Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism

James Seaton is a Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, where he teaches courses on the history of literary criticism, American literature and culture, and literature and law. His previous books include Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies (1996) and A Reading of Vergil's Georgics (1983). He is the editor of The Genteel Tradition and Character and Opinion in the United States by George Santayana (2009) and co-editor with William K. Buckley of Beyond Cheering and Bashing: New Perspectives on The Closing of the American Mind (1992). Seaton's articles and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Claremont Review of Books, The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, The University Bookman, Modern Age, Journal of the History of Ideas, Society, The Review of Metaphysics, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Legal Studies Forum, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, and Michigan State Law Review.

'James Seaton is the only writer discussing the humanist tradition who has sufficient depth of learning to take it back to its origins in Plato and Aristotle. He has shown more clearly than anyone else the paradox of postmodernist theory that nothing can be certain except the postmodernists' own certainty that nothing is certain. This book is sui generis because he offers a practical alternative to the current reign of 'theory' and 'cultural studies'. His characteristic virtues as an essayist and literary critic - discrimination, undogmatic flexibility and vast learning - come through with great force in this book. Seaton is a writer deserving - no, demanding - serious attention.' Edward Alexander, University of Washington

• Introduction; 1. Plato and Neoplatonism; 2. Romanticism and modernism; 3. Theory and cultural studies; 4. Aristotle and the humanistic tradition; 5. Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling; 6. Democracy, popular culture, and Ralph Ellison; 7. Literary criticism, the humanities, and liberal education.