Frank Kermode is the preeminent practitioner of the art of criticism in the English-speaking world. As such his task entails the readiness to evaluate in general terms the widest range of texts, both ancient and modern, and also the ability to make public sense of the seemingly arcane debates about theories of literature as they pertain to the ongoing process of evaluation. It has been Kermode's distinction to make a virtue--as all the best critics have done--of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident in every page of this set of essays.
This is a book...
Frank Kermode is the preeminent practitioner of the art of criticism in the English-speaking world. As such his task entails the readiness to evalu...
Kermode assesses the revolutionary transformations in literary criticism over the last fifteen years and places them in historical perspective. Examining novels ranging in scope from a 1907 bestseller to the avant-garde works of various periods, he includes such writers as Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Michel Butor, and Thomas Pynchon.
Kermode assesses the revolutionary transformations in literary criticism over the last fifteen years and places them in historical perspective. Examin...
The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished literary critic, has been thinking about them all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime's thinking. The great English tragedies were all written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. They are often in language that is difficult to us, and must have been hard even for contemporaries. How and why did Shakespeare's language develop as it did? Kermode argues that the resources of English underwent major change around 1600....
The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished l...
Reading other people's letters, like reading private diaries, offers thrilling and unexpected glimpses into the lives of others, and it is partly this guilty pleasure we take in such literary eavesdropping that makes The Oxford Book of Letters so compelling. With subjects ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary, from the tragic to the hilarious, this volume spans over five centuries and chronicles the affairs of correspondents from Elizabeth I to Groucho Marx, from politicians to poets, from the famous to the unknown. But whether the writers are educated or barely literate, whether...
Reading other people's letters, like reading private diaries, offers thrilling and unexpected glimpses into the lives of others, and it is partly this...
Attempts to determine the criteria for classical literature through an analysis of the social and intellectual importance of great works of the past.
Attempts to determine the criteria for classical literature through an analysis of the social and intellectual importance of great works of the past.
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Frank Kermode assesses the influence and meaning of all of Forster's novels as well as his criticism, reflects on his profound musicality (Britten thought Foster the most musical of all writers) and offers a fascinating interpretation of his greatest work, 'A Passage to India'.
Frank Kermode assesses the influence and meaning of all of Forster's novels as well as his criticism, reflects on his profound musicality (Britten tho...
