What is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time when the humanities are increasingly called upon to justify themselves, this book seeks to clarify their myriad values and ideologies. Engaging the idea of literary value while at the same time remaining attuned to aesthetic, ethical, political and psychological principles, this book serves to underscore the enduring significance of literary studies in an academic climate that is ostensibly concerned with expediency and quantification. As a sophisticated examination of literary theory and criticism, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas provides a comprehensive and hopeful view of where the discipline is now and what avenues it is likely to take from here.

In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars illuminate the purpose and priorities of literary criticism.

The Value of Literature provides an original and compelling argument for the historical and contemporary significance of literature to humanity.

Why we read literature and why we should read literature are age-old questions that have, in recent years, gained unprecedented scope and intensity, against the backdrop of what has been perceived as a world-wide crisis in the humanities. While scholars frequently discuss different types of value separately, in this volume values of literature are approached in the plural: we argue that the ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, affective, social, historical, and existential values of literature should be explored in connection with each other. The three parts of the book explore the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; the cognitive, affective, and social values of literature; and the construction and questioning of literary values in society. Throughout the book, we discuss the different things literature can do - ranging from affirmation of social dogmas to its capacities for self-questioning and challenging of moral certainties - through the dynamic interplay of its ethical and aesthetic, cognitive and affective aspects. Literature not only reflects and draws on the values of the historical world from which it stems; it also actively addresses, challenges, and transforms those values and explores new ways to understand value. Through these complementary processes, literature engages in its own distinctively literary forms of value inquiry.

Tracing the shift from liberal to neoliberal education from the nineteenth century to the present day, this open access book provides a rich and previously underdeveloped narrative of value in higher education in England. Value and the Humanities draws upon historical, financial, and critical debates concerning educational and cultural policy. Rather than writing a singular defence of the humanities against economic rationalism, Zoe Hope Bulaitis constructs a nuanced map of the intersections of value in the humanities, encompassing an exploration of policy engagement, scientific discourses, fictional representation, and the humanities in public life. The book articulates a kaleidoscopic range of humanities practices which demonstrate that although recent policy encourages higher education to be entirely motivated by outcomes, fiscal targets, and the acquisition of employability skills, the humanities continue to inspire and aspire beyond these limits. This book is a historically-grounded and theoretically-informed analysis of the value of the humanities within the context of the market.

Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application together with reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate.