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Literary Studies

literary study skills, book reviews, and recommended reading

literary skills, book reviews, and further reading

Dictionary of Literary Terms

July 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

explanations of the language of literary criticism

Do you want to know the difference between an epic poem and a tragedy? Between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’? Between ‘naturalism’ and ‘realism’? Chris Baldick’s Dictionary of Literary Terms answers all these questions – and more besides. With entries which range from definitions of abjection to zeugma, it is in fact a guide to a mixture of old-fashioned grammatical terms, traditional drama, literary history, and textual criticism. It contains over 1,200 of the most troublesome literary terms you are likely to encounter. Some of the longer entries and explanations become like short essays on their subject.

Dictionary of Literary TermsHe also includes literary terms which have slipped into everyday use – such as ‘text’ and ‘interpretation’. He gives clear and often witty explanations of terms such as ‘hypertext’, ‘multi-accentuality’, and ‘postmodernism’. He also explains more common figures of speech such as the metaphor (straightforward) and those you can never remember such synecdoche and metonymy (can you really tell the difference between them?)

He also explains literary genres, from ‘the madrigal’ to ‘dirty realism’ and ‘the boddice ripper’, as well as offering potted accounts of theories such as structuralism and hermeneutics.

The latest (third) edition has been expanded and I was glad to see that he has added entry-level web links from OUP’s companion website to the book.

This will appeal to the general reader with an interest in literary studies, but it’s principally a useful reference for the advanced schoolroom or for undergraduates. And in fact – make that teachers too. I’ve had a copy of the first edition on my shelves for years, and I use it all the time.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Chris Baldick, Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (third edition) 2008, pp.361, ISBN: 0199208271


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Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Routledge Harwood Studies in Russian Literature

Vladimir Nabokov’s work has been widely regarded as an elaborate series of linguistic games in which a variety of clever and seductive narrators invite readers to collude in a system of aesthetic and moral beliefs which are held so firmly that to dissent from them would seem like heresy or not playing the game. Editor David Larmour explains the title of this collection of essays as an exploration of the ‘system of power relations in which the author, text, and reader are enmeshed’. In other words, Nabokov’s strategies are seen as open to challenge, with the clear implication that he has been getting away with it for far too long.

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's ProseHe is well known for his ‘strong opinions’, and some of his subject matter and authorial attitudes are very often seen as dubious – especially in Lolita, which gets special extended treatment here. Galya Diment starts the collection with her best efforts to defend Edmund Wilson from the damage inflicted on him by Nabokov in their now famous friendship-turned-dispute over the translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Then Brian Walter makes a lengthy criticism of Bend Sinister to say not much more than that it is not one of his best novels.

Galina Rylkova reveals a literary precedent for The Eye in a novel by Mikhail Kuzmin called Wings published in 1906. She has no problem in establishing the parallels between the two texts, but most of her lofty interpretive claims are undermined by her failure to see that Nabokov’s narrator Smurov is a self-deceiving liar and a totally unreliable narrator. He is a comic-pathetic character who is a vehicle for one of Nabokov’s most brilliant experiments in narrative – an experiment which was only matched in subtlety by his later Spring in Fialta.

David Larmour contributes an essay which looks at the relationship between sex and sport in Glory. But like many of the other contributors he accepts almost at face value what Nabokov has to say in his introductions – which were written at a later date. There is no acknowledgement of ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’, or ‘Death of the author’, whichever you prefer.

Paul Miller offers a chapter which demonstrates that Kinbote, narrator of Pale Fire is a homosexual – something which I would have thought any reader above the age of fifteen would realise without being told. There are some perceptive analyses of the American crewcut, but not much more than can be accessed by any reasonably attentive reader.

What struck me was how long it takes these writers to say so little. They come from what is now the bygone age of pre-Internet writing – one which persists in the modern world only thanks to the requirements of tenure in the US and the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK.

