Table of Contents

Preface

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition

1. Introductory

2. Creation and the other

3. Originality and invention

4. Inventive language and the literary event

5. Singularity

6. Reading and responding

7. Performance

8. Form, meaning, context

9. Responsibility and ethics

10. An everyday impossibility

Debts and Directions Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York, UK. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Routledge, 2004), The Work of Literature (2015) and, with Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry (Routledge, 2015).

Reviews

"A deeply important book"-Rob Pope, Language and Literature"A significant and enduring contribution towards readable, ethically engaged literary criticism" - Justin Neuman, Journal of Postcolonial Writing"This book constitutes a timely, rigorous and thought-provoking alternative to the exigencies of politicised criticism" - Lucy O'Meara, Textual Practice