Including pieces by creative critics as varied as Anne Carson, Jacques Derrida, Geoff Dyer, Helene Cixous, Ali Smith, and John Cage, this anthology and guide celebrates the formal and intellectual inventiveness of works which also demonstrate a deep fidelity to the writing or art they address. The Anthology is of interest to all students, teachers and critics of literature and creative writing, and especially those students who are required to write critical essays. All 14 texts included respond innovatively to the question: How do we write criticism? As examples of academic critical writing...

Music is commonly felt to offer a valued experience, yet to put that experience into words is no easy task. Rather than view verbal representations of music as somehow secondary to the music itself, Literary Music argues that it is in such representations that our understanding of music and its meanings is constituted and explored. Focusing on recent fictional and theoretical texts, Stephen Benson proposes literature, narrative fiction in particular, as a singular form of musical performance. Literary Music concentrates not only on song and opera, those forms in which words and music overtly...