The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature

by Noël Carroll (Editor), John Gibson (Editor)

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections:
1) historical foundations
2) what is literature?
3) aesthetics & appreciation
4) meaning & interpretation
5) metaphysics & epistemology
6) ethics & political theory.

The Companion opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up to the 18th-20th centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender.

Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject.

Genres: Philosophy

520 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2014

About the author

Noël Carroll (born 1947) is an American philosopher considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art. Although Carroll is best known for his work in the philosophy of film, he has also published journalism, works on philosophy of art generally, theory of media, and also philosophy of history.

As of 2012, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds PhDs in both cinema studies and philosophy. As a journalist, earlier in his career he published a number of articles in the Chicago Reader, Artforum, In These Times, Dance Magazine, Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice. He is also the author of five documentaries.

Perhaps his most popular and influential book is The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), an examination of the aesthetics of horror fiction (in novels, stories, radio and film). As noted in the book's introduction, Carroll wrote Paradoxes of the Heart in part to convince his parents that his lifelong fascination with horror fiction was not a waste of time. Another important book by Carroll is Mystifying Movies (1988), a critique of the ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and the semiotics of Roland Barthes, which has been credited with inspiring a shift away from what Carroll describes as the "Psycho-Semiotic Marxism" that had dominated film studies and film theory in American universities since the 1970s.