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This book is an attempt to make modern literary theory intelligible and attractive to as wide a readership as possible.

This is one reason which makes a new edition of it worthwhile

If this book is a difficult, even esoteric language, then it seems to be...

in a postmodern age, meaning, like everything else, is expected to be instantly consumable.

Some literary theory has indeed been excessively in-group and obscurantist,

What is truly elitist in literary studies is the idea that works of literature can only be appreciated by those with a particular sort of cultural breeding.

Because some students entering higher education were from supposedly 'uncultivated' backgrounds. Theory was a way of emancipating literary works from the stranglehold of a 'civilized sensibility',

Properly understood, literary theory is shaped by a democratic impulse rather than an elitist one;

If one wanted to put a date on the beginnings of th transformation which has overtaken literary theory in this century, one could do worse than settle on 1917,

'reading' and 'criticism' has undergone deep alteration.

I have tried to popularize, rather than vulgarize, the subject.

There are economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it,

They suspect literary theory as an arcane, elitist enclave somewhat akin to nuclear physics.

Some students and critics also protest that literary theory 'gets in between the reader and the work

Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people's theories and an oblivion of one's own.

English literature might even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion.

A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction' seems unlikely to get us very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable one.

in the words of the Russian critic Roman jakobson, literature represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary speech'. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being,

Criticism should dissociate art from mystery

the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content' for the study of literary form.

It was this perverse insistence which won for the Formalists their derogatory name from their antagonists.

what all of these elements had in common was their 'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing' effect.

In the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale, blunted, or, as the Formalists would say, 'automatized'.

By having to grapple with language in a more strenuous, self-conscious way than usual, the world which that language contains is vividly renewed.

if a story breaks off and begins again, switches constantly from one narrative level to another and delays its climax to keep us in suspense,

The story, as the Formalists would argue, uses 'impeding' or 'retarding' devices to hold our attention;

Tristram Shandy impedes its own story-line so much that it hardly gets off the ground,

The Formalists, then, saw literary language as a set of deviations from a
norm, a kind oflinguistic violence:

But to spot a deviation implies being able to identify the norm from which it swerves.

One person's norm may be another's deviation:

Even the most 'prosaic' text of the fifteenth century may sound 'poetic' to us today because of its archaism. If we were to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell whether it was 'poetry' or not.

The fact that a piece of language was 'estranging' did not guarantee that it was always and everywhere so: it was estranging only against a certain normative linguistic background, and if this altered then the writing might cease to be perceptible as literary

For the Formalists, in other words, 'literariness' was a function of the differential relations between one sort of discourse and another; it was not an eternally given property.

There is no 'literary' device -
metonymy, synecdoche, litotes, chiasmus and so on which is not quite
intensively used in daily discourse.

Nevertheless, the Formalists still presumed that 'making strange' was the
essence of the literary. It was just that they relativized this use of language,
saw it as a matter of contrast between one type of speech and another.

realist or naturalistic writing is not linguistically self-conscious or self-exhibiting in any striking way.

they admire its laconic plainness or low-keyed sobriety.

This may well be a fruitless sort of pursuit, but it is not significantly more fruitless than claiming to hear the cut and thrust of the rapiers in some poetic description of a duel,

but is to be taken as referring to a general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always, it may employ peculiar language as though to make this fact obvious- to signal that what is at stake is a way of talking about a woman, rather than any particular real-life woman.

it would probably have come as a surprise to George Orwell to hear that his essays were to be read as though the topics he discussed were less important than the way he discussed them.

It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to
the nature of what is written.

because I enjoy Gibbon's prose style, or revel in images of human corruption whatever their historical source.

Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them. Breeding in this respect may count for a good deal more than birth.

There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever.

If I pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train connection but to stimulate in myself general reflections on the speed and complexity of modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it as literature.

As the philosophers might say, 'literature' and 'weed' are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things.

They tell us about the purposes it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.

We may be offering as a general definition a sense of the 'literary' which is in fact historically specific.

Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera.

some literature is verbally self-regarding, while some highly-wrought rhetoric is not literature.

value-judgements are notoriously
variable.

Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences,

All literary works, in other words, are 'rewritten', if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them;

Facts are public and unimpeachable, values are private and gratuitous.

This cathedral is a magnificent
specimen of baroque architecture.

In chatting to you about the weather I am also signalling that I regard conversation with you as valuable,

stating when a cathedral was built is reckoned to be more disinterested in our own culture than passing an opinion about its architecture,

All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories,

without particular interests we would have no knowledge at all,
because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know anything.
Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The claim that knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement.

such as the belief that I should try to keep in good health,

we share certain 'deep' ways of seeing and valuing which are bound up with our social life.

the prejudice that the meaning of democracy is confined to putting a cross on a ballot paper every few years.

It is deeply ingrained in us to imagine ourselves moving forwards into the future.

I do not mean by 'ideology' simply the deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold;

I. A. Richards sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary
value-judgements could actually be by giving his undergraduates a set of
poems, withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and asking
them to evaluate them.

time-honoured poets were marked down and obscure authors celebrated.

Their critical responses were deeply entwined with their broader prejudices and beliefs.

If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category,
neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose
to call literature.

They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of 'literature'
in England.