Books by William (Reed College Ray

This work offers an analysis of the underlying grammar or "logic" of "culture". Ray argues that the disparate models, ideologies, and ethics that have been advanced in the name of culture derive from a shift in our ways of thinking that occurred before the advent of modernity.

This book is both a guide to, and interpretation of, the course of modern literary theory. Exploring the various theories of reading which have informed post--war literary criticism, it shows that for all the fervour of current debate about new movements in criticism, all these different approaches share at root a common notion of literary meaning.

A comprehensive , ambitious, and demanding critique of eighteenth-century English and French fiction, Story and History rereads the major works of the period as components in a systematic exploration of how the ordering of experience by individuals might relate to larger orders of authority.