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Why do we spend time reading and discussing books which tell of events which never in fact occurred? The question is elementary - and yet, as David Daiches suggests in this provocative study, it is the elementary questions that are never answered. Although literary criticism today is more concerned with technique than with the basic question of value, the question of value underlies all the others. Professor Daiches therefore directs this book to the search for the basic function and purpose of imaginative prose and poetry.

A Study of Literature is not, however, an obscure book of literary theory; it contains abundant and pungent examples and critical analyses - of prose fiction, of modern writing, and of the nature of poetry. It's main purpose, as Professor Daiches says, is to help the reader of works of imaginative literature to see what he is reading, to understand just what it is that he gets from different kinds of reading, and to discriminate between those different kinds.