"What is Literature? A Critical Anthology" explores the most fundamental question in literary studies. 'What is literature?' is the name of a problem that emerges with the idea of literature in European modernity. This volume offers a cross-section of modern literary theory and reflects on the history of thinking about literature as a specific form. "What is Literature?" reveals how ideas of the literary draw on the foundations of Western thought in ancient Greece and Rome, charting the emergence of modern literature in the eighteenth century, and including selections from the present state of the art. The anthology includes the work of leading writers and critics of the last two thousand years including Plato, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Rancière, and many others. The book is an insightful examination of the nature of literature, its meanings and values, functions and forms, provocations and mysteries. "What is Literature?" brings together in one volume influential and intriguing essays that show our enduring fascination with the idea of literature. This important guide: (1) Contains a broad selection of the most significant texts on the topic of literature; (2) Includes leading writers from ancient times to the most recent thinkers on literature and criticism; and (3) Encourages readers to reflect on the varied meanings of "literature." "What is Literature? A Critical Anthology" is a unique collection of texts that will appeal to every student and scholar of literature and literary criticism in the European tradition. This book contains the following chapters: (1) Hamburg Dramaturgy (1769) (G. E. Lessing); (2) Of the Standard of Taste (1777) (David Hume); (3) Critique of Judgment (1790) (Immanuel Kant); (4) On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) (Friedrich Schiller); (5) On the Study of Greek Poetry (1797) and Philosophical Fragments (1798-1800) (Friedrich Schlegel); (6) Lectures on Dramatic Art (1811) (A. W. Schlegel); (7) Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802) (William Wordsworth); (8) Biographia Literaria (1817) (Samuel Taylor Coleridge); (9) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1835) (G. W. F. Hegel); (10) The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) (Matthew Arnold); (11) The Birth of Tragedy (1872) (Friedrich Nietzsche); (12) The Art of Fiction (1884) (Henry James); (13) Crisis of Verse (1897) (Stéphane Mallarmé); (14) Art as Technique (1917) (Viktor Shklovsky); (15) The Uncanny (1919) (Sigmund Freud); (16) Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) and The Function of Criticism (1923) (T. S. Eliot); (17) A Room of One's Own (1929) (Virginia Woolf); (18) The Storyteller (1936): Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov (Walter Benjamin); (19) Pierre Menard, Author of the "Quixote" (Jorge Luis Borges); (20) What is Literature? (1948) (Jean-Paul Sartre); (21) Literature and the Right to Death (1948) (Maurice Blanchot); (22) Language (1950) (Martin Heidegger); (23) Trying to Understand "Endgame" (1958) (Theodor W. Adorno); (24) The Meridian (1960) (Paul Celan); (25) What is an Author? (1969) (Michel Foucault); (26) Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays (1975) (Hélène Cixous); (27) What is a Minor Literature? (1975) (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari); (28) Literature and Life (1993) (Gilles Deleuze); (29) The Literary Absolute (1978) (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy); (30) Orientalism (1978) (Edward W. Said); (31) Autobiography as De-facement (1979) (Paul de Man); (32) Che cos'è la poesia? (1988) and Before the Law (1982) (Jacques Derrida); (33) Signs Taken for Wonders (1986): Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817 (Homi K. Bhabha); (34) What is the History of Literature? (1997) (Stephen Greenblatt); (35) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); (36) Literature for the Planet (2001) (Wai Chee Dimock); (37) The Politics of Literature (2003) (Jacques Rancière); and (38) Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing (2013) (Rebecca L. Walkowitz).