Tony Moore makes a valiant attempt to offer what he calls a feminist reading of Lolita, even enlisting the help of Camille Paglia, but his argument that Humbert Humbert changes his moral stance and his prose style at the end of the novel doesn’t seem very convincing, especially when it simply ignores the fact that Humbert is guilty of murder.

There’s also a full-on rad fem reading of Lolita from Elizabeth Patnoe which combines personal testimony and high moral outrage in a very unprofessional manner, ignoring any distinction between the worlds of fiction and reality. At the end of a long tortuous argument, one is left wondering why she bothers reading the novel.

She also has an annoying habit of describing almost every narrative twist as ‘doubling’ – a term she uses indiscriminately as a synonym for ‘ambiguous’, ‘dubious’, ‘disingenuous’, ‘devious’, ‘evasive’, and other related terms.

Fortunately the collection is rounded off by two sensible chapters by Donald Johnson and Suellen Stringer-Hye which place Nabokov in the context of popular culture and America in the 1960s. The collection is based on papers given at an academic conference. It’s obviously one for the literary specialist, but Nabokov enthusiasts will not want to miss it – even if it’s to sharpen their own critical analysis against the views being expressed.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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David H.J.Larmour (ed), Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.176, ISBN 0415286581


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Filed Under: Literary Studies, Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: Discourse & Ideology in Nabokov's Prose, Literary criticism, Literary studies, Vladimir Nabokov

Doing English

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

preparing for literary studies at undergraduate level

This book is designed to make students of literature think more deeply about the subject. It explains the development of English Literature as an academic discipline and poses fundamental questions about the activity – such as ‘What is English [Literature] and what is studying it supposed to mean?’ Robert Eaglestone’s book aims to help students prepare for studying literature at undergraduate level. He offers a gentle introduction to literary theory – but without lots of jargon.

Doing English If students read what he has to say, they will certainly be more confident in confronting some of the challenges and contradictions which exist in literary studies in universities. For instance, tutors commonly deduct marks from students for poor written expression – and quite right too. Yet why do so many literary critics get published when their work is almost unintelligible? These are questions worth asking. He explains the rise in ‘Eng Lit’ and uncovers some of the hidden assumptions which lie beneath the surface of traditional attitudes to it. This is in fact an explanation of the ideology of ‘Eng. Lit.’ – but he cleverly avoids even using the term.

He unpacks the concept of the literary canon and looks in detail at Shakespeare studies as a prime example. This is followed by issues of interpretation which are summed up in the expressions ‘the intentional fallacy’ and ‘the death of the author’.

The latter parts of the book are devoted to considering the relationships between English Literature and cultural identity, politics, and educational policy. His consideration of these larger strategic issues make me think that this book will be as valuable to teachers as to students. It will help them clarify their ideas about their objectives and teaching strategies in the classroom.

There is an excellent and deeply annotated bibliography. Any student [or teacher] reading even a few of the titles he recommends will be well prepared to put their own approach to literary studies into a well-informed ideological context. [But they don’t have to mention the term.]

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Robert Eaglestone, Doing English: A guide for literature students, London: Routledge, 3rd edition 2009, pp.192, ISBN: 0415284236


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Good Fiction Guide

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

reference guide and essays on ideas for further reading

Do you like reading good quality fiction – but you’re not sure what to read next? Good Fiction Guide is designed for you. It’s combination of short essays describing popular literary genres and topics, with lists of suggested reading. It then adds potted biographies of writers, with tips on which of their works are most approachable. The general idea is to lead you onto any number of recommendations for ‘further reading’, all of which will be of good quality.

Good Fiction Guide This is because they are by classic writers – Balzac, Dickens, Turgenev, Woolf – or because their contemporary writing is of a literary kind – Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Julian Barnes. So it’s a good mixture of the traditional and the new. The book begins with thirty-four articles on a mixture of genres – short story, fantasy – place – France, Canada – and topics such as ‘war’, ‘humour’, and ‘the sea’. These are written by enthusiasts who range from academics to popular writers, and each one includes their top twelve recommended titles.

The bulk of the book is taken up with over a thousand thumbnail sketches of writers and their best-known work. Clive James cheek by jowl with Henry James and Thomas Hardy followed by Robert Harris.

