Die Kunst des Rezensierens besteht nicht zuletzt darin, selbst über langweilige Bücher fesselnd zu schreiben.

There is a remarkable degree of consistency in the way mediaeval literature affirms humanity. With all its faults, humanity emerges as more realistic than heavenly ideals…….Because the mediaeval period is seen from our own times...

Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world’s pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of...

Williams, having awarded Orwell the title of exile, immediately replaces it with the description ‘vagrant’. A vagrant will, for example, not be reassured or comforted by Williams’s not-very-consoling insistence that ‘”totalitarian” describes a certain kind...

The loudness of tone in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly effective in communicating tension and frustration, but the style does of course have its related limitations. It precludes the use of the small suggestive detail or...

The formerly absolute distinction between time and eternity in Christian thought–between nunc movens with its beginning and end, and nunc stans, the perfect possession of endless life–acquired a third intermediate order based on this peculiar...

In January 1912 Leonard proposed marriage. She was unable to answer directly and he pressed further in a passionate letter: ‘It isn’t, really it isnt, merely because you are so beautiful – though of course...

The most interesting inconsistency in thought is connected with the Bower of Bliss. This passage–the twelfth canto of the second Book–is probably the best known in the whole poem and the most frequently cited as...

In summing up Lawrence’s earlier novels and in anticipating the later, Sons and Lovers is of central importance to the whole Lawrence canon because it contains the psychological basis of much of the later doctrine.

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.

As a novelist, Scott’s influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately likened to Shakespeare’s; the use of historical settings became a mainstay of Victorian...

Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative...

The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place,...

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of ‘slender means’, and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief,...

The 1970s and 1980s: feminism, androgyny, modernism, aestheticsIn the 1970s and 1980s, Woolf studies expanded in a number of directions,most notably in relation to feminism. Critical interest in Woolf developed at the same time as...

The setting, concerns, and mood of The Woodlanders are consonant with the Wessex of the earlier novels. There is an element of nostalgia in Hardy’s treatment of the woodlands of Little Hintock. Although such rural...

A certain critic — for such men, I regret to say, do exist — made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has...

The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group (Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner) were members of the...

Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political...

That’s why literature is so fascinating. It’s always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It’s never the same thing twice.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Wuthering Heights, however it may appear in retrospect,demands a reading of the utmost intensity, the feeling present in the writing seems to seek a matching response in the reading. If we turn from the story...

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps not strictly philosophical, about the origin of the world and its end, the...

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn’t elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest...

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still...

The sixties began what many admirers of Eliot would consider a bleak period. The anxiety of influence of the profession at large seemed to inspire quick and increasingly uninformed dismissals of Eliot, and these repeated...

Two literary figures bridge the gap between the mediaeval age and the Renaissance. They are Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, and the first ‘poet-laureate’, John Skelton. In their entirely separate ways,...

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its...

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book.

To return to my point about the immense power that his enemies attribute to him, Orwell once wrote about the ‘large, vague renown’ that constituted the popular memory of Thomas Carlyle. His own reputation has...

Whether he chooses a ‘scholarly’ or a ‘popular’ edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice...

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,’ says a modern Freudian, ‘are really only the necessary schemata of repression.’ And an experimental psychologist adds that ‘a sense of time can only exist...

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September...

We have, then, three Books wholly and one partially written before, and two after, the Preface; and only one of the first four is consistent with it, while the two later are entirely in agreement...

CUSTOMER (to her friend): What’s this literary criticism section? Is it for books that complain about other books?

The ones that landed near the bathroom are Bad Tolkien imitations or transcripts of a D&D adventure; bad Herbert, Heinlein, and Asimov are below the television; and these on the bed are the ones whose...

Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of ‘Wessex’, but the...

It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious ‘artist’, that we hear in Caedmon’s Hymn, and in such texts as Deor’s Lament (also known simply as Deor) or The Seafarer. These...

In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among ‘intellectuals’, that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus...

It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations borrowed from any intellectual system of the universe which seems at the time...

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, mythThere was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953),...

A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his indebtedness to Hardy for his own education in matters of poetic technique………………………In a...

…If you genuinely believe that only the death of a loved one can motivate a human being to take up a cause…then get your pathetic, cynical ass out of my way so I can do...

[N]o such thing as objective writing, . . . every inscription, every traveler’s tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the...

Milton argued, in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that a people ‘free by nature’ had a right to overthrow a tyrant; a subject that recalls vividly the questions examined by Shakespeare in his...