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.

Burning Ashes does nothing to elevate my grim opinion of cricket-themed novels. Had I but taken, before proceeding, a cursory glance at her publisher’s back-catalogue, I might have been more tolerant. Dreamspinner Press deals in...

The sin of Book I is at first sight more obscure, but it is particularly significant. We have seen that there appear to be two very important episodes showing the Red-Crosse a prey to Despair....

Lawrence’s claims for the vital self and his inability to make itconvincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the novel, explain the sense in which the author’s vision exceeds his grasp, and bring...

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

Shakespeare’s plays do not present easy solutions. The audience has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is ‘Nothing’....

The concept of an author, the single creative person who gives the text ‘authority’, only comes later in this period. Most Old English poetry is anonymous, even though names which are in no way comparable,...

Periods’ are largely an invention of the historians. The poetsthemselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

I tossed up whether I’d see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I...

The double consequence of artifice–to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact–is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two separable consequences, one of which...

Literary Fiction and RealityTowards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that ‘no serious attempt will be made to… enter into competition with reality.’ And yet it is an element...

Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death,...

In his Preface to the 1892 edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy warns the reader that ‘a novel is an impression, not an argument’. However, the text offers several explanations of Tess’s tragedy; social,...

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a...

Howl.” Doctorow struggles to accommodate this form to his artistry (as successful practitioners of the work have always done). To this end, he has repeatedly adapted genres such as the Western, the romance, and the...

The novels of Daniel Defoe are fundamental to eighteenth-century ways of thinking. They range from the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year, an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London between 1664 and 1665...

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn’t go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and...

Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don’t mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they...

In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.