Twentieth-century Western philosophy divides untidily into two traditions, analytic and continental, and two figures stand tall at the forking of the ways—the philosophers Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl. However, the division is not reducible to this convenient alternative between two great contemporaries equally committed to the provision of firm foundations for the advancement of philosophy.

Nineteenth-century literary criticism read literature as a commentary on the world it inhabited. Thecommentators understood what they read in terms of the judgments and values they registered in it, andwhich they themselves, as commentators, as critics, made explicit - as if, somehow, the literary textunder investigation always fell short in this regard. Their criticism, then, took up, or extended, theintention of the texts they engaged, as they understood it: to say something significant about the world.In this climate, the literary object, (...) as literary, scarcely existed. Where successful, it was a transparency,in itself barely visible, so well did it convey a world.This is, briefly, the caricature of this period of literary criticism produced by those polemicists who,coming after, were keen to situate themselves in the vanguard of a new critical method. (shrink)