附註:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Writing well is the best revenge -- That Shakespearian rag -- Burke's great melody -- Responding to Blake -- Wordsworth's "Resolution and independence" -- Byron in his letters -- My Bront ︠problem, and yours? -- Reading Hawthorne -- Nineteenth-century American poetry -- Talking back to Emily Dickinson -- Matthew Arnolds' permanence -- What to do with Carlyle? -- Henry James on tour -- Yeats's first fifty years -- T.S. Eliot: a revaluation -- Fabulous monster: Ford Madox Ford as literary critic -- R.P. Blackmur's last song -- Anthony Powell's serious comedy -- Appreciating Kingsley Amis -- Naipaul's written world -- Looking back at Lessing -- Mailer in retrospect -- Terry Southern: R.I.P. -- Robert Penn Warren's late poems -- Donald Hall's poetry -- Donald Davie as critic of modern poets -- The last man of letters: Julian Symons.
摘要:This collection makes the case for literary criticism as an informed, aggressive, personal, and often humorous response to writers and writing. An unrepentant academic, William Pritchard nonetheless finds himself looking vainly, in much current professional study of literature, for what he sees as criticism's central task. This involves, in part, an attentiveness to the performing voice of the novelist, poet, or essayist under discussion. To bring out that quality, the critic must exploit, with invention and intrepidity, his or her own responsive voice - must "talk back" to the work of art.
