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William Empson, Volume II - Against the Christians (Hardcover)
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William Empson, Volume II - Against the Christians (Hardcover)
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Following the acclaimed first volume, Among the Mandarins, this is
the second and concluding volume of the authorized biography of
William Empson, one of the foremost poets and literary critics of
the twentieth century.
Against the Christians begins during the Second World War and
follows Empson's turbulent years of writing wartime propaganda for
the BBC. As Chinese Editor, he organized broadcasts to China and
propaganda programs for the Home Service, during which time his
friends and colleagues included the prickly George Orwell. The
effectiveness of Empson's work for the BBC provoked the Nazi
propagandist Hans Fritzsche to call him a "curly-headed Jew"--a
charge which gave him enormous satisfaction.
In 1947 he returned to China, where he was caught up in the
Communist siege of Peking and witnessed Mao Tse-tung's triumphant
entry. "I was there for the honeymoon between the universities and
the communists; we were being kept up to the mark rather firmly."
He saw "the dragooning of independent thought and the hysteria of
the confession meetings." In the late 1940s he also taught in the
USA, where he relished the irony of his situation. "My position
here really seems to me very dramatic; there can be few other
people in the world who are receiving pay simultaneously and
without secrecy from the Chinese Communists, the British
Socialists, and the capitalist Rockefeller machine."'
From 1953 to 1971 he held the Chair of English Literature at
Sheffield, where he engaged more vigorously than ever before in
public controversy, being driven by a desire to correct the
wrong-headed orthodoxies of modern literary criticism--most notably
"neo-Christianity." He acquired massive publicityfor his views on
the wickedness of Christianity when he published Milton's God in
1961: "The poem is wonderful because it is an awful warning. The
effort of reconsidering Milton's God, who makes the poem so good
just because he is so sickeningly bad, is a basic one for the
European mind." Haffenden presents a full account of the work on
Milton, along with analyses of Empson's many other writings on
subjects including Marlowe, Donne, Marvell, and Coleridge, and The
Structure of Complex Words (1951).
In a full and candid study of the public and private Empson, John
Haffenden enables the reader to understand one of the most gifted,
eccentric, witty, and controversial figures of our age--a giant of
modern literature and criticism.
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