than cautious. "What is Literature?" challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about the phenomenology of reading, and he goes on to provide a dashing example of how to write a history of literature that takes ideology and institutions into account. This new edition of "What is Literature?" also collects three other crucial essays of Sartre's for the first time in a volume of his. The essays presenting Sartre's monthly, Les Temps modernes, and on the peculiarly French manner of nationalizing literature do much to create a context for Sartre's treatise. "Black Orpheus" has been for many years a key text for the study of black and third-world literatures.

Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
ISBN-10: 0674950844
ISBN-13: 9780674950849
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/15/1988
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.03lbs
Size: 8.48h x 5.43w x 1.06d