📚 Literary Criticism

Books with literary criticism on their catalogue record, first published between 1715 and 2019, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject literary criticism in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 14,351 works the catalogue holds under that subject. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	An essay on man	Alexander Pope	1733	315
	Οἰδίπους Τύραννος (Oidípous Týrannos)	Sophocles	1715	188
	George Bernard Shaw	Gilbert Keith Chesterton	1909	138
	Practical criticism	I. A. Richards	1929	60
	Principles of literary criticism	I. A. Richards	1900	51
	Wild	Cheryl Strayed	1767	31
	陰翳礼讃 (In'ei raisan)	谷崎潤一郎	1977	30
	Mythologies	Roland Barthes	1953	26
	A short guide to writing about literature	Sylvan Barnet	1968	24
	He, the one who gets slapped	Леонид Николаевич Андреев	1912	22
	Narration	Gertrude Stein	1935	20
	The hero with a thousand faces	Joseph Campbell	1949	16
	A glossary of literary terms	M. H. Abrams	1957	16
	History of American Literature	Reuben Post Halleck	1911	15
	Teaching a Stone to Talk	Annie Dillard	1982	15
	The Gift	Lewis Hyde	1983	15
	An Experiment in Criticism	C. S. Lewis	1961	12
	La casa de Bernarda Alba	Federico García Lorca	1973	12
	Introducing English grammar	David J. Young	1984	12
	How to read literature like a professor	Thomas C. Foster	2002	12
	Stranger Than Fiction	Chuck Palahniuk	2004	12
	The Devil and Sherlock Holmes	David Grann	2010	12
	Essays	Italo Calvino	1988	11
	The Great Derangement	Amitav Ghosh	2016	11
	Plays of George Colman the Younger	George Colman	2019	11
	Every Tongue Got to Confess	Zora Neale Hurston	2001	10
	On Deconstruction	Jonathan Culler	1983	9
	The Art of Nonfiction	Ayn Rand	2001	8
	Small talk	Harold Nicolson	1937	7
	A handbook to literature	William Harmon	1996	7

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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