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| Review by Andrew Hadfield | |
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Gary Day's new history of literary criticism is a spirited, often aggressive, attempt to explain why the study of English literature has gone so badly awry and how it can be returned to its proper state. His answer is straightforward enough. Until the "Theory Wars" of the 1980s, the towering figure of F. R. Leavis dominated literary criticism within the university system and beyond, insisting on the need for close reading of great works of literature as the cornerstone of the intellectual rationale of the subject. The advent of post structuralist, feminist, post- colonial and postmodern approaches to works of literature replaced the proper study of the art object on its own terms with a series of allegorical political approaches based on the distorted preferences of the critic, who assumed a position of power over the writer.
Day is not alone in this reading of the state of literary studies. Ronan McDonald argues in The Death of the Critic (2007) that critics have become ever more marginalized as creators and arbiters of value and taste as they write in increasingly obscure and selfregarding ways. The relationship between the critic and the public forces us to ask questions about the level of difficulty that can and should be employed in literary-critical discourse. Literary critics should think about who they are writing for, what their subject actually is and how a discourse which is primarily aesthetic should relate to political, historical and philosophical approaches to literature. As others have pointed out, the "theory wars" of the 1980s, ludicrous as some aspects of them now seem, were about precisely these issues and were an attempt to take English seriously as a subject, even if the answers provided were not always persuasive or even cogent. Many formerly fierce adherents of political criticism now readily admit that the weakness of their former approach was that they lost sight of the aesthetic value of the literary object in exploring its relationship to wider contextual matters.
... Hadfield then goes on to pan Day's book
addenda #2 - Cyril's Favorite Books as of Jan. 1, 2009
Chapman's Homer: The Illiad, the Odyssey and the Lesser Homerica, 2 Volume Set by Chapman's Homer (Hardcover - 1967)
The Aeneid (Penguin Classics) by Virgil, Frederick M. Keener, and John Dryden (Paperback - Oct 1, 1997)
Don Quixote (numerous good translations - get several including James Montgomery's)
The Complete Poems and Translations, Marlowe (Penguin Classics) (Plays are worth having too)
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliette and The Sonnets (others too - I particularly like Henry V, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, A Midsummer's Night Dream, Antony and Cleopatra - the Oxford School Shakespeare provides good editions)
Paradise Lost (and A Preface to Paradise Lost: Being the Ballard Matthews Lectures Delivered at University College, North Wales, 1941 by C.S. Lewis (Paperback - Dec 31, 1961))
Pilgrim’s Progress (I like the Folio Society edition)
Wordsworth’s poems (mainly The Prelude – all versions, Norton – and Selected Poems (Everyman’s Library Classics))
Pickwick Papers (get the one with Jasper Fforde's intro)
Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. (William Henry)
Idle Days in Patagonia (Dodo Press) by W. H. Hudson (Paperback - April 4, 2008)
The Memoirs of George Sherston
Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918 by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Hardcover - Mar 26, 1963) - Ricks is not bad: The Oxford Book of English Verse by Christopher Ricks (Hardcover - Oct 29, 1999)
Mencken: Days (Happy, Newspaper, Heathen) (
The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library Classics) by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Nancy Milford (Paperback - Sep 10, 2002) and Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford (Paperback - Sep 10, 2002)
Faulkner: Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses, Old Man, The Bear (Modern Library) - I like his short stories too: Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner (Modern Library) by William Faulkner (Hardcover - May 18, 1993)
Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner (Modern Library) by William Faulkner (Hardcover - May 18, 1993)
Essays (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) by George Orwell (Hardcover - Oct 15, 2002)
Collected Poems by Philip Larkin and Anthony Thwaite (Paperback - April 1, 2004) - The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse edited by Philip Larkin (Hardcover - Mar 29, 1973) is good too
The Library of
Oxford Book of American Verse edited by F. O. Matthiessen (Hardcover - Dec 31, 1950 )
W. S. Maugham Short Stories (I like the 4-volume Folio Society edition)
A choice of Kipling's verse by T. S. Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling by T. S. Eliot (Hardcover - 1943)
Kipling, Collected Short Stories (I like the 5-volume Folio Society edition)
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Leslie S. Klinger, and John Lecarre (Hardcover - Nov 30, 2004)
The Annotated Collected Poems - Edward Thomas; Paperback
The Best Short Stories of Jack London - Jack London; Paperback
The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce by Ambrose Bierce, Cathy N. Davidson, and Ernest Jerome Hopkins (Paperback - Dec 1, 1984)
The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (Paperback - Jan 2, 2007)
Books by and about P. G. Wodehouse
I prefer PGW's short stories to his novels (though I do not care for the Ukridge stories). Some of my favorite PGW follows:
short stories-
-The Golf Omnibus
-The World of Mr. Mulliner
-The World of Jeeves
-Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best: The Collected Blandings Short Stories
-Tales from the Drones Club
other-
-The Complete Lyrics of P. G. Wodehouse, Barry Day (ed.)
-Uncle Fred: An Omnibus
-The Best of Wodehouse: an Anthology, Everyman's Library (for the bedside table in the guest room)
-Wodehouse on Wodehouse (3-vols in one - autobiographical – funny but not veridical)
best books about Wodehouse by other than Wodehouse-
-P.G. Wodehouse, a Literary Biography, Benny Green
-Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern: the Men Who Made Musical Comedy, Lee Davis
-The World of P.G. Wodehouse, Herbert Warren Wind
-P.G. Wodehouse and Hollywood, Brian Taves
NB #1 – as to novels, the Blandings (11 if you include the final unfinished novel – 7 in Folio), Jeeves/Wooster (11 – all in Folio), and the five Hollywood novels (The Luck of the Bodkins; Laughing Gas;
The Old Reliable; Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin (aka The Plot that Thickened); and Bachelors Anonymous) are mandatory – as are Quick Service and A Damsel in Distress and the two best Valley Fields novels: Sam the Sudden and The Ice in the Bedroom
NB #2 – PGW edited a book of humor: P. G. Wodehouse Selects the Best of Humor
NB #3 - P. G. Wodehouse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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