For all the debates that have roiled literature departments over the past 60 years, the history of the discipline itself is a source of surprising consensus. According to the standard narrative, ...

For thousands of years, humans have been creating stories — and for just as long, they’ve been coming up with words to describe all the tools and techniques that make a story work. But these “literary ...

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...

Mr. Howard, a retired book editor, is the author of the forthcoming “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature.” See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New ...