The emphasis is firmly on modern and contemporary literature, and I suspect that despite the introductory essays, most readers will find the biographies the ideal ground for browsing and picking up ideas for further reading. They also make this compilation a reasonable quick reference book for those concerned with modern literature.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Good Fiction Guide, (ed Jane Rogers) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2005, pp.548, ISBN: 0192806475


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Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated encyclopedia of writers and places

Writers in Britain (no less than those in any other part of the world) have often been influenced by the localities in which the have been born and grown up. There are whole mythologies built around the Brontes and Yorkshire, Thomas Hardy and the West Country, Charles Dickens and London. But the influence actually goes further back than that. For instance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people from all over Europe flocked to Scotland, inspired by the writing of Walter Scott.

Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland Wordsworth and his friends almost single-handedly created a passion for the English Lake District which continues to this day. People queue up to peep into Dove Cottage, then go back home to houses ten times the size. Jane Austen has her own museum in Bath, because she captured the city so well in her work, even though she only spent a brief period of her short life there. But these are the well known examples. Less well known but just as interesting socially and geographically are the names listed in this encyclopedia of literature and place which explains connections between writers and locations from the smallest villages via towns and cities, to palaces and country seats which are like separate worlds of their own.

The other interesting factor here is that entries take a historical view of places – so that the record stretches well back beyond the recent past. And it also includes writers who were well known in their own day, even though they might not be now.

So, whilst you get pages of information about Shakespeare and Stratford on Avon (for obvious reasons) the entry on my own home city of Manchester includes Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Burgess (both fairly well known) but also the less well known Thomas de Quincy, Harrison Ainsworth, Howard Spring, George Gissing, and even Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, who lived here for a while.

I was even more interested to read the details of an entry concerning Christopher Isherwood and his connections with the now defunct Marple Hall in Cheshire. His much neglected – and in my opinion his best – novel The Memorial (1932) is set there. He inherited the hall, but gave it away to his brother.

There are all sorts of unexpected informational gems – such as the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Southport; Henry James wrote The Spoils of Poynton in Torquay; and Vladimir Nabokov lived in Trinity College, Cambridge. Entries range from Adelstrop and Abingdon to Wormwood Scrubs and Zennor – famous for having expelled D.H.Lawrence during the First World War on suspicion that he was a German spy.

It’s packed with little gems like that, and the nice thing is that although the big names are not neglected, the smaller, the second.rate, and the also-rans are listed too – and this makes it a work of fairly serious reference rather than just a coffee-table guide. And with two indexes, you can look up either authors or places you might plan to visit. It’s the sort of book that reinforces the idea that people from all over the world probably regard Britain as a nation of writers and poets.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins, The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, third revised edition 2008, pp.370, ISBN: 0198614608


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How Novels Work

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelists’ techniques – and contemporary fiction

Literary Theory of the academic kind led itself into a one-way, dead-end street in the latter decades of the last century. But traditional literary criticism has survived, largely because it preserved a connection with common sense; it didn’t take itself too seriously; and it was more interested in literature than theory. John Mullan’s guide to understanding novels How Novels Work belongs to this humanist tradition. It’s based on articles he wrote for the cultural supplement to the Guardian. He seeks to examine how novels work by looking at examples of contemporary fiction whilst keeping in mind what we already know about classics.

How Novels WorkHe does this by focusing on some of the most fundamental parts of the novel – its title for instance, how its story is told, its characters created, its style, and even how it ends. One of the clever parts of his approach is that he situates his analyses within an account of the story. So even if you haven’t read some of the recent Booker prizewinners he uses as his source materials, he tells you enough to make his point comprehensible. And en passant he delivers some really good appetite-whetting accounts of contemporary best-sellers – from Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and Ian McEwan.

The Guardian articles were originally written with people in book-reading circles in mind – and they are just the sort of readers who could profit from this introductory approach to the analysis of literature and how it achieves its effects. Others include students in schools, colleges, and universities, plus general readers of novels who would like a guided tour of the literary engine room to be shown how it all works.

