Criticism: The Major Texts.
Ed. Walter Jackson Bate. Contains the original statements on literary and
artistic criticism from Plato to Edmund Wilson.
The Future of
the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction. Henry James. A series of essays on the
novel and its practitioners in James’s time—Dickens, George Eliot, Zola,
Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Trollope, HG Wells, Arnold
Bennett and Joseph Conrad.
The Western
Canon.
Harold Bloom. Bloom suggests that the goal in our schools and colleges today is
no longer intellectual excellence, but achieving social harmony and remedying
historical injustice. Bloom explores the problem of no longer reading serious
books, the books enumerated in the Western Canon, “what has been preserved out
of what has been written.”
The Flowering of
New England.
Van Wyck Brooks. Tells the story of the New England Renaissance in the period
between the Revolution and the Civil War. It was a springtime surge of energy
and intellect, a revolution against theology which had crushed the human spirit
and confidence.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Volume One. James Boswell. The most famous biography in
English literature of one of the most quoted people in the English
language—other than Shakespeare, of course. Samuel Johnson was “bigger than
life” because James Boswell, his biographer, kept voluminous and meticulous
notes.
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