Download or read book The Selected Prose of John Gray written by John Gray and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publication of Ian Fletcher's The Poems of John Gray (1988) was welcomed by reviewers in the U.S. and England. Now ELT Press offers a companion volume, The Selected Prose of John Gray. It complements the poetry by printing essays and short stories chosen from different periods of Gray's life--some selections previously unpublished, others having appeared only in limited periodical circulation. This new book adds to our understanding of Gray and topics relevant to the era. Professor McCormack explains the importance of the prose in her introduction: Gray has a significance for his time as a writer who has made the transition from the mannered decadence of "The Modern Actor" to the cryptic pre-modernist narrative of Park. As such, his work helps us reconstruct our own past: in particular, it requires us to acknowledge that abyss which lies between the late Victorian and the years after the Great War. As one who survived, not only personally but as a writer, Gray allows us to speculate on the strategies by which he sought to bridge that chasm. And in so doing, John Gray's work may provide an example of how on the edge of greater chasms, we may still presume to tell stories and to feel, in telling them, that they are permitted to tell us something about our experience--and ourselves. Professor McCormack traces the development of Gray's life and writings in her introductory essay. She prefaces each selection with a useful headnote. Her extensive notes to the prose clarify topical allusions and make Gray's work accessible to a wide audience.
Download or read book The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde written by Oscar Wilde and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative edition of Oscar Wilde’s critical writings shows how the renowned dramatist and novelist also transformed the art of commentary. Though he is primarily acclaimed today for his drama and fiction, Oscar Wilde was also one of the greatest critics of his generation. Annotated and introduced by Wilde scholar Nicholas Frankel, this unique collection reveals Wilde as a writer who transformed criticism, giving the genre new purpose, injecting it with style and wit, and reorienting it toward the kinds of social concerns that still occupy our most engaging cultural commentators. “Criticism is itself an art,” Wilde wrote, and The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde demonstrates this philosophy in action. Readers will encounter some of Wilde’s most quotable writings, such as “The Decay of Lying,” which famously avers that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life.” But Frankel also includes lesser-known works like “The American Invasion,” a witty celebration of modern femininity, and “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea,” in which Wilde deftly (and anonymously) carves up his former tutor’s own criticism. The essays, reviews, dialogues, and epigrams collected here cover an astonishing range of themes: literature, of course, but also fashion, politics, masculinity, cuisine, courtship, marriage—the breadth of Victorian England. If today’s critics address such topics as a matter of course, it is because Wilde showed that they could. It is hard to imagine a twenty-first-century criticism without him.
Download or read book Straw Dogs written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British bestseller Straw Dogs is an exciting, radical work of philosophy, which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. John Gray argues that this belief in human difference is a dangerous illusion and explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned. The result is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question our deepest-held beliefs. Will Self, in the New Statesman, called Straw Dogs his book of the year: "I read it once, I read it twice and took notes . . . I thought it that good." "Nothing will get you thinking as much as this brilliant book" (Sunday Telegraph).
Download or read book The Fin de si cle Poem written by Joseph Bristow and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siecle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that shows why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siecle poetry, the collection explains how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter in turn provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief. The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of such legendary writers as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W.B. Yeats, whose careers have always been associated with the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson. The Fin-de-Siecle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations made in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how woman poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.Joseph Bristow is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edits the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature. His recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Oscar Wilde: Contextual Conditions, and the variorum edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Download or read book Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s written by Emma Sutton and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sutton presents a study of the influence of Richard Wagner on the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). She explores the role of Wagnerism within British culture of the 1890's, in particular the relations between Wagnerism and the decadent movement.
Download or read book Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Si cle written by Frances Knight and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period known as the fin de siecle - defined in this groundbreaking book as chiefly the period between1885 and 1901 - was a fluid and unsettling epoch of optimism and pessimism, endings and beginnings, aswell as of new forms of creativity and anxiety. The end of the century has attracted much interest from scholars of literary and cultural studies, who regard it as a critical moment in the history of their disciplines; but it has been relatively ignored by religious historians. Frances Knight here sets right that neglect. She shows how late Victorian society (often said to be one of the most intensely Christian cultures the world has ever seen) reacted to the bold agendas being set by the thinkers of the fin de siecle; and how prominent Church figures during the era first identified many of the concerns that have preoccupied Christians latterly. These include an active interest in social justice and the creation of new types of communities; increasingly open discussion of the sexual exploitation of children; debates about society's 'decadence'; new ideas about the role of women; and the belief in the redemptive powers of art, pioneered by figures as diverse as P.T. Forsyth, Percy Dearmer and Samuel and Henrietta Barnett.Examining in particular the Christian world of fin de siecle London, the author offers penetrating insights intoa society in which the ritual and culture of Christianity sometimes permeated the aesthetic movement andwhere devotees of the aesthetic movement - like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and their disciples - often revealed a fascination with Christianity. She argues that the 'long 1890s' was a decisive decade in which various sections of Christian opinion, both on the progressive and the more conservative wings of the faith, began to express views which set the tone for attitudes which would become commonplace in the twentieth century. Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siecle is the focussed treatment of religion and culture at the end of the nineteenth century that the field has long needed. It will be welcomed by scholars of church history, social and cultural history and the history of ideas.
