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He argues that the best poetry that came out of the 1939-45 war,
while very different from the work of Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, and
their contemporaries, is in no sense inferior. It also has
different matters to consider. War in the air, war at sea, war
beyond Europe, the politics of Empire, democratic accountability -
these are no subjects to be found in the poetry of the Great War.
Nor is sex. Nor did American poets have much to say about that war,
whereas the Americans Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, and Louis
Simpson, are among the greatest English-speaking poets of World War
Two. Both Hecht and Simpson write about the Holocaust and its
aftermath, as do the English poets, Lotte Kramer and Gerda Mayer.
For these reasons among others, Englishspeaking poetry of the
Second World War deserves to be valued as work of unique
importance.
John Lucas's riveting novel is about the role of memory in how we
shape and come to terms with the past. Waterdrops is about what is
lost, what endures, about, as one of the characters says, the
terrible things that happen in war, and not only on the
battlefield. It is also about love.
Greece has always had its admirers, though none seems to have
cherished the Athenian tavernas, the murderous traffic and the
jaded prostitutes, the petty bureaucratic tyrannies, the street
noise and the heroic individualists with the irony and detachment
of John Lucas. '92 Acharnon Street' is a gritty portrait of a dirty
city and a wayward country. Yet Lucas' love for the realities of
Greece triumphs- for the Homeric kindness of her people towards
strangers, for the pleasures of her table and for the proximity of
islands in clear blue water as a refuge from the noise and
pollution of her capital city. This is Greece as the Greeks would
recognise it, seen through the eyes of a poet.
This title discusses the sequence of four plays that begins with
"Richard II" and concludes with "Henry V" referred to as the second
tetralogy. This second tetralogy, with its complex characters, is
evidence of Shakespeare's developing skills as a playwright and the
influence events of the period had on his writing. The author
explains what these influences were and how they may have affected
Shakespeare's portrayal of the various characters.
First published in 1977, this book studies three important
nineteenth-century novelists: Mrs Gaskell, William Hale White and
Thomas Hardy. They are all provincial novelists who wrote about
social change and the attendant problems and pressures this brought
with it. Unlike previous critics, who have tended to concentrate on
her 'social-problem' novels, here the author treats Gaskell's
Sylvia's Lovers and Cousin Phillis as central texts. However a
chapter also examines Gaskell and Engels perception of social
change in Manchester. This book also seeks to correct Hale White's
neglect, anointing Revolution in Tanner's Lane and Clara Hopgood
major works. The survey of women in Hardy's novels represents an
illuminating new angle and leads on to a discussion of love and
marriage in later Victorian fiction.
The intention of this collection of essays, first published in
1971, is to explore the political aspects of some nineteenth
century English writers. Under the influence of the great
revolutionary upheavals of the period almost all its most important
writers were involved, explicitly or otherwise, in political ideas.
This is an exploratory volume, and will be of absorbing interest to
anyone studying the interaction between literature and ideas in the
nineteenth century.
Spanning the past 20 years, this collection encompasses the work of
a leading modern poetry critic.
First published in 1980, this book surveys Dickens' growing power
to drive deep into the causes of his contemporary conditions. It
reveals the importance of nature to Dickens as a rich metaphor of
human freedom and potentiality, and emphasises his concern with
time and the problems of freedom. The author considers the
peculiarity of Dickens being unanimously acclaimed as a great
writer considering the difficulty in placing him definitively
within the literary tradition. The author argues Dickens was an
isolated figure, indifferent to changing fashions and with a strong
sense of the dignity of human nature and that this formed the basis
of his character and writings.
First published in 1966, this book collects six essays which
discuss the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the
work of several nineteenth century novelists. In the novels
studied, and the discussion of fiction that follows, the authors
argue that all these novelists' attempts to confront social change
- to connect old with new, past with present and the attempted
inclusiveness of vision in a changing society - sooner or later
fail. The essays are polemic in arguing against the contemporary
critical consensus that this failure is a limitation of imaginative
intelligence rather than an endorsement of a receding past which
the process of change was charged with destroying.
The collection of essays presented in this volume represents some
of the best recent critical work on William Blake as poet, prophet,
visual artist, and social and political critic of his time. The
critical range that is represented includes examples of Marxist,
New Historicist, Feminist and Psychoanalytical approaches to Blake.
