here is one other element of the apocalyptic tradition to be considered, namely transition. I said a minute ago that one of the assumptions prevalent in sophisticated apocalyptism was what Yeats called ‘antithetical multiform influx’–the...

I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life,” Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article....

The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing....

One problem with the work of the New Critics was that their close readings, no matter how brilliant, could not deliver all they seemed to promise.

In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment focused attention on Glasgow and Edinburgh as centres of intellectual activity. The Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which originated in Glasgow in the early eighteenth century, and...

The fairy or fantastic world replaces the classical Hades (or Hell) in Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight takes this fantasy element to new heights. Sir Gawain is one of the Knights...

A novel, in which all is created by the author’s whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.””And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your...

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

Informative and understandable, even for non-techies like me…

Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse; and tick-tock is in any case not much of a plot. We need much larger ones and much more complicated ones if we persist in finding...

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of...

The 1980s witnessed radical advances in the theorisation of the study of literature in the universities. It had begun in France in the 1960s and it made a large impact on the higher education establishments...

The ”text” is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

In my freshman and sophomore years of college, I read dozens of books by the great thinkers of Western civilization. From Plato to Nietzsche, Homer to Shakespeare – you name it, I read it. At...

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in...

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard’s vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

Some think it the historian’s business to penetrate beyond this apparent confusion and heterogeneity, and to grasp in a single intuition the ‘spirit’ or ‘meaning’ of his period. With some hesitation, and with much respect...

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I’m not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.

What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as...

Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,historicist, materialist,...

Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among ‘Romances and Fantasies’. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel,...

Reading The Waste Land, then, is in part reading about reading in the early twentieth century. The crisis in epistemology brought on by the discrediting of objectivity is especially relevant to understanding the poem, because...

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

Alongside the development of theatres came the growth of an acting culture; in essence it was the birth of the acting profession. Plays had generally been performed by amateurs – often men from craft guilds....

The thing people don’t realize, God bless them, is that my books are supposed to suck.

A few months ago, I was sitting morosely at my desk, wondering why I had ever agreed to review Barbara Bush: A Memoir for an English newspaper. The experience was proving to be a degradation...

We are always sure that the heroine is fiery and passionate, which is quite an achievement when the plot has had to keep her passive, inactive and loveless for long stretches. Up to the point...

A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive.

The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we...

…a fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called “stories”), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating...

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going...

The best of the New Critics were masters of close readings. Cleanth Brooks, for example, in 1937 wrote a detailed commentary on The Waste Land which is still a model of critical helpfulness. The fact...

John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his reputation has changed constantly. He has been seen as a political opportunist, an advocate of ‘immorality’...

Pearl introduces an original story, in a form which was to become one of the most frequent in mediaeval literature, the dream-vision. Authors like Chaucer and Langland use this form, in which the narrator describes...

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving...

The critic’s aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and help readers appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of visions...

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

The degree of rigidity is a matter of profound interest in the study of literary fictions. As an extreme case you will find some novel, probably contemporary with yourself, in which the departure from a...

Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell....

Hardy’s astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also...

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic...

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to...

Later, Hobbes will stress the notion central to Augustan thinking, the binary of passion and reason:The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Fear of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious...

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing...

Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle...

There is a larger lesson here, because the book encompasses not just the lives of prisoners in a Soviet prison camp, but every one of us. Shukhov squeezes everything he can out of a mouthful...

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).