Best of
Literary-Criticism

1971

The Pound Era


Hugh Kenner - 1971
    Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions. A new book by him is certainly an event....A demanding, enticing book that glitters at the same time it antagonizes...."The Pound Era presents us with an idiosyncratic but sharply etched skeletal view of our immediate literary heritage."—The New York Times

A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake


S. Foster Damon - 1971
    An indispensable guide to Blake's ideas and symbols is once again available in paper, with a new foreword and annotated bibliography

Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature


Fredric Jameson - 1971
    Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Luk cs, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous influence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form.Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism.One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's "The Prison-House of Language" (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.

Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century


Russell Kirk - 1971
    S. Eliot since it was first published, Eliot and His Age remains the best introduction to the poet’s life, ideas, and literary works. It is the essential starting place for anyone who would understand what Eliot was about. Russell Kirk’s view of his older friend is sympathetic but not adulatory. His insights into Eliot’s writings are informed by wide reading in the same authors who most influenced the poet, as well as by similar experiences and convictions.Kirk elaborates here a significant theory of literary meaning in general, showing how great literary works awaken our intuitive reason, giving us profound visions of truth that transcend logical processes. And he traces Eliot’s political and cultural ideas to their true sources, showing the balance and subtlety of Eliot’s views. Eliot and His Age is a literary biography that will endure when much of the more recent writing on Eliot is gathering dust.

Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism


Paul De Man - 1971
    

Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature


M.H. Abrams - 1971
    H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789–1835)—the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of the age.But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in the same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.

In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture


George Steiner - 1971
    Steiner’s discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic.  He writes as a man sharing ideas, and his original notions, though scarcely cheerful, have the bracing effect that first-rate thinking always has.” –New Yorker“In Bluebeard’s Castle is a brief and brilliant book.  An intellectual tour de force, it is also a book that should generate a profound excitement and promote a profound unease…like the great culturalists of the past.  Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it.  The result is one of the most important books I have read for a very long time.”—New Society

The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry


Harold Bloom - 1971
    It is both a valuable introduction to the Romantics and an influential work of literary criticism. The perceptive interpretations of the major poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Beddoes, Clare, and Darley develop the themes of Romantic myth-making and the dialectical relationship between nature and imagination.For this new edition, Harold Bloom has added an introductory essay on the historical backgrounds of English Romantic poetry and an epilogue relating his book to literary trends.

Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End


Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 1971
    . . . It can be read, enjoyed, studied by people who like reading poetry, including—I would suspect—poets.”—Richard M. Elman, New York Times Book Review

Friendship


Maurice Blanchot - 1971
    He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the atomic era. Essays are devoted to works of fiction (Louis-René des Forêts, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Laporte, Marguerite Duras), to autobiographies or testimonies (Michel Leiris, Robert Antelme, André Gorz, Franz Kafka), or to authors who are more than ever contemporary (Jean Paulhan, Albert Camus).Several essays focus on questions of Judaism, as expressed in the works of Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber. Among the other topics covered are André Malraux's "imaginary museum," the Pléiade Encyclopedia project of Raymond Queneau, paperback publishing, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin's "Task of the Translator," Marx and communism, writings on the Holocaust, and the difference between art and writing. The book concludes with an eloquent invocation to friendship on the occasion of the death of Georges Bataille.

Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost


Stanley Fish - 1971
    S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor


Ellis Sandoz - 1971
    But his political vision had deep spiritual roots. Dostoevsky's searing struggle with the question of God is famously presented in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.

Truth of Poetry


Michael Hamburger - 1971
    Stressing the tensions and conflicts in and behind the work of almost every major poet of the period, Hamburger's non-partisan approach and practitioner's appreciation of the aesthetic problems ensure that the many different possibilities open to poets since Baudelaire are lucidly and sympathetically discussed. Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924, and came to Britain as a child. He has taught widely in America and Britain and is the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. His awards include the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for services to German literature. Anvil publishes several of his translations, including editions of Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke and Poems of Paul Celan, which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His poem-sequence 'Late' appeared in 1997.

Kahlil Gibran: The Nature of Love


Andrew Dib Sherfan - 1971
    

City Of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970


Tony Tanner - 1971
    

What Coleridge Thought


Owen Barfield - 1971
    Please put price both in barcode and separately on back cover.

Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918


Guillaume Apollinaire - 1971
    His rampant enthusiasms and antipathies, and his remarkable acumen, make him still today the most evocative commentator on the intellectual ferment of the time. He was one of the first to champion Picasso and Braque, and to identify the importance of Delaunay, Duchamp, and Rousseau; he coined the word "Surrealism" and almost single-handedly pushed Cubism into the mainstream. With a new preface by Roger Shattuck, this is the definitive edition of these seminal writings.

Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations


D.A. Russell - 1971
    This edition provides for the first time the principal texts in translation, giving the reader a full view of ancient literary criticism and its development. In addition towell-known texts such as Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Art of Poetry, and Longinus's On Sublimity, the book includes complete versions of Aristotle's Rhetoric Book III, Demetrius's On Style, and Tacitus's Dialogue on Orators. It's shorter passages range from Homer to Hermogenes of Tarsus, in addition to selections from Plato, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero, the two Senecas, and Quintilian.

Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in Titus Andronicus, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, a Midsummer Night's Dream, and Richard II


James L. Calderwood - 1971
    

Keats and His World


Timothy Hilton - 1971
    

Shelley: A Critical Reading


Earl R. Wasserman - 1971
    Bennett and Stuart Curran bring together an internationally recognized group of scholars to focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley's conception of the poet's social role and how that conception has changed over time. The authors consider the cultural and political forces within Shelley's society and his attempts to establish a new role for the poet in its renovation. They examine the ways in which Shelley's thought engages contemporary debates on feminism, class structure, political representation, and human rights, and how it in turn affects radical politics in England. They describe his impact on other cultures, particularly in national liberation movements of both the 19th and 20th centuries. And they discuss the continuing presence and relevance of his ideas within the contemporary social and intellectual arena.Contributors: Donald H. Reiman, Greg Kucich, Terence Hoagwood, William Keach, Mark Kipperman, Michael Erkelenz, Gary Kelly, Annnette Wheeler Cafarelli, Neil Fraistat, Michael Scrivener, Bouthaina Shaaban, E. Douka Kabitoglou, Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, Marilyn Butler, Meena Alexander, Alan Weinberg, Steven E. Jones, Horst Höhne, Andrew J. Bennett, Karen A. Weisman, P.M.S. Dawson, Tilottama Rajan, Linda Brigham, Arkady Plotnitsky.

The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel


Sanford Pinsker - 1971
    Horatio Alger might have once been a good emblem of the American sensibility, but today Woody Allen’s anxious, bespectacled punin (face) seems closer, and truer, to our national experience. His urban, end-of-the-century anxieties mirror—albeit in exaggeration—our own.This expanded study of the schlemiel is especially relevant now, when scholarship of Yiddish and American Jewish literature is on the increase. By sketching the family tree of that durable anti-hero the schlemiel, Pinsker proves that Jewish humor is built upon the very foundations of the Jewish experience. Pinsker shows the evolution of the schlemiel from the comic butt of Yiddish jokes to a literary figure that speaks to the heart of our modern problems, and he demonstrates the way that Yiddish humor provides a sorely needed correction, a way of pulling down the vanities we all live by.