Product Description: Is there such a thing as a specifically literary discourse, distinguishable from other modes of thought and writing? Is there any way to defend the intuition that a work of literature says something that can't be said in any other way? Drawing on recent work in the philosophies of language and action, Steven Knapp presents a challenging new definition of “the literary” in a forceful analysis that will radically change the sometimes heated debate about formalism...read more

Product Description: Eighteenth-century and Romantic readers had a peculiar habit of calling personified abstractions "sublime." This has always seemed mysterious, since the same readers so often expressed a feeling that there was something wrong with turning ideas into people--or, worse, turning people into ideas...read more