I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works,...

The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with...

It is important to recognise Woolf ’s acknowledgement of her father’s dually formative influence. The domesticdictator was also an intellectual who powerfully shaped her developing intellect, even if, at times, antithetically so: ‘just as a...

However, for Hardy the possibility of poetry’s traditional function of transcendence remains, but in a more limited form. In Hardy’s work the poet transcends himself towards humanity, affirming the central values of loving-kindness and fellowship.

The most important thing about reading is not the level of sophistication of the books on your self. There is no prerequisite reading regimen for being a bookworm.

If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a ‘not good’ critic.

Henry Fielding, a highly successful satiric dramatist until the introduction of censorship in 1737, began his novel-writing career with Shamela, a pastiche of Pamela, which humorously attacked the hypocritical morality which that novel displayed. Joseph...

The truthfulness of ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism’ is in doubt largely because of uncertainty about its authorship, and, as we have seen, a nearly identical ambiguity surrounds the Appendix. The parallel is...

Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all...

When we discuss a novel it is only partially to hear another person’s ‘view’, it is much more to find outwhat we ourselves think in order to possess the text more completely. Such a possession...

If critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can...

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself...

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Stracheywas compounded by Carrington’s suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox,...

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him,...

Eliot’s own reflections on the primitive mind as a model for nondualistic thinking and on the nature and consequences of different modes of consciousness were informed by an excellent education in the social sciences and...

This is the real warning of Nineteen Eighty-Four: The danger comes not from our suppressors but from our ovine willingness to be suppressed.

All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of...

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman’s effort.

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of ‘deconstruction’ or ‘postmodernism’ was applied...

Discussions of the effects of serial publication of Victorian novels on their authors and readers1 usually draw attention to the author’s peculiar opportunities for cliff-hanging suspense, as, for instance, when Thackeray has Becky Sharp counter...

Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity...

We have then, in the first part of The Faerie Queene, four of the seven deadly sins depicted in the more important passages of the four several books; those sins being much more elaborately and...

Starting with the hypothesis that all the characters in Women in Love suffer from acute dissociation of sensibility, it becomes clear that psychological reintegration is no longer possible for them, and complete divorce between reason...

Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won’t strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author’s persona and the poem’s...

THE METAPHYSICAL POETSHad we but world enough, and time,This coyness, lady, were no crime(Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress)While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal,...

As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as ‘castle’ is a French loan word, for example; and the...

[T]he new weird represents a productive experiment in fantasy fiction. The New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s arguably embodied science fiction’s claim to literary ‘seriousness.’ This desire for seriousness is not snobbery, as sometimes...

Jewish writer, ” but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American...

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of...

The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in ‘The New Biography’ (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance,...

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of...

There are long stretches of the work [Paradise Lost] that are for anyone not theologically minded sheer howling boredom from the point of view of the content.

Thus we come to the problem of determining what the poem is ‘about.’ Charles Altieri notes that ‘[a]n expression of the self can be one that is intended, the self’s act, or one that is...

Richardson, however, remains a vital figure in the history of the novel, and of ideology. He initiates a discourse on sexual roles which, in all its ambiguities, is as relevant to today’s society as it...

Now, it may be objected that Orwell was no Borges, that Nineteen Eighty-Four is no postmodern literary experiment, and that I am considering the Appendix too curiously. Perhaps the Newspeak essay should be seen simply...

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, “Mythology and Archetypal Experience,” confounded me. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps spurious, but nevertheless compelling dynamic between details which can undermine the ability of...

Like Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves...

But that there is a simple relation between literary and other fictions seems, if one attends to it, more obvious than has appeared. If we think first of modern fictions, it can hardly be an...

Woolf turned her back on a number of tokens of her rising eminence in the 1930s, including an offer of the Companion of Honour award, an invitation from Cambridge University to give the Clark lectures,...

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden...

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep....

Chaucer’s world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms...

But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book so that his very absence becomes a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, il brille par...

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had...

Recognising such dimensions implicit to the reading experience can distract from the immediacy of our response; it can substitute literary archaeology for novelistic reality. That is one pole. But the other extreme is equally limiting....

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.