Search results for ""Author Eric G. Wilson""

An in-depth look into the life of Romantic essayist Charles Lamb and the legacy of his work “[An] electrifying portrait of Charles Lamb.”—New Yorker A pioneer of urban Romanticism, essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) found inspiration in London’s markets, theaters, prostitutes, and bookshops. He prized the city’s literary scene, too, where he was a star wit. He counted among his admirers Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His friends valued in his conversation what distinguished his writing style: a highly original blend of irony, whimsy, and melancholy. Eric G. Wilson captures Lamb’s strange charm in this meticulously researched and engagingly written biography. He demonstrates how Lamb’s humor helped him cope with a life‑defining tragedy: in a fit of madness, his sister Mary murdered their mother. Arranging to care for her himself, Lamb saved her from the gallows. Delightful when sane, Mary became Charles’s muse, and she collaborated with him on children’s books. In exploring Mary’s presence in Charles’s darkly comical essays, Wilson also shows how Lamb reverberates in today’s experimental literature.

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John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) has long been recognised as one of the seminal films of the sixties, with its revisionary mix of genres including neo-noir, New Wave, and spaghetti western. Its lasting influence can be traced throughout the decades in films like Mean Streets (1973), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995), The Limey (1999) and Memento (2000). Eric Wilson's compelling study of the film examines its significance to New Hollywood cinema. He argues that Boorman revises traditional Hollywood crime films by probing a second connotation of 'point blank'. On the one hand, it is a neo-noir that aptly depicts close range violence, but, it also points toward blankness, a nothingness that is the consequence of corporate America unchecked, where humans are reduced to commodities and stripped of agency and playfulness. He goes on to reimagine the film's experimental style as a representation of and possible remedy for trauma. Examining Boorman’s formal innovations, including his favouring of gesture over language and blurring of boundaries between dream and reality, he also positions the film as a grimly comical exploration of toxic masculinity and gender fluidity. Wilson's close reading of Point Blank reveals it to be a film that innovatively inflects its own generation and speaks powerfully to our own, arguing that it is this amplitude, which encompasses the many major films it has influenced, that qualifies the film as a classic.

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