Books by Stanley Fish

"Nothing that Stanley Fish writes can be ignored. In this latest work, he explodes all our comforting notions of unbiased, uninflected judgment in the pursuit of interpretation."--Annette Kolodny

Analyzes various arguments for the value of academic freedom: Is academic freedom a contribution to society's common good? Does it authorize professors to critique the status quo, both inside and outside the university? Does it license and even require the overturning of all received ideas and policies? Is it an engine of revolution?

Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, established Fish as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time.

Stanley Fish raises a provocative challenge to those who try to turn literary studies into an instrument of political change, arguing that when literary critics try to influence society at large by addressing social and political issues, they cease to be literary critics at all.

Drawing on a wide range of great writers, from Philip Roth to Antonin Scalia to Jane Austen, How to Write a Sentence is much more than a writing manual-it is a spirited love letter to the written word, and a key to understanding how great writing works.

Stanley Fish, one of the foremost critics of literature working today, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Milton. This book brings together his finest published work with brand new material on Milton and on other authors and topics in early modern literature. In his analyses of Renaissance texts, he meditates on the interpretive problems that confront readers and offers a sustained critique of historicist methods of interpretation. Intention, he argues, is key to understanding which pieces of historical data are relevant to literary criticism. Lucid, provocative, direct and inimitable, this new book from Stanley Fish is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Milton and early modern literary studies.

The author argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality - no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim - and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end it is history and context that determines a principle's content and power.

Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers a proposal for a new way of thinking about the way we read.

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps, one proclaiming that Milton was of the devil's party, the other proclaiming that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.