Books by Jonathan Culler

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan Culler reveals the limitations of these two models--the Romantic and the modern--and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.

A classic survey of structuralist literary criticism combined with a discussion about how English and American criticism might benefit from its lessons.

Here this immensely influential 20 year old title is reissued due to its continuing relevance as a tool in understanding the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism.