What Piece of Literary Criticism Blew You Away???

[Red Terror]

What piece of literary criticism made you understand a work of literature much better and in a new way??? Look, I haven't read tons of literary essays or criticism but I did major in literature in college and so I have some background in the field of literary criticism and I have looked at a lot of titles of critical essays and skimmed those that caught my attention. I have discarded many as boring crap. For my own part, the literary essay that has blown me away the most is by the Shakespearean scholar Professor Cantor of the University of Virginia. He wrote a piece entitled "The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells Critique of Capitalism". I found it in the book called H.G. Wells (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) . I have never seen any essay of literary criticism as fascinating as that. I read the Invisible Man many years ago and I thought I understood it, but after reading Professor Cantor's essay I was floored by his insights. What an astonishing work that piece of literary criticism is!!!! If you could point me in the right direction I would like to learn about any great enlightening works of literary criticism you know about.

[EmptySeraph]

S/Z by Roland Barthes; La poésie comme expérience by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Le dernier à parler by Maurice Blanchot, De l'Être à l'Autre by Levinas, Economy of the Unlost by Anne Carson, Huts by J.H. Prynne.

[Red Terror]

Thank you, sir.

[WICKES]

Harold Bloom's 'The Western Canon'. I love everything by Bloom, especially his great book on Shakespeare, but 'The Western Canon' is my favorite.

[Red Terror]

Harold Bloom's 'The Western Canon'. I love everything by Bloom, especially his great book on Shakespeare, but 'The Western Canon' is my favorite.

That is obvious, surely.

[Jackson Richardson]

Mimesis: the representation of reality in Western literature by Erich Auerbach.

[Danik 2016]

I should say not a piece of criticism, but a critic. The best literature critic I know was Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza. He was also very interested in furthering and integrating Latin American criticism. There are several articles by him in Spanish. I didn´t find any of them on the net, But they should be found at Centro Angel Rama.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_C%C3%A2ndido

https://sites.usp.br/portalatinoamericano/es/espanol-candido-antonio