Frank Lentricchia
After the New Criticism.
The University of Chicago Press, 1980. First printing. 0226471977 xiv/384 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.5", is bound in white cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book is like new. Dust jacket shows shelfwear, with faded spine panel and wear at edges. 
""After the New Criticism" is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. The historical intention of Frank Lentricchia's book is evident in its structure. In the first part, "A Critical Thematics, 1957-1977," Lentricchia analyzes the impact of our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Saussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among others, less central figures. Having exposed the significant themes and problems, and gauged the influence of archetypalist, existentialist, phenomenological, structuralist, and poststructuralist perspectives, the author turns, in the second part, to four exemplary theorists on the American scene -- Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom -- and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in the first part.
Lentricchia's critical intention is in evidence in his sustained attack on the more or less hidden formalist premises, inherited from the New Critical fathers, of much contemporary criticism. Even in the name of historical consciousness, he contends, contemporary theorists have often cut literature off from social and temporal processes. By so doing he believes that they have deprived literature of its relevant values and turned the teaching of both literature and theory into a rarefied activity. All along the way, with the help of such diverse thinkers as Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Bloom, Lentricchia indicates a strategy by which future critical theorists may resist the mandarin attitudes of their fathers.