Selected Letters of William EmpsonJohn Haffenden OUP Oxford, 2006 M03 9 - 792 páginas This edited collection of letters by William Empson (1906-1984), one of the foremost writers and literary critics of the twentieth century, ranges across the entirety of his career. Parts of the correspondence record the development of ideas that were to come to fruition in seminal texts including Seven Types of Ambiguity, The Structure of Complex Words, and Milton's God. The topics of other letters range from Shakespeare's Dark Lady to Marvell's marriage and Byron's bisexuality. Empson relished correspondence that was combative, if not downright aggressive. As a result, parts of this edition take the form of a serial disputation with other critics of the period, including Frank Kermode, Helen Gardner, Philip Hobsbaum, and I. A. Richards. Other notable correspondents include A. Alvarez, Bonamy Dobrée, Leslie Fiedler, Graham Hough, C. K. Ogden, George Orwell, Kathleen Raine, John Crowe Ransom, Christopher Ricks, Laura Riding, A. L. Rowse, Stephen Spender, E. M. W. Tillyard, Rosemond Tuve, John Wain, and G. Wilson Knight. All readers of literary history and criticism will stand to benefit from this edition. Empson is universally credited as the man who 'invented' modern literary criticism, so that all of his writings make a signal addition to the canon of his works. This selection provides a context for the evaluation of Empson's total literary output; and in many letters Empson seeks to defend his ideas against both published and personal attacks. This volume not only fills in all the missing links, it adds up to a completely new volume of critical writings by Empson. |
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Página xvi
... keeping letters? Do you keep letters? It must be a widespread practice judging from biographies. Rather an ugly one I think. It certainly couldn't be done in my mother's house, where any writing left about (including two complete plays ...
... keeping letters? Do you keep letters? It must be a widespread practice judging from biographies. Rather an ugly one I think. It certainly couldn't be done in my mother's house, where any writing left about (including two complete plays ...
Página xix
... keep up with the secondary reading. A good number of the letters written during Empson's years in the Far East (Japan, 1931–3; China, 1937–9, 1947–52), and during briefer visits to the USA (1948, 1950, 1954), are therefore 'conversation ...
... keep up with the secondary reading. A good number of the letters written during Empson's years in the Far East (Japan, 1931–3; China, 1937–9, 1947–52), and during briefer visits to the USA (1948, 1950, 1954), are therefore 'conversation ...
Página xx
... keep to himself and write up later. They seemed to him, that is to say, to be more like articles, broadcasting matters for general consumption without respect to the individual being addressed in any particular letter. In other words ...
... keep to himself and write up later. They seemed to him, that is to say, to be more like articles, broadcasting matters for general consumption without respect to the individual being addressed in any particular letter. In other words ...
Página xxii
... keep it for the travel book if you can be bothered. What an ass I would have been if I had refused to leave England.'20 The opening phrase of those brief colloquial sentences assumes the voice of official disdain––as it might have been ...
... keep it for the travel book if you can be bothered. What an ass I would have been if I had refused to leave England.'20 The opening phrase of those brief colloquial sentences assumes the voice of official disdain––as it might have been ...
Página xxiii
... keep it––those pages recorded a crucial phase of the struggle for educational standards in wartime China, and of his lived experience. 'In the learned world, a man loses his standing if he refuses to answer a plain refutation,' declared ...
... keep it––those pages recorded a crucial phase of the struggle for educational standards in wartime China, and of his lived experience. 'In the learned world, a man loses his standing if he refuses to answer a plain refutation,' declared ...
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