Books

The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin
   Cambridge University Press, 2008  (excerpt)

The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin 
    Cambridge University Press, 2004

“All the chapters deserve to take their place in such a prominent volume and all serve both to enrich advanced understandings of Benjamin's work and to invigorate new engagement. . . .the standard of the chapters in this work is uniformly high, and at times outstanding.” 
      – Comparative Critical Studies ​

Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity
   Stanford University Press, 2000 (excerpt)

“an original and compelling critical study that breaks important new ground in a variety of areas, including European Romanticism and its relation to the past, the relation of aesthetics to politics, and contemporary historicist theories of literature and culture.”  
      – Criticism 
“carefully thought challenge to critical orthodoxy” - Keats-Shelley Journal

Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions
   Stanford University Press, 1996 

Theory and the Evasion of History
   Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 

“Almost uniquely amongst his generation of literary scholars, David Ferris has found the patience and self-discipline to confront the central Hegelian quesion of the nature and function of historical understanding.” 
       – MLN

"Teases out philosophical problems from minutely close attention to the rhetorical and formal elements of literary texts... Erudite and resourceful." 
       – Studies in English Literature