Such readers will find helpful his explanations of first and third person narratives, unreliable narrators, point of view, and the conventions that surround them. And he moves fluently from Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre to contemporary novels such as Nick Hornby’s How to be Good and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth without any strain or condescension.

Of course you’re not likely to agree with every one of his interpretations. For instance, I think he credits Philip Roth with clever manipulation of author-narrator distinctions which are no more than modish self-referentiality, weak writing, and self-indulgence. But that is the nature of literary interpretation. These things are up for debate.

He has a particularly good section which discusses the distinctions to be made between story, narrative, structure, and plot. And the examples he chooses are fascinating. Indeed, half way through reading the chapter I dashed out to buy all Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, he made the account of their split narratives so interesting.

All sorts of literary and rhetorical devices are examined: diction, parenthesis, hyperbole, pastiche, stream of consciousness, letters, emails, newspaper articles, coincidence, epigrams, quotations, symbolism – and so on. I read the book straight through, but it could equally well suffice as a work of reference.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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John Mullan, How Novels Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.368, ISBN: 0199281785


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Filed Under: Literary Studies, Theory Tagged With: English literature, How Novels Work, Literary studies, Study skills, The novel

Hyper/Text/Theory

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature and literary theory in the digital age

George Landow was amongst the early few to spot the similarities between modern literary theory and the technological possibilities of hypertext programmes. This is the third of his publications which explore connexions between them. The general argument he makes is that the digitization of text coupled with the associative links of hypertext represents a development of revolutionary potential.

Hyper/Text/Theory It makes new literary forms available, blurs distinctions between existing genres [‘boundary erasure’] and makes possible anything from multimedia compilations started by authors but completed by their readers, to texts which are ‘unreproducible’ because of their size and their constant revision.

His introductory essay is an invigorating mixture of reports on hypertext projects and visionary ideas of the kind promoted by Jay Bolter and Nicholas Negroponte. Unfortunately, his fellow contributors fail to match his standard. The other essays deal with non-linearity as one of the essential features of hypertext, the politics of this branch of IT, and what promotes itself as new writing – ‘hypertext fiction’, a somewhat dubious notion over which there is still much debate.

They range enthusiastically over topics as diverse as Wittgenstein’s notebooks, films and narratology, and forms of classical rhetoric. But much of their exposition is clogged with silly jargon [‘texton’, ‘scripton’, ‘screener’] which is depressingly rife amidst professionals in the field of cultural studies.

At their worst the essays deal in speculation rather than reporting
on practical experiences or successful projects. Mireille Rosello for instance at one point drops to the level of conceptual art when she spends two or three pages describing what an imaginary hypertext programme could be like. Since there are unsung technical writers out there in the field constructing hypertext programmes for real right now, this is a feeble and self-indulgent substitute. There are just too many questions raised, not enough empirical data or answers.

One further dispiriting feature is the tendency of the authors to draw on the same material, and even worse to quote each other. It is one thing for them to [quite understandably] cite Ted Nelson as a hypertext visionary, but when yet another reference to Thomas Pynchon occurs in the fourth or fifth essay, one wonders if these aren’t the papers of some post-graduate club. This suspicion is reinforced by the tendency for them all to quote from the same fashionable cultural theorists – Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. The collection ends with a piece of post-Modernist tosh by Gregory L Ulmar which weaves a tissue of non-sequiturs around a contrived verbal connection between Wittgenstein [again] and Carmen Miranda.

