In this book, which was first published in 1983, Frank Kermode looks in particular at the revived Russian Formalism, a highly original body of literary theory that flourished in the years immediately following the Revolution, and at the work of Roman Jakobson, one of its most distinguished exponents. He discusses its modern 'structuralist' descendants, recalling the importance of Roland Barthes and the invigorating effect of his fertile and surprising mind. He considers also the work of Foucault, Laca and Levi-Strauss, as well as that of Jacques Derrida, which uses a novel and de(con)structive method of analysis to question to tacit assumptions on which structuralism is based. In an opening chapter, Professor Kermode surveys his relationship with the new theory, explaining that it is a relation from which he has benefited without ever feeling disposed to join a movement. These essays will be of interest to students of literature.

This book, first published in 1962, is a collection of twenty-four essays written by Frank Kermode between 1958 and early 1961, and are all concerned with criticism and fiction. Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 includes essays on the works of James Joyce, William Golding, E. M. Forster, and J. D. Salinger, amongst many others. This book is ideal for students of literature.

First published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

'Sir Frank Kermode's effortless learning, lucid intelligence and wry, self-deprecating style prove that, at its best, literary criticism itself is a lively art.' - Al Alvarez

'In this extremely important book of speculative and scholarly criticism, Mr Kermode is setting out to re-define the notion of the Romantic tradition, especially in relation to English poetry and criticism.' - Times Literary Supplement

Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf's last novel, and in her own opinion it was `more quintessential' than any of her others. Set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village pageant at Pointz Hall, the book weaves together the musings of several disparate characters and their reactions to the imminence of a war which is to change the pattern of history. Before the book was published in the spring of 1941, Virginia Woolf had taken her own life. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

First published in 1971.
This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history.
Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

Various aspects of Milton are explored in this collection of essays by scholars whose reputations were, at the time of publication in 1960, perhaps largely based on their writings on more modern subjects. This had the advantage of demonstrating that Milton as a poet is "alive" and that other attempts to represent him as irrelevant to the interests of the modern reader had failed. The essays offer to admirers of Milton and of modern poetry cogent and mature arguments for restoring a great poet to his proper authority in our literary life.

Continuities, first published in 1968, is a collection of reviews by Frank Kermode that appeared from 1962 to 1967. Kermode discusses a variety of novelists, poets, and critics, including T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Wallace Stevens. History and politics are two important aspects that are discussed in regards to these writers. This book is ideal for students of English literature.

Continuities, first published in 1968, is a collection of reviews by Frank Kermode that appeared from 1962 to 1967. Kermode discusses a variety of novelists, poets, and critics, including T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Wallace Stevens. History and politics are two important aspects that are discussed in regards to these writers. This book is ideal for students of English literature.

Various aspects of Milton are explored in this collection of essays by scholars whose reputations were, at the time of publication in 1960, perhaps largely based on their writings on more modern subjects. This had the advantage of demonstrating that Milton as a poet is "alive" and that other attempts to represent him as irrelevant to the interests of the modern reader had failed. The essays offer to admirers of Milton and of modern poetry cogent and mature arguments for restoring a great poet to his proper authority in our literary life.

Creative Lives and Works: Raymond Firth, Audrey Richards, Lucy Mair, Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach is a collection of interviews conducted by one of England's leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of 40 years, the five conversations in this volume, are part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences, the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume on five of England's foremost social anthropologists is the second in the series of several such books. These conversations and talks are interlaced with rich ethnography and interpretations of distant civilizations and the very real practices that enable these tribal societies and cultures to thrive. There are several teaching moments in these engaging conversations which are further enriched by detailed personal experiences that each of the five shares. Sir Raymond Firth gives us an insight into his Polynesian experience, while Audrey Richards and Lucy Mair recall their days in the African hinterland. Meyer Fortes's account of his tribal study, yet again in the African subcontinent, is mesmeric, while Sir Edmund Leach's Southeast Asian encounters are just as enthralling. Immensely riveting as conversations, this collection gives one a flavour of how tribal societies live and work. The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in learning about tribal societies and cultures, and those interested in History, Culture Studies, but also to those curious to gather knowledge about other cultures. Please note: This title is co-published with Social Science Press, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

