George Steiner - Literary Criticism & Philosophy (11 books)

GEORGE STEINER (b. 1929) is a prominent French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. His field is primarily comparative literature, and his work explores cultural and philosophical issues, particularly the anomalies of contemporary Western culture, translation and the nature of language and literature, and the impact of the Holocaust. His best-known book, AFTER BABEL (1975), quickly established itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory, and an early contribution to the field of translation studies.

Steiner's essays and books are always provocative and thrilling, addressing a broad range of topics, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to "the common reader." He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children’s games, war-time Britain, Hitler’s bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Central to Steiner's thinking, he has stated, "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate."


The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise indicated. The PDFs are improved versions of older scans, in which the page images have been completely reprocessed with contents in bookmarks and accurate pagination.

* AFTER BABEL: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford UP, 1975).

* AFTER BABEL: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford UP, 1998). Third edition. -- ePUB

* ANTIGONES: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (Yale UP, 1984).

* THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY (Oxford UP, 1980). -- PDF + ePUB

* EXTRATERRITORIAL: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (Atheneum, 1976).

* GEORGE STEINER AT THE NEW YORKER (New Directions, 2009). Edited with an Introduction by Robert Boyers. -- ePUB

* IN BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture (Yale UP, 1971).

* LANGUAGE AND SILENCE: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (Atheneum, 1986).

* MARTIN HEIDEGGER (University of Chicago Press, 1991). With a new Introduction.

* NOSTALGIA FOR THE ABSOLUTE (House of Anansi, 1997).

* ON DIFFICULTY & OTHER ESSAYS (Oxford UP, 1978). -- PDF + ePUB

* THE POETRY OF THOUGHT: From Hellenism to Celan (New Directions, 2011).