Abstract

This volume is an authorized and slightly emended English translation of the second revised German edition of Die Logik der Dichtung, a work whose influence on the philosophy of literature is perhaps comparable only to that of Roman Ingarden, Emil Staiger, or Northrop Frye. The study aims at a phenomenological description of literature by appeal to logic, ontology, and the scientific study of literature. All of its analytical intricacies notwithstanding, the book is not overwhelmingly abstract and unremittingly formal in its presentation, and its analyses are amply buttressed with concrete examples drawn predominately from European but also from Anglo-American literature. At a time when neo-Marxists such as Sartre have pronounced the concept of literature itself ideologically suspect and structuralists like Todorov, who contends that the very existence of literature constitutes its greatest paradox, Hamburger correctly discerns that the logic of literature has its foundation in the general theory of language.