Best of
Literary-Criticism

1955

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections


Walter Benjamin - 1955
    Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaces them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times. Reflections the companion volume to this book, is also available as a Schocken paperback.Unpacking My Library, 1931The Task of the Translator, 1913The Storyteller, 1936Franz Kafka, 1934Some Reflections on Kafka, 1938What Is Epic Theater?, 1939On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939The Image of Proust, 1929The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Theses on the Philosophy of History, written 1940, pub. 1950

The Space of Literature


Maurice Blanchot - 1955
    From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

You Lovely People (Filipino Literary Classics)


Bienvenido N. Santos - 1955
    Santos has presented what may well be the essence of those years - the loneliness and hunger of a people who were almost all of them hurt and broken to the bone. But for an ideal, which Santos so eloquently dramatizes in this book, they would have lost their very souls. In this sense YOU LOVELY PEOPLE is a document and at once a portrait of the Filipino heart.

The Later Eighteenth Century


René Wellek - 1955
    

The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism


Lionel Trilling - 1955
    Jacket has minor edge wear on all edges and corners. Is priceclipped. NOT reprint publisher, NOT a worthless book of the month club edition, NEVER a library book.

The Shock of Recognition


Edmund Wilson - 1955
    s/t: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It

The Making of a Poem


Stephen Spender - 1955
    

Reading Modern Short Stories


Jarvis A. Thurston - 1955
    Understanding themes, characters, symbolism, as well as a compilation of the works of authors including Lardner, Suckow, Turgenev, De Maupassant, Chekhov, Mansfield, Bowen, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Forster, Robert Penn Warren, Joyce, Gide, Hofmannsthal, Flaubert, Trilling, Svevo and others.

The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times


Eric Bentley - 1955
    A major study by one of the leading modern dramatic critics. Introduction by Richard Gilman; new Afterword by the Author. Index.