Books by John Limon

Death's Following refuses the call of twentieth-century philosophy to face death heroically, advocating instead the mediocrity of Heidegger's "they-self" and its inauthentic, distanced relation to death. Through literary criticism and autobiography, the book considers mediocrity the privileged site for imagining eternal absence: mediocrity as practice for being forgotten.

Presents the study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. This title appreciates and analyses the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory.

In this 1990 book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.