Kant and Literary Studies

With original contributions from a wide range of scholars of literature and philosophy alike, Kant and Literary Studies is the first volume devoted to examining the premises and principles of Kant's explicitly interdisciplinary philosophy in its specific relation to the defining features, means and aims of literature. Its central explorations of the relations between experience and representation, feeling and judgment, thought and poetics, and language and freedom make the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant one of the most relevant to the understanding of literature. Organizing its analyses of Kant's relationship to literature along intersecting lines, the three sections of the book focus, first, on the relation of central literary problems and genres to the theoretical underpinnings of Kant's thought; second, on the epistemological, narrative and historiographic dimensions of Kant's critical conceptions; and third, on the formative relation of his Critique to specific literary works and of critical discourse to ethics.