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Originally published in 1985, fourteen foremost writers of fiction
give detailed accounts of their writings in this absorbing
collection by John Haffenden, whom The Sunday Times has applauded
for having 'perfected' the art of the literary interview. Bringing
together discussions with a wide range of authors in Britain at the
time, the volume contains interviews with Martin Amis, Malcolm
Bradbury, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, William Golding, Russell
Hoban, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Pritchett,
Salman Rushdie, David Storey, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon. John
Haffenden questions them about the creative process, about specific
works - including Golding's Rites of Passage, Hoban's Riddley
Walker, Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil and Rushdie's Midnight's
Children and Shame - and about the ideas and visions which inform
those works. The writers provide lively, fascinating and often
definitive responses which offer many insights into the value and
function of fiction. The volume also includes discussions of
cultural context and of narrative techniques and kinds - realist,
postmodernist, fabulous - offering immediate material for critical
debate. For all who are interested in twentieth century fiction it
is essential reading.
First published in 1982, The Life of John Berryman draws on
extensive research in the USA and on an enormous collection of
hitherto unpublished materials - journals, letters, stories and
poetry -to build a biography that recounts in absorbing detail the
public and private stages of John Berry man's career. It also
offers an intimate portrait of a creative artist: his compulsive
self-presentation and self-reproach, his moral and artistic
dilemmas, his dedication and his accomplishments. John Berryman
occupies a central place among the outstanding poets of recent
times. The course of his life ran between the extremes of personal
degradation and artistic ecstasy. He suffered the early suicide of
his father, the dominance of his mother, poverty and professional
setbacks, psychiatric treatment, alcoholism, and sexual and
spiritual vexation. He became an electrifying, fearful teacher and
a loving, jealous friend. His mentors and close associates included
Mark Van Doren, Richard Blackmur, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell and
Saul Bellow. The years brought him spells of deep personal joy and
artistic fulfilment, but all too heavy a hand of terrible
suffering. The book will be an extremely interesting read for
students of literature.
Originally published in 1985, fourteen foremost writers of fiction
give detailed accounts of their writings in this absorbing
collection by John Haffenden, whom The Sunday Times has applauded
for having 'perfected' the art of the literary interview. Bringing
together discussions with a wide range of authors in Britain at the
time, the volume contains interviews with Martin Amis, Malcolm
Bradbury, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, William Golding, Russell
Hoban, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Pritchett,
Salman Rushdie, David Storey, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon. John
Haffenden questions them about the creative process, about specific
works - including Golding's Rites of Passage, Hoban's Riddley
Walker, Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil and Rushdie's Midnight's
Children and Shame - and about the ideas and visions which inform
those works. The writers provide lively, fascinating and often
definitive responses which offer many insights into the value and
function of fiction. The volume also includes discussions of
cultural context and of narrative techniques and kinds - realist,
postmodernist, fabulous - offering immediate material for critical
debate. For all who are interested in twentieth century fiction it
is essential reading.
The "Collected Critical Heritage II" series comprises 40 volumes
covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These
volumes are available as a complete set, mini box sets (by theme)
or as individual volumes. The series gathers together a large body
of critical figures in literature. These sources include
contemporary reviews from both popular and literary media. In these
students can read about how "Lady's Chatterly's Lover" shocked
contemporary reviewers, or what Ibsen's "Doll's House" meant to the
early women's movement. The series also includes little-published
documentary material such as diaries and correspondence - often
between authors and their publishers and critics - and significant
pieces of criticism from later periods to demonstrate how an
author's reputation changed over time. This volume is devoted to
William Carlos Williams
This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth
century European and American authors. These volumes will be
available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as
individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume
set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
The poetry of John Berryman occupies an incomparable place in
modern American literature. This study traces the composition of
the major poems, and interprets Berryman's characteristic trials
and his imaginative triumphs. In Homage to Mistress Bradstreet ,
which Edmund Wilson called ' the most distinguished long poem by an
American since The Waste Land ', Berryman set himself enormous
problems of theme and form, and overcame them with the vigorous and
exciting craft that is described in this book. He transformed his
personal concerns and historical interests into a fully achieved
artistic unity, a poem which succeeds both as lyric and as drama.
Similarly, in forging the thirteen-year 'epic' of The Dream Songs ,
'the tragical history of Henry', as the poet himself called it,
Berryman resolutely confronted chosen models such as Don Quixote
and The Iliad , and eventually realised his own design and a unique
poetic voice. 'I set up the 'Bradstreet' poem as an attack on 'The
Waste Land' ' Berryman said in his National Book Award Acceptance
Speech; 'I set up ' The Dream Songs ' as hostile to every visible
tendency in both American and English poetry...The aim was the same
in both poems: the reproduction or invention of the motions of a
human personality, free and determined, in one case feminine, in
the other masculine.' A chief feature of this study is the
remarkably extensive use John Haffenden has made of primary
research materials - manuscript drafts, notes, marginalia, diary
entries and letters, all of which are printed here for the first
time - to illuminate and explain the poems. This book is both a
critical analysis of Berryman's mature works and an internal
narrative of the poet's struggles and success. It includes
comprehensive notes and commentary on 'The Dream Songs' and on
'Delusions, Etc.' , as well as an authoritative discussion and
assesment of 'Love & Fame'.
'The book amounts to a comprehensive literary history of the time.'
David Sexton, Evening Standard Volume 5 of The Letters of T. S.
