Books by Ben (Professor of European Literature Hutchinson

Considering literature comparatively can help readers realize how much can be learned by looking beyond the horizon of their own cultures, discovering not only more about other literatures, but also about their own. Ben Hutchinson offers a history of comparative literature, placing it at the heart of literary criticism.

Ben Hutchinson proposes a major new reading of modern literature understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of chronology and imitation, he argues that lateness can be understood as an expression of modernity's quest for legitimacy.