By Janet Groth
“The greatest literary critic of the twentieth century.”
New York magazine
In the course of a career that spanned five decades, Edmund Wilson’s literary output was impressive. His life’s work includes five volumes of poetry, two works of fiction, thirteen plays, and more than twenty volumes of social commentary on travel, politics, history, religion, anthropology, and economics. It is, however, his criticism for which Wilson is best known. To note a few of his accomplishments as a critic, Wilson furthered the understanding and appreciation of the poetry of W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, promoted the enigmatic prose of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and pioneered the study of women writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Kate Chopin.
With the advent of contemporary concerns in literary criticism, the work of Edmund Wilson is frequently relegated to a lesser role. In this energetic and convincing study of one of America’s most distinguished literary critics, Janet Groth sets out to restore Wilson’s work to a place of prominence amongst current critical modes. She offers extended and rigorous treatments of Wilson’s most important critical works and traces his roots as a critic in the work of Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve and Taine, demonstrating how Wilson used the work of Frued and Marx to update this tradition. Most importantly, however, Groth demonstrates that Wilson’s work has significance today and that lasting value in Wilson’s critical studies is his constant belief in the close relationship between life and literature.
Janet Groth is emeritus professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She is the author of Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time. More info →
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Release date: May 1989
295 pages
Rights: World
In Defense of Reason
Three Classics of Contemporary Criticism
By Yvor Winters
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Introduction by Kenneth Fields
Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works—Primitivism and Decadence, Maule’s Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense—of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With The Function of Criticism, a subsequent collection, In Defense of Reason provides an incomparable body of critical writing.The
Literary Criticism · Literature · Yvor Winters and His Circle
Wittgenstein and Critical Theory
Beyond Postmodern Criticism and Toward Descriptive Investigations
By Susan B. Brill
The crucial point of Brill’s study is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critique.
On Poets and Poetry
By William H. Pritchard
William Pritchard’s collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. One of them, Philip Larkin, answered an interviewer’s question about what he had learned from his study of other poets by snapping back, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think: That’s marvelous; how is it done?”