Eliot finds the poet, between the ages of forty-two and forty-four,
reckoning with the strict implications of his Christian faith for
his life, his work, and his poetry. The letters between Eliot and
his associates, family and friends - his correspondents range from
the Archbishop of York and the American philosopher Paul Elmer More
to the writers Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read and Ralph Hodgson -
serve to illuminate the ways in which his Anglo-Catholic
convictions could, at times, prove a self-chastising and even
alienating force. 'Anyone who has been moving among intellectual
circles and comes to the Church, may experience an odd and rather
exhilarating feeling of isolation,' he remarks. Notwithstanding, he
becomes fully involved in doctrinal controversy: he espouses the
Church as an arena of discipline and order. Eliot's relationship
with his wife, Vivien, continues to be turbulent, and at times
desperate, as her mental health deteriorates and the communication
between husband and wife threatens, at the coming end of the year,
to break down completely. At the close of this volume Eliot will
accept a visiting professorship at Harvard University, which will
take him away from England and Vivien for the academic year
1932-33.
A vivid and personal documentation of T. S. Eliot's most crucial
years, both in his private and public life. Despairing of his
volatile, unstable marriage, T. S. Eliot, at 44, resolves to put an
end to his eighteen-year union with Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot. To
begin with, he distances himself from her for nine months, from
September 1932, by becoming Norton Lecturer at Harvard University.
His lectures will be published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism(1933). He also delivers the Page-Barbour Lectures at
Virginia (After Strange Gods, 1934). At Christmas he visits Emily
Hale, to whom he is 'obviously devoted'. He gives talks all over -
New York, California, Missouri, Minnesota, Chicago - and the
letters describing encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund
Wilson and Marianne Moore ('a real Gillette blade') brim with
gossip. High points include the premiere at Vassar College of his
comic melodrama Sweeney Agonistes (1932). The year 'was the
happiest I can ever remember in my life . . . successful and
amusing.' Returning home, he seeks refuge with friends in the
country while making known to Vivien his decision to leave her. But
he is exasperated when she buries herself in denial: she will not
accept a Deed of Separation. The close of 1933 is lifted when Eliot
'breaks into Show Business'. He is commissioned to write a 'mammoth
Pageant': The Rock. This collaborative enterprise will be the
proving-ground for the choric triumph of Murder in the Cathedral
(1935).
In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, which
brings the poet to the age of forty, T.S. Eliot was to set a new
course for his life and work. Forsaking the Unitarianism of his
American forebears, he was received into the Church of England and
naturalised as a British citizen - a radical and public alteration
of the intellectual and spiritual direction of his career. The
demands of Eliot's professional life as writer and editor became
more complex and exacting during these years. The celebrated but
financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922 - The
Criterion - switched between being a quarterly and a monthly,
before being rescued by the fledgling house of Faber & Gwyer.
In addition to writing numerous essays and editorials, lectures,
reviews, introductions and prefaces, his letters show Eliot
involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career
as a publisher. His Ariel poems, Journey of the Magi (1927) and A
Song for Simeon (1928) established a new manner and vision for the
poet of The Waste Land and 'The Hollow Men'. These are also the
years in which Eliot published two sections of an exhilaratingly
funny, savage, jazz-influenced play-in-verse - 'Fragment of a
Prologue' and 'Fragment of an Agon' - which were subsequently
brought together as Sweeney Agonistes. In addition, he struggled to
translate the remarkable work Anabase, by St.-John Perse, which was
to be a signal influence upon his own later poetry. This
correspondence with friends and mentors vividly documents all the
stages of Eliot's personal and artistic transformation during these
crucial years, the continuing anxieties of his private life, and
the forging of his public reputation.
Passionate, controversial and illuminating - this collection
contains Empson's best short pieces on Shakespeare, a sally on
George Herbert, a defence of Coleridge, and an eager introduction
to a French farce, a group of incomparably witty autobiographical
articles, and the text to his extraordinary Inaugural Lecture as
Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University.
This collection of William Empson's essays on Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama is the second volume of his writings on Renaissance
literature. Edited with an introduction by the leading Empson
scholar John Haffenden, the contents range from famous essays on
The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone, The Alchemist and The Duchess of
Malfi to a sprightly piece on Elizabethan spirits. In addition,
there are previously unpublished essays which revisit critical
controversies, and a magnificent, provocative study of A Midsummer
Night's Dream which ventures a major new reading of the play. 'I am
attracted by the notion of a hearty indifference to one's own and
other people's feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in
question,' Empson stated. The incomparable Empson here fights his
own critical corner with unequalled zest, intelligence and insight.
Following the success in paperback of William Empson's Essays on
Shakespeare (1986), this first volume of his Essays on Renaissance
Literature (1993) now appears in an accessible format. The volume
gathers Empson's passionate and controversial essays on John Donne
in the context of contemporary science, and includes previously
unpublished pieces on some of the most influential Renaissance
writers and scientists. Edited and introduced by leading Empson
scholar John Haffenden, this is a book for anyone interested in the
Renaissance, the history of science, and the history of literary
criticism. 'Some of these passages have a sweep as grand as Empson
found in Donne.' Eric Griffiths, The Times Literary Supplement
'Empson's achievement here as elsewhere comes from the generosity
of spirit which made him consistently a great critic.' The New York
Review of Books
This collection of William Empson's essays on Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama is the second volume of his writings on Renaissance
literature. Edited with an introduction by the leading Empson
scholar John Haffenden, the contents range from famous essays on
The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone, The Alchemist and The Duchess of
Malfi to a sprightly piece on Elizabethan spirits. In addition,
there are previously unpublished essays which revisit critical
controversies, and a magnificent, provocative study of A Midsummer
Night's Dream which ventures a major new reading of the play. 'I am
attracted by the notion of a hearty indifference to one's own and
other people's feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in
question,' Empson stated. The incomparable Empson here fights his
own critical corner with unequalled zest, intelligence and insight.
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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