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First appearing in 1981, this book was the first full-length study
of the Songs of Innocence and Experience to be published in almost
fifteen years. The book provides detailed readings of each poem and
its accompanying design, to redirect attention to the nature and
achievement of the book as a whole, to Songs as a single, carefully
unified work of verbal and visual art. Particularly close attention
is paid, not only to the designs Blake etched to accompany his
poems, but also to the many books and treatises for and about
children to which, it is argued, Songs alludes or is indebted. Like
so many important works of this period, Songs is shown to be
autobiographical in nature, one of Blake's attempts to order and
account for the conflicts and crises of his own art and life. Its
story is that of an artist's growth into and out of vision, and of
his gradual realization of the dangers and deficiencies of the
prophetic mode.
Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832 provides a valuable insight into
the condition of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth
century. It includes original documents from a range of disciplines
and discourses. Each section includes a scholarly introduction,
select bibliography, and annotations.
Among the material assembled in the anthology are writings by
previously neglected or under-represented women, working-class men,
black radicals, and conservative and evangelical polemicists, as
well as several unfamiliar texts by canonical writers. The writings
are organised into sections on:
* Radical Journalism
* Political Economy
* Atheism
* Nation and State
* Race and Empire
* Gender
* Literary Institutions.
While the Victorian era has been extensively covered by scholars
and critics, less attention has been given to the period that
bridges the gap to Victorianism. "Romantic Period Writings
1798-1832" provides a valuable insight into the condition of
Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century. Original
documents from a range of disciplines and discourses include
writings by previously neglected or under-represented women,
working-class men, black radicals, and conservative and evangelical
polemicists, as well as several previously neglected texts by
canonical writers. The writings are organized into sections on
Radical Journalism, Political Economy, Atheism, Nation and State,
Race and Empire, Gender and Literary Institutions. Each section
includes an introduction which contextualizes the following
selections.
First appearing in 1981, this book was the first full-length study
of the Songs of Innocence and Experience to be published in almost
fifteen years. The book provides detailed readings of each poem and
its accompanying design, to redirect attention to the nature and
achievement of the book as a whole, to Songs as a single, carefully
unified work of verbal and visual art. Particularly close attention
is paid, not only to the designs Blake etched to accompany his
poems, but also to the many books and treatises for and about
children to which, it is argued, Songs alludes or is indebted. Like
so many important works of this period, Songs is shown to be
autobiographical in nature, one of Blake's attempts to order and
account for the conflicts and crises of his own art and life. Its
story is that of an artist's growth into and out of vision, and of
his gradual realization of the dangers and deficiencies of the
prophetic mode.
The final volume of the definitive authorised biography of one of
the greatest American writers. 'A moving testament to one of the
last century's greatest writers' Sunday Times At forty-nine, Saul
Bellow was at the pinnacle of American letters - he was rich,
famous and critically acclaimed, with the best yet to come: Mr
Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, all his best stories. He went on
to win two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the
Nobel Prize. However, away from his desk, Bellow's life was set to
become embroiled in controversy: over foreign affairs, race,
religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate
of the novel. From the women he pursued and his turbulent family
relations, to his struggles with cultural relativism and the
perceived excesses of civil rights movements, this second and final
volume of Zachary Leader's monumental Life of Saul Bellow charts
Bellow's heroic energy and will throughout his life, right to the
end - where his immense achievements and their costs, to himself
and others, became ever more apparent. 'Brilliant' Spectator
'Compelling' Times Literary Supplement 'Riveting' New Statesman
'Superb' New York Times
The Movement was the preeminent poetical grouping of post-war
Britain. 'We shall have stamped our taste on the age between us in
the end', boasted its most important poet, Philip Larkin, of his
and Kingsley Amis's influence. That Larkin's boast proved
well-founded even those who deplored Movement taste have agreed.
According to Randall Stevenson, author of volume 12 of the Oxford
English Literary History, English literature 'was never more static
than under the influence of the Movement. If the later twentieth
century proved a difficult period for poetry, it was in large
measure because it took so long to realise this, and move on.'
Moving on, though, was just what the Movement writers - Larkin,
Amis, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest, John Wain, D.J.
Enright, Elizabeth Jennings, and John Holloway - thought they were
doing, even when deploring innovation and experiment. Was their
influence, as detractors claim, stultifying, a lament for 'England
gone'? What, moreover, of other charges: that Movement writing is
dry, academic, insular? These accusations are as extreme as the
anti-modernist accusations that sparked them, in particular those
of Amis, Larkin, Conquest, and Davie.
The Movement Reconsidered, a collection of original essays by
distinguished poets, critics, and scholars from Britain and
America, sets out to show not only that relations between Movement
and other post-war British writers were more complex and nuanced
than is usually suggested, but that the role these relations played
in shaping the current literary scene is important and complicated.
Other topics it examines include the origins of the grouping; the
role of mediating figures such as Auden, Empson, and Orwell; the
part the writers themselves played in promoting the grouping; the
interlocking network of academics, journalists, and editors who
aided them; and analogous developments in other fields, notably
philosophy, politics, and language. The book's ultimate aim is to
encourage readers to come to Movement writing with fresh eyes and
to gain a fairer sense of its range and power.
The Romantic author as spontaneous, extemporizing, otherworldly,
and autonomous is a fiction much in need of revision. In this
highly regarded volume, Zachary Leader argues that the continuing
influence of a Romantic preference for what comes naturally, with a
concomitant devaluing of the secondary processes, distorts our
understanding of the actual creative practices of writers of the
period, even those most closely associated with Romantic
assumptions. `Second thoughts' (including those of collaborators)
play a crucial role in the writings of Wordsworth, Byron,
Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Clare, and Keats. Other assumptions
complicated by a study of the actual revising practices of Romantic
writers are those which associate composition with the organic and
with process, or which characterize authors as independent agents
or figures of coherent and consistent subjectivity. In the first
part of the book, Leader shows how revisionary and editorial habits
(those not only of the writers themselves but of their modern
editors) reflect conflicting attitudes to the self or personal
identity; in the second, these attitudes are related to the role of
`collaborators' in the revising process, including family, friends,
publishers, critics, and readers.
Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his
generation, but also a dominant figure in post-World War II British
writing as a novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist. Zachary
Leader's definitive, authorized biography conjures in vivid detail
the life of one of the most controversial figures of
twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering
intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion.
In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Leader, the acclaimed editor of The
Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on published and
unpublished works and correspondence, but also on interviews with a
wide range of Amis's friends, relatives, fellow writers, students,
and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken publicly before. The
result is a compulsively readable account of Amis's childhood,
school days, and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic,
political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband,
father, and lover. Neither evading nor sensationalizing the more
salacious aspects of Amis's life, Leader explores the writer's
phobias, self-doubts, and ambitions; the controversies in which he
was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled
by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence, and personal
disaster.
Here is the biography that its subject deserves. Like Amis himself,
it is incisive and unsentimental, deeply appreciative of aesthetic
achievement, and a great source of amusing anecdotes. Dazzling for
its thoroughness, psychological acuity, and elegant style, The Life
of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.
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