'These new stories give strong support to the claim that their author is 'one of the very few left-wing imaginative writers of literary ability who have not betrayed their principles'...Reflecting on his achievements in a very long career, one cannot help thinking that Upward presents in his work a reliable record of an extraordinary period of history. His unique blending of the past, in art as well as in politics, still has lessons for the future. We should be grateful that a devoted artist has lived so intensely through so much' - From the Introduction by Frank Kermode.The first four of these new short stories by Edward Upward, now in his 99th year, form a closely linked sequence - almost a single story - and could be described as 'realistic dreams'. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward's earlier fantasies "The Railway Accident" and "Journey to the Border", both also published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, "Fred and Lil" is straightforwardly realistic and humanly sympathetic, while "With Alan to the Fair" deals with love, hate and political extremism in serious and in highly comical episodes.

In this book, which was first published in 1983, Frank Kermode looks in particular at the revived Russian Formalism, a highly original body of literary theory that flourished in the years immediately following the Revolution, and at the work of Roman Jakobson, one of its most distinguished exponents. He discusses its modern 'structuralist' descendants, recalling the importance of Roland Barthes and the invigorating effect of his fertile and surprising mind. He considers also the work of Foucault, Laca and Levi-Strauss, as well as that of Jacques Derrida, which uses a novel and de(con)structive method of analysis to question to tacit assumptions on which structuralism is based. In an opening chapter, Professor Kermode surveys his relationship with the new theory, explaining that it is a relation from which he has benefited without ever feeling disposed to join a movement. These essays will be of interest to students of literature.

This book, first published in 1962, is a collection of twenty-four essays written by Frank Kermode between 1958 and early 1961, and are all concerned with criticism and fiction. Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 includes essays on the works of James Joyce, William Golding, E. M. Forster, and J. D. Salinger, amongst many others. This book is ideal for students of literature.

For the past four decades Frank Kermode, critic and writer, has steadily established himself as one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. Questioning the public's harsh perception of 'the artist', Kermode at the same time gently pokes fun at artists' own, often inflated, self-image. He identifies what has become one of the defining characteristics of the Romantic tradition - the artist in isolation and the emerging power of the imagination. Back in print after an absence of over a decade, The Romantic Image is quintessential Kermode. Enlightenment has seldom been so enjoyable!

Guilt is an original, closely argued examination of the opposition between guilty man and tragic man. Starting from the scientific and speculative writings of Freud and the major pioneers of psychoanalysis to whom we owe the first studies of this complex question, Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca goes on to focus on the debate between Klein and Winnicott in an enlightened attempt to remove blame and the sense of guilt from religion, morality and law. Drawing on an impressive range of sources - literary, historical and philosophical - and illustrated by studies of composers, thinkers and writers as diverse as Mozart and Chuang Tzu, Shakespeare and Woody Allen, Guilt covers a range of topics including the concept of guilt used within the law, and the analyst's contribution to the client's sense of guilt. Previously unavailable in English, this book deserves to be read not only by psychoanalysts, philosophers. scholars and forensic psychiatrists interested in the theory of justice, but also be the ordinary educated reader.

Ian Watt (1917-1999) has long been acknowledged as one of the finest of postwar literary critics, and among the most learned of those writing about the work of Joseph Conrad. Essays on Conrad is a collection of Watt's most characteristic essays on Conrad's work. Watt's own philosophy, as well as his insight into Conrad's work, was shaped by his experiences as a prisoner of war on the River Kwai. His moving account of these experiences completes this essential collection of Watt essays.

Ian Watt (1917-1999) has long been acknowledged as one of the finest of postwar literary critics, and among the most learned of those writing about the work of Joseph Conrad. Essays on Conrad is a collection of Watt's most characteristic essays on Conrad's work. Watt's own philosophy, as well as his insight into Conrad's work, was shaped by his experiences as a prisoner of war on the River Kwai. His moving account of these experiences completes this essential collection of Watt essays.

While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, “The Waste Land” is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective. This edition includes “The Love Song of  J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Gerontion,” and more.

