Books by Antoine Compagnon

Montaigne for the 21st century

Assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, this work defends the methods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense. It is organized not by school of thought but around seven central questions: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history, and value.

This book explores the formative period when Scotland acquired the characteristics that enabled it to enter fully into the comity of medieval Christendom. These included a monarchy of a recognizably continental type, a feudal organisation of aristocratic landholding and military service, national boundaries, and a body of settled law and custom.

This treatise on modernism and postmodernism establishes that modernists' faith in the cult of novelty inevitably led to its destruction. Exploring the paradoxical nature of the modernist tradition in literature and the arts, the author considers its aesthetic and moral contradictions.