Review by Choice Review
This is the 12th volume in Routledge's series "The New Critical Idiom," which has produced a few excellent works (e.g., Tony Davies's Humanism, 1997) and other less distinguished volumes that nevertheless function as gateway introductions to major fields (e.g., Ania Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 1998). Widdowson presents the debates around "literature" with considerable learning and wit, and a modicum of fairness. M. Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and F.R. Leavis get the space they deserve, but the volume remains resolutely Anglocentric in its selection of theoretical and fictional texts. Although this bias is understandable, the neglect of thinkers on aesthetics and the literary--from Aristotle to M. Bakhtin to H. Cixous--is not. The sociological excursions are the least well handled parts of the book. The core material on what has changed the meaning of literature is useful though incomplete; chapter 4, "What Is the Literary?," can and will be used as a text in courses on criticism and theory. Recommended to undergraduate and graduate collections of literary theory. K. Tololyan Wesleyan University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review