Download or read book English Literature in Transition 1880 1920 written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages written by Clare A. Simmons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medievalism, the later reception of the Middle Ages, has been used by many writers, not just during the Victorian period but from the Renaissance to the present, as a means of commenting on their own societies and systems of values. Until recently, this self-interest was used to distinguish between Medievalism, a selective, often romanticised, view of the past, and medieval studies, with its quest for an authentic Middle Ages. The essays in this collection suggest that the search for knowledge of a "real" Middle Ages has always been a problematic one, and that the vitality of the vision of Medievalism is demonstrated by its constant adaption to current concerns.
Download or read book Scottish Literary Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wilde the Irishman written by Jerusha Hull McCormack and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this vigorous study, seventeen leading Irish artists, critics, and cultural commentators explore the neglected theme of Wilde's Irishness."--Jacket.
Download or read book Edward Thomas Prose Writings A Selected Edition written by Edna Longley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Thomas can be seen as the most important poetry critic in the early twentieth century. Thomas was a prose-writer before he was a poet. The Selected Edition of his prose, and especially this volume, shows that he was also a critic before he was a poet. His unusual literary career opens up key questions about the relation between poetry and criticism, as well as between poetry and prose. Thomas wrote books about poetry, but his criticism mainly took the form of reviews. He reviewed collections, editions, and studies of poetry, most regularly, for the Daily Chronicle and the Morning Post. These reviews amount to a unique commentary on the state of poetry and of poetry criticism after 1900. Since reviewing provided Thomas's main income, he also reviewed other kinds of book. Hence the sheer mass of his reviews, the stress he suffered as a literary journalist. Yet his criticism maintains an astonishingly high standard. Thomas's response to contemporary poetry intersects with his readings of older poetry. No critic or poet of the time was so deeply acquainted with the traditions of English-language poetry or so alert to new poetic movements in Ireland and America. Edward Thomas's writings on poetry have a double importance. Besides suggesting the hidden evolution of his own aesthetic, they constitute a lost history and critique of poetry before the Great War. They change our assumptions about that period. Thomas's perspectives on poets such as Yeats, Hardy, Frost, Lawrence, and Pound illuminate the making of modern poetry.
Download or read book The Breviary of the Decadence written by George A. Cevasco and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letters to Edward Playfair written by André Raffalovich and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne written by John Donne and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2001-08-14 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne's great metaphysical love poetry. Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His Mistris Going to Bed." Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne's prose, including many of his private letters; Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time."
Download or read book Is Nothing Sacred written by Ben Rogers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A controversial debate on the place of values in a secular age, between some of the most outstanding thinkers of our day - including Richard Dawkins, Simon Blackburn and Ronald Dworkin.
Download or read book Lord John and the Private Matter written by Diana Gabaldon and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2009-04-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SPECIAL FOR THIS EDITION: The Return of Jamie & Claire—a sneak preview of the next Outlander novel! Plus the short story Lord John and the Hell-fire Club. In her New York Times bestselling Outlander novels, Diana Gabaldon introduced millions of readers to a dazzling world of history and adventure—a world of vibrant settings and utterly unforgettable characters. Now one of these characters, Major Lord John Grey, opens the door to his own part of this world—eighteenth-century London, a seething anthill of nobility and rabble peopled by soldiers and spies, whores and dukes. Great Britain is battling France for supremacy on three continents—and life is good for a soldier. The year is 1757. On a clear morning in mid-June, Lord John Grey emerges from London’s Beefsteak Club, his mind in turmoil. A nobleman and a high-ranking officer in His Majesty’s Army, Grey has just witnessed something shocking. But his efforts to avoid a scandal that might destroy his family are interrupted by something still more urgent: the Crown appoints him to investigate the brutal murder of a comrade in arms, who may have been a traitor. Obliged to pursue two inquiries at once, Major Grey finds himself ensnared in a web of treachery and betrayal that touches every stratum of English society—and threatens all he holds dear. From the bawdy houses of London’s night-world to the stately drawing rooms of the nobility, and from the blood of a murdered corpse to the thundering seas ruled by the majestic fleet of the East India Company, Lord John pursues the elusive trails of a vanishing footman and a woman in green velvet, who may hold the key to everything—or nothing. The early days of the Seven Years War come brilliantly to life in this historical mystery by an author whose unique and compelling storytelling has engrossed millions of readers worldwide.
Download or read book The Fate of Ideas written by Robert Boyers and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.