Taken together, the essays consider all areas and moments of
Blake's career as poet, from the early lyrics to his later epic
poems, and they have been chosen to reveal not only the range of
Blake's concerns but also to alert the reader to the rich variety
of contemporary criticism that is devoted to him. Although the
majority of essays are devoted to Blake as poet, others consider
his work as printmaker, illustrator, and visionary artist. However
severely individual essays choose to judge him, ultimately all the
contributions to this book affirm Blake as one of the great
geniuses of English art and letters. William Blake provides a
valuable introduction by one of Britain's foremost critics and will
be welcomed by students wanting to familiarise themselves with the
work of Blake.
The intention of this collection of essays, first published in
1971, is to explore the political aspects of some nineteenth
century English writers. Under the influence of the great
revolutionary upheavals of the period almost all its most important
writers were involved, explicitly or otherwise, in political ideas.
This is an exploratory volume, and will be of absorbing interest to
anyone studying the interaction between literature and ideas in the
nineteenth century.
First published in 1980, this book surveys Dickens' growing power
to drive deep into the causes of his contemporary conditions. It
reveals the importance of nature to Dickens as a rich metaphor of
human freedom and potentiality, and emphasises his concern with
time and the problems of freedom. The author considers the
peculiarity of Dickens being unanimously acclaimed as a great
writer considering the difficulty in placing him definitively
within the literary tradition. The author argues Dickens was an
isolated figure, indifferent to changing fashions and with a strong
sense of the dignity of human nature and that this formed the basis
of his character and writings.
First published in 1977, this book studies three important
nineteenth-century novelists: Mrs Gaskell, William Hale White and
Thomas Hardy. They are all provincial novelists who wrote about
social change and the attendant problems and pressures this brought
with it. Unlike previous critics, who have tended to concentrate on
her 'social-problem' novels, here the author treats Gaskell's
Sylvia's Lovers and Cousin Phillis as central texts. However a
chapter also examines Gaskell and Engels perception of social
change in Manchester. This book also seeks to correct Hale White's
neglect, anointing Revolution in Tanner's Lane and Clara Hopgood
major works. The survey of women in Hardy's novels represents an
illuminating new angle and leads on to a discussion of love and
marriage in later Victorian fiction.
First published in 1966, this book collects six essays which
discuss the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the
work of several nineteenth century novelists. In the novels
studied, and the discussion of fiction that follows, the authors
argue that all these novelists' attempts to confront social change
- to connect old with new, past with present and the attempted
inclusiveness of vision in a changing society - sooner or later
fail. The essays are polemic in arguing against the contemporary
critical consensus that this failure is a limitation of imaginative
intelligence rather than an endorsement of a receding past which
the process of change was charged with destroying.
Now available in paperback to coincide with the 50th anniversary of
his death, this biography corrects many of the myths surrounding
the often controversial Thomas Beecham. Thomas Beecham was one of
Britain's greatest conductors of orchestral music and opera as well
as an entrepreneur and impresario of exceptional energy and
brilliant wit. This acclaimed biography places him - musically,
politicallyand socially - in the troubled times in which he lived
and corrects the stories and myths, many of them Beecham's own
making, that have grown up around this uniquely gifted and
controversial figure. Drawing upon extensive research, Lucas
presents new material on his early years, his complicated private
life, his father's catastrophic attempt to buy a large part of
Covent Garden - which brought the family to its knees financially -
and the orchestras andopera companies that Beecham founded. New
light is shed on his visits to Nazi Germany and his view of its
leaders, as well as the much misunderstood and previously
unchronicled years of the Second World War, which he spent in
Australia and America. Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music will
remain the standard biography for years to come. JOHN LUCAS was on
the staff of the Observer for 25 years, completed Peter Heyworth's
monumentalbiography of Otto Klemperer, wrote Genius of Valhalla,
the biography of Reginald Goodall, and is responsible for the
current entries on Beecham and Klemperer in the New Grove .
John Lucas' account of the play considers the significance of
Shakespeare's decision to break with the expectations of the
Jacobean stage, of his treatment of sexual jealousy, of the
contrasting (and complementary) worlds of court and country, and of
the ways in which women successfully oppose male power. He also
relates the play to a number of others in the canon in order to
identify what is uniquely wonderful about The Winter's Tale. The
Winter's Tale is a play in which Shakespeare chooses to flout the
laws of dra matic probability. Not only are its two halves
separated by a gap of 16 years, a man is eaten by a bear, a baby is
miraculously saved from death by drowning, a statue no less
miraculously comes to life. It is also a play which seems destined
for a tragic outcome and yet which ends in reconciliation, in love
restored, in a king's mad jealousy healed. Perhaps most
importantly, in The Winter's Tale women become the active agents of
good rather than the passive sufferers to which conventional role
they seem condemned at the play's outset.
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