This book brings together essays that ask how one may chart more productive engagements with the methodological foundations of literary studies, a discipline that is finding itself in a moment of severe crisis.The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice and are accompanied by a new Preface.

Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Fellow for Literary Theory, Literary Studies, and Literary Studies Education at Goethe University, Frankfurt. His most recent books include Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel (2023) and, with Max José Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games (2023).

Mathias Nilges is Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. His most recent books include How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present (2021) and, with Mitch Murray, William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture (2021).

Preface: Futures of literary studies, revisited Introduction: Futures of literary studies 1. Phronesis: Shifting the concept of the political in the environmental humanities 2. The work of literary studies: Interpretation, argument, and socioaesthetic experience 3. Thinking the contemporary: Beyond distinctiveness in the literary humanities 4. Prospective criticism: On private and public things 5. The notion of criticism at the present time: From postcriticism to an ethics of reading well 6. A case for religious criticism 7. Meathead materialisms: César Aira's ANTsy fictions of a world without conviction Afterword: How we argue