Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory

Meyer Howard Abrams was born in 1912. He in the 1930s at Harvard and with I. A. Richards at Cambridge University in 1935. Abrams set the standard of critical authority for American literary studies for the quarter century after World War II. He is the author of two syntheses of English Romantic thought, and has also been general and Romantic period editor of the most widely used college anthology of English literature; The Norton Anthology of English Literature,as well as author of a popular Glossary of Literary Terms, and several influential essays on English Romanticism. Abrams's dissertation written in 1940, was expanded and published in 1953 as The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. The Mirror and the Lamp contributed to the legitimation of English Romanticism as a field of study. Nearly 20 years later, in Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams asserted a different thesis with similar authority. Michael Fischer is vice president for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty and professor of English at Trinity University. He was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. His research and teaching have focused on English romanticism, the history of ideas about literature and philosophy, and defenses of the humanities.