In Landow’s own survey of current programmes and projects [written, one supposes, circa 1993/94] it is interesting to note how often he describes the hypertext systems available by using the telling metaphor of a ‘web’ of connexions. The World Wide Web which was under development at that very time now makes available many of the linkages dreamed of from Vannevar Bush onwards. And most importantly, they are available not merely for some technological elite as in the past, but for whoever wishes to use them. This is a democratizing influence which will have a profound effect upon the construction, assembly, and cross-linking of information – and Landow knows it. One of the driving forces behind this collection of essays is to make these possibilities known. I imagine that a further post-WWW volume is on its way right now – but I hope he writes the book himself.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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George P. Landow, (ed) Hyper/Text/Theory, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp.379, ISBN: 0801848385


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Hypertext in Hypertext

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

hypertext essays on literature and literary theory

This is a two-disk hypertext version of Landow’s 1992 print publication, Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. For those who are not acquainted with the original, Landow sets out a case for hypertext which looks at issues of textual authority, intellectual ownership, and the philosophy of a writing which can never be ‘finished’.

Hypertext in HypertextHe notes the similarities between the new technology and contemporary critical theory which seeks to undermine the authority of texts and authors. So what’s new in the electronic version? Well, Landow has included many of the texts from which he quotes in the earlier printed book. There are also essays on Barthes, Bhaktin, and Foucault. He includes reviews of the original book, as well as some (typically feeble) parodies by Malcolm Bradbury.

There are mini-essays from students explaining and often criticizing some of the arguments. Landow observed in the original version that hypertext was ripe for exploiting this all-inclusiveness, and he has been as good as his word by adding material which even undermines his own work in this way. This might be seen as a courageous move from someone who could easily have insisted on absolute textual authority. Alternatively, you could say that it reflects his impregnability in the academic hierarchy. Would someone without tenure dare risk such a venture?

Some material has been added for this hypertext edition. For instance, it includes the text of the original proposal to Johns Hopkins Press: “This project will include …” and so forth. But I’m not so sure that readers want to know about these details of the planning stage. It’s one thing to have the early drafts of “King Lear”, but presenting the outline plans for a book of cultural argument (even an interesting one) is another matter. We warn students against discussing the process of composing their essays. All that’s required is the finished product – not the means by which it arrived.

The bibliographical jump-links are good. This is technology which works more efficiently than a printed book. Strangely enough though, there are not as many notes or pop-up screens as one might expect. Perhaps this is because the basic text was conceived and executed in the Old Days of sequential writing?

What he has done is split the original into smaller sections – but they’re still not small enough. On my 17-inch monitor screen there are ‘pages’ which require so much scrolling that one craves for the start of a paragraph. The fact is that even with a knowledge of the original printed text, reading this version on screen is not easy. It’s difficult to keep any sense of structure in mind. This experience supports the notion that writing for screen and for print require quite different skills.

He argues fairly persuasively that Hypertext is useful in learning the
culture of a discipline, because we can switch easily from the principal text to supplementary readings of it:

hypertext materials provide the student with a means of experiencing the way an expert works in an individual discipline … such a body of electronically linked material also provides the student with an efficient means of learning the vocabulary, strategies, and other aspects of a discipline that constitute its particular culture

Anyone interested in the potential relationships between hypertext and cultural theory should try to see this program in action. It may well be that sustained and continuous arguments made in prose are not actually suitable for this format, but one can hardly blame him for trying out his theories. He could be a little more inventive with his titles, though, couldn’t he?

© Roy Johnson 2000

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George P. Landow, Hypertext in Hypertext, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, ISBN: 0801848695 (Windows version) ISBN: 0801848709 (Mac version)


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Filed Under: Literary Studies, Media, Theory Tagged With: Electronic Writing, Hypertext, Hypertext in Hypertext, Literary studies

Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a case of wrongful critical conviction

During his lifetime, Philip Larkin, the self-effacing ‘Hermit of Hull’ (where he was the University Librarian), was held in public affection as an ‘accessible’ poet, minor novelist, and quirky jazz critic. His death in 1985 was mourned as the passing of – in W. H. Auden’s phrase – ‘a master of the English language’. But with the publication of his Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite (1992), and Andrew Motion’s biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), the tide began to turn.

Germaine Greer characterised Larkin’s verse as ‘anti-intellectual, racist, sexist, and rotten with class-consciousness’ while Tom Paulin condemned the Letters as a ‘revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals the sewer under the national monument that Larkin became’.

Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence What Paulin and other commentators failed to understand was the fundamental distinction between private and public correspondence. Unless one is a compiler of the dreadful and usually seasonal round robin to friends and acquaintances, letters are written to individuals, and take into account their sensibilities. Larkin certainly knew this, yet a recent eBay auction listed Motion’s biography under the key words: ‘Homosexual Pornography Poet PHILIP LARKIN Nazi’.

John Osborne’s purpose in this adversarial and provocative polemic is to rescue Larkin from both his disciples and his detractors, who have combined and conflated the man with his work. As Osborne cautions, ‘a narrator of invented experiences is not to be confused with an actual author and real ones’.

Read correctly, neither Larkin’s poems nor his prose reveal an ‘anti-Modernist’, Little Englander, blinkered jazz lover, homophobe or racist bigot. On the contrary, he emerges as a magisterially informed, radical and subversive writer, fully conversant with and sympathetic to the plight of oppressed minorities – including African-Americans, immigrants and the white working classes.

In an excellent chapter on ‘Larkin and Modernism: Jazz’, Osborne contends that from its beginnings jazz, with its stylistic and creative innovations, was ‘Modernist music par excellence’ and was seen as such. But Larkin, because of his famous/notorious anti-modernist stance (‘Parker, Pound and Picasso’), liked to pretend that jazz stopped being ‘jazz’ with the bebop revolution of the 1940s. It didn’t, and he knew it.

Osborne also offers a brilliant (and persuasive) interpretation of the poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and also notes that Larkin’s other jazz hero was Louis Armstrong who, he suggested, was ‘certainly quite comparable’ in cultural stature with Pablo Picasso. So much for Larkin the private racist and public ‘anti-Modernist’.

Where the ‘pink professoriate’ and ‘self-appointed guardians of public morality’ – including Terry Eagleton, Lisa Jardine – have castigated Larkin as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative, Osborne reminds us that the only poem he was commissioned to write by the Tory party (‘Going, Going’) was ‘so little to their liking that they brutally censored it before publication’.

Again, far from being unaware of working-class culture, Larkin identified (even if he did not identify with) its consumer novelties: ‘split-level shopping, transistors, deodorants, the Pill, Bri-Nylon, Baby-Doll nighties, the Beatles’ first LP’. In poems like ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, Osborne suggests, Larkin deconstructs the ‘discourse of modern advertising’ as profoundly as does the work of pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol.

Despite his myopic scholarly detractors, Larkin’s influence and reputation have been recognised by musicians, artists and creative writers. Leonard Bernstein nominated Larkin as the twentieth century’s greatest poet (Osborne views him as ‘the greatest poet of doubt since [Thomas] Hardy’). The paintings in Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition are all titled after a Larkin poem, while Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Julian Barnes have acknowledged his ‘liberating role’ in their work.

Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence deserves a wide readership. It sheds fresh light on his oeuvre and its sources, and, most importantly, sends one back to the poems (and prose) with sharpened perceptions.

Academic students of literature will also welcome the two chapters on ‘Larkin and Philosophy’. Only occasionally does Osborne lapse into the arcane jargon of the new literary criticism, as in his endorsement of Barbara Everett’s recognition of Larkin’s indebtedness to T.S. Eliot. She, we are informed,

appreciates that this Eliotic citationality desiderates a text-centred rather then an author-centred methodology, the incorporation of elements by other hands generating a problematic of multiplicity, heterogeneity and exteriority that challenges the author’s sovereignty.

Larkin’s response to this intelligence might well have been: ‘In a pig’s arse, friend’. But he would surely have welcomed the aside that ‘The worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment in contemporary cinema or television (let alone the internet).’

© John White 2008

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John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 304, ISBN: 1403937060


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Filed Under: Literary Studies Tagged With: English literature, Larkin Ideology and Critical Violence, Literary studies, Philip Larkin

Literary Criticism – a new history

September 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

aesthetic theory from the classical period to the present

Gary Day’s main argument in his impressive study Literary Criticism – a new history is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs. At one moment it emphasizes the text, and at the next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism.

