Books by Gerard Genette

What art is-its very nature-is the subject of this book by one of the most distinguished continental theorists writing today. Informed by the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and referring to a wide range of cultures, contexts, and media, The Work of Art...

One of Gerard Genette's most important works, this examines the manifold relationships a text may have with prior texts. Genette describes the multiple ways a later text asks readers to read or remember an earlier one. In this regard, he treats the history and nature of parody, antinovels, pastiches, caricatures, commentary, allusion, imitations, and other textual relations.

One of the best-known continental theorists writing today, Gerard Genette here explores our aesthetic relation to works of art. Through an analysis of the views of thinkers ranging from David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Monroe C. Beardsley, Arthur...

Includes eighteen pieces which are concerned either with universal aesthetic problems or with specific moments in the work of a well-known writer or artist. This title contains material related to the appreciation of beauty by one of the subtlest and original minds working in aesthetics.

Bridges mainstream literary history and Gerard Genette's expertise in critical method by undertaking an intensive study of the most vexed of literary problems: language as a representation of reality. Deeply learned, the book draws upon the traditions - both sane and eccentric - of philosophy, linguistics, poetics, and comparative literature.

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gerard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declaration requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions as revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interact with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Gennet's work in contemporary literary theory.