Essays on English and American Literature

This volume brings together a group of essays on 27 English or American writers contributing to the history of English and American literature, and offers a concise survey of the question of literary understanding. It approaches this question in a specific and systematic way, adopting the framework of structuralist literary criticism. The book proposes a preliminary to the understanding of literature in general, a sort of 'philosophy of literature', as the problems involved in critical reading of course reflect the powerful characteristics of literary language.