Literary CriticismHe takes the history of both literature and literary criticism through the distinct phases of its historical development, starting with the classics, then looking successively at Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, and Modern phases. His emphasis on the whole is on English criticism, though it does not preclude an occasional consideration of other cultures.

His examination of criticism relating to the earlier periods has the instructive effect of condensing their ideas and ‘theory’ into digestible chunks. He points out that in the medieval period for instance there was no concept of either literature or criticism as we know them – only ‘commentary’ on sacred texts. The Greco-Roman classics for instance were interpreted as guides to (Christian) moral behaviour. The medieval period also gave rise to the concept of the auctor (author). It also saw, towards its end, the rise of the written vernacular. Latin was the language of learning, but as trade between nations increased there was more reason than ever for people to use and learn each other’s native language.

In the Renaissance period Day argues that a crucial issue was the Protestant-inspired translation of the Bible into English. This gave the common man both access to divine scripture and the right to its interpretation – previously only in the remit of the church itself. The introduction of printing and the establishment of a vernacular English that pushed out Latin and French as the lingua francas of official discourse led to the publication of books for readers’ pleasure. This in turn gave rise to a literature of the popular marketplace and a need to make distinctions between such products and a canon of revered classics. It is easy to see the point that Gary Day makes several times throughout this study – that many of the critical issues debated with such recent ferocity were evident in literary history centuries ago.

His chapter on the English Enlightenment draws interesting parallels between criticism and finance. If the intrinsic value of a paper five pound note was certainly not five pounds, because there was not a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, so the value of a work of literature could not be determined by the accuracy of its correspondence with some value in the real world.

There is a strong period of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century that Day attributes to a desire for order, proportion, and rule-based authority after the uncertainties created by the Civil War. However, he argues that it failed to take permanent root and only sprang back into life now and again during politically reactionary phases.

In his chapter on the Romantic period he argues that the cult of individualism, ‘sensibility’, and nature was a reaction to the industrial revolution which reduced man to a mere part in the economy of mass production. Thus the literary criticism that emerged emphasized the possibilities of individual response to and interpretation of a text. This tendency reached its apogee in the art for art’s sake movement at the end of the nineteenth century when all connections between art and moral improvement were finally denied completely.

When it comes to the twentieth century he understandably sees Freud, Max Plank and Picasso as exemplars of revolutionary thinking, though the literary critics he first considers are the very unfashionable Walter Orage and G.K. Chesterton. But in fact the main focus of interest in his final chapter is the establishment of English Studies in the UK university system – a surprising phenomenon both in its recency and the controversy that surrounded it.

Fortunately, he does finish by looking at three major figures critics who were influential from the mid-century onwards – I.A.Richards, William Empson, and F.R.Leavis. He explains their critical methods and their significance, and finally lets himself off the leash to take a few well-aimed swipes at Catherine Belsey, who is obviously his bete noir.

This is not simply gratuitous rival-bashing however, for one of Day’s habits that I found quite entertaining was his demonstrating links between debates held centuries ago with those of the last two or three decades – to show that there is very little that is totally new under the sun. And he is also much given to taking pot shots at the current academic culture of ‘skills’ and ‘performance indicators’ that have come to replace a serious interest in the subject of literature and literary criticism.

He has very little to say about contemporary forms of literary criticism which range from feminism, postcolonialism, post-Modernism, and queer theory – except to conclude somewhat radically that

the sheer variety should not distract us from one fundamental truth: that the demands of bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency are making the study of literature ever more prescriptive for students while the Research Assessment Exercise has distorted it for academics. Criticism is better off outside the academy.

This sort of writing could signal the beginnings of a long overdue and very welcome change in the practice of academic literary criticism.

Literary Criticism Buy the book at Amazon UK

Literary Criticism Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Gary Day, Literary Criticism: a new history, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.344, ISBN: 0748641424


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Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature, Literary Studies, Theory Tagged With: Critical theory, Cultural history, English literature, Literary criticism, Literary studies

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