Permanence and Change

Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change, written by American literary theorist Kenneth Burke, was first published in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression. Burke followed this with Attitudes Toward History followed just two years later. His texts proved to be revolutionary in the theory of communication, and, as classics, retain their surcharge of energy.

Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, and in this book, Burke establishes, in ground-breaking fashion, that form permeates society, just as it does poetry and the arts.

This present volume is the Second Edition, first published in 1954, and includes an Introduction by Hugh Dalziel Duncan.

“Unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America.”—W. H. Auden

“One of the truly speculative American thinkers of his era.”—Malcolm Cowley

“The foremost critic of our time and perhaps the greatest critic since Coleridge.”—Stanley Edgar Hyman

“What Burke has done better than anyone else is to find a way of connecting literature to life without reducing either. He’s had far less attention than he deserves because he’d been so far ahead of his time. But he’s one of the major minds of the twentieth century, and he’s sure to be read in the future.”—Wayne Booth