Search results for ""Author Stefan Collini""

This unusual book explores the historical assumptions at work in the style of literary criticism that came to dominate English studies in the twentieth century. Stefan Collini shows how the work of critics renowned for their close attention to 'the words on the page' was in practice bound up with claims about the nature and direction of historical change, the interpretation of the national past, and the scholarship of earlier historians. Among the major figures examined in detail are T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, and Raymond Williams, while there are also original discussions of such figures as Basil Willey, L.C. Knights, Q.D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart. The Nostalgic Imagination argues that in the period between Eliot's The Sacred Wood and Williams's The Long Revolution, the writings of such critics came to occupy the cultural space left by academic history's retreat into specialized, archive-bound monographs. Their work challenged the assumptions of the Whig interpretation of English history, and entailed a revision of the traditional relations between 'literary history' and 'general history'. Combining close textual analysis with wide-ranging intellectual history, this volume both revises the standard story of the history of literary criticism and illuminates a central feature of the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.

Read more less

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it. George Orwell was one of the most celebrated essayists in the English language, and there are quite a few of his essays which are probably better known than any of his other writings apart from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Stefan Collini presents a collection of Orwell's longer, major essays as well as a selection of shorter pieces, arranged into three categories: Personal/Descriptive, Literary, and Political.

Read more less

This is the first scholarly edition of one of the classics of literary criticism. William Empson was among the two or three most important and influential literary critics and theorists of the twentieth century. He has long been celebrated as one of the most fertile (as well as one of the funniest) explorers of how meaning works in language, especially in poetry. The Structure of Complex Words (1951) was much his longest book and was intended as a major theoretical statement of his contribution to the subject. Since its publication, it has been constantly referred to, but usually from a respectful distance, since it can seem a forbidding and difficult work. This edition provides an extensive introduction together with full critical and explanatory notes. The editors trace the book's genesis and development in detail, beginning with Empson's collaboration with I. A. Richards in the early and mid-1930s, and concluding with the extensive writing and re-writing that Empson undertook while in Peking in 1947-50. This edition also reprints a selection of materials (including articles and letters) that illuminate Empson's thinking and contributed to the eventual book. The edition makes Empson's great work more intelligible to a range of readers and will immediately become the standard version of this celebrated text.

Read more less