What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This book answers and prolongs these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction. Examples range from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats.
Michael Wood born in Lincoln, England, is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He is an alumnus of St John's College, Cambridge.
Prior to teaching to Princeton, he taught at Columbia University, and at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.
He was Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton from 1995-2001, and chaired Princeton's English department from 1998 to 2004. He writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and on film for the London Review of Books.