Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology

Why do we need literature, and what does this need tell us about human nature? Wolfgang Iser shows how these questions grew out of his pioneering work in reader-response criticism and how the answers to them may lie in the new field of literary anthropology. Iser's recent work spans a wide range of viewpoints and subject matter, from sixteenth- to twentieth-century literature, from Spenser and Shakespeare to Joyce and Beckett. In thirteen chapters that chart his intellectual development over the past decade, Iser sets forth what reader-response theory has accomplished--and where it has fallen short. Reevaluating such time-honored concepts as representation, he sketches out a new play theory of the text that sees literature as an ongoing enactment of human possibilities.

Author: Wolfgang Iser
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 02/01/1993
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.98lbs
Size: 9.04h x 6.14w x 0.77d
ISBN: 9780801845932

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