Books by Wolfgang Iser

In this work philosopher Wolfgang Iser offers a fresh perspective on questions such as why do human beings need fictions? And why do human beings need to interpret, despite the fact that complete interpretation is unattainable?

Why do we need literature and what does this need tell us about human nature? Iser shows how these questions come from his work on reader-response criticism and that the answers may lie in the new field of literary anthropology. He relates theoretical issues to analyses of individual works.

Ranging from the Renaissance pastoral to Coleridge to Sartre and Beckett, The Fictive and the Imaginary is a distinguished work of scholarship from one of Europe's most respected and influential critics.

In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that underlie all the perceptions, the reader learns to "readhimself as he does the text.

In a series of readings, the author examines Shakespeare's five major history plays and accounts for their continued popularity, both in film and on stage. He examines the historical context out of which the plays emerged, and describes how the period gave birth to a modern form of politics.

First published in German in 1960, this text places the English critic, essayist and novelist in a philosophical tradition whose major exponents were Hegel and Coleridge, at the same time showing how Pater differed crucially from these thinkers to become representative of a late Victorian culture critically poised in transition between Romanticism and Modernism.