Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, Vol. 7

Literary Criticism and Psychology Edited by Joseph P. Strekla

Publish Date: 10/1/1990
Dimensions: 6 x 9
Page Count: 318 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-01218-6

The psychological problems within literary study are manifold. The most important for investigation include the writer himself as a psychologically complex person involved in the creative process, the work of art itself as a psychological stimulus, and the response to the work by the audience. Each area generates its own psychological questions. The greatest error on the part of the literary critic would be to reduce a work’s literary aspects to psychological means and ends, to psychologize it totally and thus to abandon literary criticism as an autonomous discipline. A psychologist may do this legitimately, but a literary critic cannot—although this by no means precludes the critic’s bringing a knowledge of psychology to bear on his own work. The contributors to this book consist of critics, psychologists, and some who are both.

Joseph P. Strelka, born May 3, 1927 in Wiener Neustadt, Lower Austria, received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 1950. After the untimely death of his academic mentor, Oskar Benda, he became a freelance critic and worked for Austrian Broadcasting and for a publishing house. He became the Austrian representative at the Centre International des Etudes Poétiques in Brussels and is a member of the Austrian PEN-Club. He received awards from the Theodor Koerner Foundation, a prize from the city of Vienna, and a special research fellowship in Paris. In 1964 he came to the United States as an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. In 1966 he moved to The Pennsylvania State University, and he is now Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Albany.

Professor Strelka is a member of the editorial boards of the North Carolina Comparative Literature Series and of the Colloquia Germanica. In addition to writing and editing a number of books he is the general editor of the "Penn State Series in German Literature."

Other Ways to Acquire

Buy from Amazon.com
Buy from an Independent Bookstore
Buy from Powell's Books
Find in a Library

Related Subjects

Literary Studies