ABSTRACT
Literature has been considered the pre-eminent art in the Western tradition from classical times on. Plato and Aristotle foregrounded poetry and its cognate art, drama, in their writings; two millennia later, Hume still drew exclusively on this art for the illustrative examples in his “Essay on the Standard of Taste.” Literature has continued to figure centrally in twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical battles about the canon as well as in the succession of struggles amongst ever-changing variants in critical theory: New Criticism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist theory, queer theory, evolutionary theory, and more.
