I don’t generally publicly respond toreviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’ responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.

In the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet there is an attempt at a more or less Copernican change in the relation between the paradigm and the text. In Camus the counter-pointing is less doctrinaire; in Dostoevsky...

Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf ’s first novel is a self-conscious meditation on the formation of an emergent intellectual and artist (a Ku¨nstlerroman).

If you tell me bad things about someone, you’re telling bad things about me behind me

The period of general neglect of Eliot’s poetry was one in which a revolution was occurring in the theory of interpretation. Existentialist, phenomenologist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and poststructuralist theories appeared and stimulated dazzling conversations about...

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were...

I love our summer game and its letters as much as the next man, and surely no less than my colleagues. I do not, however, repose much faith in its fiction. The short stories are...

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

The first unanalysed impression that most readers receive from Jane Eyre is that it has a very violent atmosphere. If this were simply the effect of the plot and the imagined events then sensation novels...

Mr. Morris’s poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous Poems and Ballads,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial...

Let us look once more at Yeats. At bottom, he was sceptical about the nonsense with which he satisfied what we can call his lust for commitment. Now and again he believed some of it,...

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas’s house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless — as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in...

I learned that it’s okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys...

…the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to...

There is a degree of emotional impact in the nature poetry of the eighteenth century which marks a shift in sensibility towards what came to be called ‘the sublime’. The concept, from classical Greek, came...

The range and variety of Chaucer’s English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands...

Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another.

It is impossible to empathise with these mono-dimensional heroes. For half the novel, their lives are nothing short of bliss, which is another way of saying that next to nothing happens. This is exemplary of...

At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature, however conscious some, as against others, may become of the fictive...

By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King’s College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English...

Hardy’s poetry is pre-eminently about ways of seeing. This is evident in the numerous angles of vision he employs in so many poems. Sometimes it involves creating a picture, as in ‘Snow in the Suburbs’,...

It seems to me that my whole life I’ve been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I...

Analogies are like lies.

The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of Shakespeare’s work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neurotic, as having an Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as...

Although there is general agreement that the ‘Goldstein’ book and the Appendix both stem from the same satiric impulse, the degree of Orwell’s success in combining satire and naturalism remains a subject of debate. Crick...

It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

Length, I want to suggest, has a peculiar significance for the reader of a Victorian novel and especially so if we are concerned with an awareness of it as a book; a physical object held...

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for...

The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed...

There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three...

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I’ll waste no time reading it.

The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to...

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it’s a very new,...

Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous alternatives for key words like battle,...

If we bear in mind the inherent shortcomings of the genre, it may fairly be said of Ms Lewis-Foster that she possesses a rare art: the art of making a bad story plausible. She even...

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel...

Because it is written by a nineteenth-century American, and because of its closeness to the twentieth century, The Portrait of a Lady foregoes Victorian affirmations. The price it pays, however (together with several twentieth-century novels)...

What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its truth to the set of our fear and desire. Acknowledged, qualified by the scepticism of the...

Thus, on the one hand, Spenser’s thought is steeped in sensuous detail, so that for him there is no really abstract thinking; men, he thinks, ‘should be satisfied with the use of these days, seeing...

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership...

My goal was that the reader wouldn’t have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form. And, since a great many writers and critics...

The language of Shakespeare is the first and lasting affirmation of the great changes that took place in the sixteenth century, leaving the Middle English of Chaucer far behind. In many ways, the language has...

Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that most of the...

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.