Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
10 best books like Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (Edmund Wilson): The Second Common Reader, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts, The Pound Era, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, The Rise of the Novel, Updated Edition, Poets in a Landscape, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
| ISBN | 0156028166 |
3.5 stars
Last year I came across The Common Reader Vol. I at a Kinokuniya Bookstore in Bangkok and ordered Vol. II immediately. In fact, these famed two volumes have been published in various editions since 1932 and I've tried to buy them for a long time. Enticed by the simple title, I've since...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0307595846 |
A dazzling new collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers.
It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of...
| Author | Hugh Kenner |
| ISBN | 0520024273 |
"Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era could as well be known as the Kenner era, for there is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis...
| Author | Ezra Pound |
| ISBN | 0811201570 |
This collection of essays, edited by Pound's friend and fellow poet T.S. Eliot, contains essays from five earlier volumes: Pavannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations(1920), How to Read(1931), Make it New(1934), and Polite Essays(1937). The thirty-three essays contained in this collection...
| Author | Frank Kermode |
| ISBN | 0195136128 |
s/t: With a New Epilogue
Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished and beloved critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach...
| Author | M.H. Abrams |
| ISBN | 0195014715 |
It's the first time I've had this reaction when reading an 'academic' book: awe and envy. I usually have 2 stock reactions: 1. interesting, but the author's argument was screwed in A and B manner and 2. how did this guy even get his phd?! in a cereal box!?
M.H. Abrams is too good to be anywhere near...
| Author | Margaret Drabble |
| ISBN | 0198614535 |
The first edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Sir Paul Harvey, was published in 1932, and quickly established itself as the standard source of reference for scholars, students, and general readers alike. In 1985, under the editorship of Margaret Drabble, the text was...
| Author | Ian P. Watt |
| ISBN | 0520230698 |
The Rise of the Novel is Ian Watt's classic description of the interworkings of social conditions, changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era.
In a new foreword, W. B. Carnochan accounts for the...
| Author | Gilbert Highet |
| ISBN | 1853753017 |
Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some...
| Author | Malcolm Bradbury |
| ISBN | 0140138323 |
History
Any reader of literary fiction from the last 120 years will sooner or later encounter the distinction between Modernism and Post-Modernism.
My teenage years coincided with the 1970's. During this period I became a consumer and advocate of Modernism, whether or not I could...
| Author | F.R. Leavis |
| ISBN | 0140214879 |
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references,...
| Author | Guy Davenport |
| ISBN | 1567920802 |
I've lost count of the times I read his essay on Whitman.
Within a few miles of each other in the 1880s, Whitman was putting the last touches to his great book, Eadweard Muybridge was photographing movements milliseconds apart of animals, naked athletes, and women, and Thomas Eakins was painting...
| Author | Lionel Trilling |
| ISBN | 0151511977 |
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays...
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century
| Author | John Brewer |
| ISBN | 0374234582 |
This is a difficult book to review, mostly because I don’t consider myself qualified to properly criticize the amount of work that went into this well-crafted, well-written brick (and it is a brick – it’s a read-at-a-table-because-it’s-too-heavy-to-comfortably-hold-for-long-stretches-of-time...
| Author | T.S. Eliot |
| ISBN | 0674931505 |
The 1932-33 Norton Lectures are among the best and most important of Eliot's critical writings. Tracing the rise of literary self-consciousness from the Elizabethan period to his own day, Eliot does not simply examine the relation of criticism to poetry, but invites us to "start with the supposition...
| Author | D.H. Lawrence |
| ISBN | 0140183779 |
Lawrence asserted that 'the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it'. In these highly individual, penetrating essays he has exposed 'the American whole soul' within some of that continent's major works of literature. In seeking to establish the status of writings...
| Author | Leslie A. Fiedler |
| ISBN | 1564781631 |
A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as “one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work.” This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and...
| Author | Roger Shattuck |
| ISBN | 0394704150 |
The definitive chronicle of the origins of French avant-garde literature and art, Roger Shattuck's classic portrays the cultural bohemia of turn-of-the-century Paris who carried the arts into a period of renewal and accomplishment and laid the groundwork for Dadaism and Surrealism. Shattuck...
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
| Author | James Wood |
| ISBN | 0312424604 |
"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia Ozick
Following the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms...
| Author | Henry James |
| ISBN | 0684150506 |
This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James's fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing :character, plot, point...
The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays
| Author | Marguerite Yourcenar |
| ISBN | 0374519196 |
I really did think Borges unique in a genius that allowed him, in his nonfictions, to select a tidbit from a superannuated encyclopedia, extract an incident from the most obscure chronicle—or, conversely, from the collective media memory of widely disseminated, easily recognizable historical...
| Author | Vladimir Nabokov |
| ISBN | 0156027755 |
At first I was wary of this book, being a former grad student and current exile from the literary academy with no interest in rejoining those stale debates. But what a breath of fresh air it proved to be. Nabokov was, not surprisingly, a keen reader, and he brings all his technical prowess to bear on works...