'Literary criticism is a distinctive activity of the civilised mind.' With Eliot's dictum in mind, Professor Kermode has selected from the whole range of his critical writings, some of them dating back to before 1918. There are essays of generalisation, appreciations of individual writers, and a section of his social and religious criticism. All the famous and most influential essays are drawn upon, with extracts from many others, and there is an important Introduction by Professor Kermode, with valuable notes.

'A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places ... ' This was the new metropolitan disease Trollope set out brilliantly to expose in The Way We Live Now. His milieux are the City's financial institutions, London's exclusive West End squares and drones' clubs populated by languorous aristocrats, all offering rich pickings for the unscrupulous speculator, whether in the marriage or the money market. Among the unscrupulous are the hack-writer Lady Carbury, her son Felix and, above all, Melmotte, a financier of uncertain origins and Napoleonic ruthlessness, energy and charm, whose dramatic rise and fall dominates the novel. The Way We Live Now, unpopular on its first appearance in 1874-5, is now widely recognized as Trollope's masterpiece. An unorthodox satire with a happy ending, it explores decadence and change in what Frank Kermode calls 'a world increasingly more congenial to the speculator than to the gentleman'.

'In this extremely important book of speculative and scholarly criticism, Mr Kermode is setting out to re-define the notion of the Romantic tradition, especially in relation to English poetry and criticism.' - Times Literary Supplement

Sir Frank Kermode, the British scholar, teacher, and author, was an inspired critic. "Forms of Attention" is based on a series of three lectures he gave on canon formation, or how we choose what art to value. The opening essay, on Botticelli, traces the artist's sudden popularity in the nineteenth century for reasons that have more to do with poetry than painting. In the second essay, Kermode reads Hamlet from a very modern angle, offering a useful (and playful) perspective for a contemporary audience. The final essay is a defense of literary criticism as a process and conversation that, while often conflating knowledge with opinion, keeps us reading great art and working with - and for - literature.

E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel is an innovative and effusive treatise on a literary form that, at the time of publication, had only recently begun to enjoy serious academic consideration. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Oliver Stallybrass, and features a new preface by Frank Kermode. First given as a series of lectures at Cambridge University, Aspects of the Novel is Forster's analysis of this great literary form. Here he rejects the 'pseudoscholarship' of historical criticism - 'that great demon of chronology' - that considers writers in terms of the period in which they wrote and instead asks us to imagine the great novelists working together in a single room. He discusses aspects of people, plot, fantasy and rhythm, making illuminating comparisons between novelists such as Proust and James, Dickens and Thackeray, Eliot and Dostoyevsky - the features shared by their books and the ways in which they differ. Written in a wonderfully engaging and conversational manner, this penetrating work of criticism is full of Forster's habitual irreverence, wit and wisdom. In his new introduction, Frank Kermode discusses the ways in which Forster's perspective as a novelist inspired his lectures. This edition also includes the original introduction by Oliver Stallybrass, a chronology, further reading and appendices. E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was a noted English author and critic and a member of the Bloomsbury group. His first novel, Where Angels Fear To Tread appeared in 1905. The Longest Journey appeared in 1907, followed by A Room With A View (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. Howards End (1910) was a story that centered on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. Maurice was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971. If you enjoyed Aspects of the Novel, you might like Forster's A Room with a View, also available in Penguin Classics.

The question of the canon has been the subject of debate in academic circles for over fifteen years. Pleasure and Change contains two lectures on this important subject by the distinguished literary critic Sir Frank Kermode. In essays that were originally delivered as Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in November of 2001, Kermode reinterprets the question of canon formation in light of two related and central notions: pleasure and change. He asks how aesthetic pleasure informs what we find valuable, and how this perception changes over time. Kermode also explores the role of chance, observing the connections between canon formation and unintentional and sometimes even random circumstance. Geoffrey Hartmann (Yale University), John Guillory (New York University), and Carey Perloff (director of the American Conservatory Theatre) offer incisive comments on these essays, to which Kermode responds in a lively rejoinder. The volume begins with a helpful introduction by Robert Alter. The result is a stimulating and accessible discussion of a highly significant cultural debate.