Christopher Ricks Reihenfolge der Bücher

A selection of new and revised essays from eminent scholar and critic Professor Christopher Ricks. Christopher Ricks brings together new as well as substantially augmented critical essays across a wide range. Several derive from his term as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, when his inaugural lecture engaged with the illuminatingly puzzled relations between poetry and prose. Comparison and analysis (the tools of the critic, as T.S. Eliot insisted) are enlivened by imaginative pairings: of Samuel Johnson with Samuel Beckett, of Norman Mailer with Dickens, of Shakespeare with George Herbert, or of secret-police surveillance in Ben Jonson's Rome with that of Carmen Bugan's Romania. Along Heroic Lines devotes itself to the heroic and to 'heroics' (Othello cross-examined by T.S. Eliot; Byron and role-playing; Ion Bugan, political protest and arrest). This knot is in tension with the English heroic line (Dryden's heroic triplets, Henry James's cadences, Geoffrey Hill's concluding book of prose-poems and how they choose to conclude). All alert to the balance and sustenance of alternate tones that prose and poetry can achieve in harmony.

A novel about writing a novel is the subject of this complex classic which has been described as the greatest shaggy dog story in the English language.

In Essays in Appreciation, Christopher Ricks continues the work of his highly-praised The Force of Poetry, with lively and provoking essays on poets and poetry. In addition, Ricks puts his appreciative pen in the service of other literary figures and genres, including drama, the novel, history and philosophy, and a discussion of Victorian biographies. Ricks wraps up the collection with a series of critical questions on literature and theory; plus two notes--on the canon, and on Empson and political criticism. W.H. Auden once wrote of Christopher Ricks that "he is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding;" with this latest volume every scholar as well as serious reader will join the poet in finding much to appreciate.

Most people want to live forever. But there is another the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition--an age of transplants and life-support.But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not unwelcome encroachments of death, when it is for the life, the vitality of their language that we value writers? Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of in clichés, which are dead but won't lie down; in a dead language and its memento mori; in words which mean their own opposites, like cleaving; and in what Beckett called a syntax of weakness.This artful study explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer, the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

This is an anthology of America, not of American literature. Covers a range of writings which were not simply (or even necessarily) American, but which were about America. Includes: John James Audubon, Willa Cather, e.e. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Dos Passos, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, Robert Frost, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer, Herman Melville, H.L. Mencken, Ogden Nash, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Malcolm X, & many others.

The essays in this volume are intended to give a modern reader a sense of the many contexts within which literature exists. The particular angle or emphasis is the contributor's choice. Thus Spenser's work is discussed in relation to his life and times; Shakespeare's sonnets are explored as transforming a specific genre; while Marvell is read in the context of the Caroline circle. Writers such as Sidney, Donne and Milton are discussed in more than one context. There are substantial chapters on genres, such as the epyllion or minor epic, the lyric and the prose of the period, as well as chapters on individual writers, and there is a bibliography and a table of dates. Published in ten volumes, "The Penguin History of Literature" is a critical survey of English and American literature covering 14 centuries, from the Anglo-Saxons to the present.

Tristram Shandy is one of English literature's most curious, complex and comic novels and is therefore perfectly suited to the distinctive, anarchic style of the celebrated cartoonist and illustrator Martin Rowson. Here Rowson travels with his faithful companion Pete through the tortuous paths of Laurence Sterne's infinitely digressive world, interpreting the great novel in a new way.

In this acclaimed book, Professor Ricks argues for the importance of embarrassment in human life and for the value works of art which help us deal with embarrassment by recognizing and refining it. As a poet and a man, Keats was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about, embarrassment. This study demonstrates the particular direction of his insight and moral concern to acknowledge embarrassability and its involvement in important moral concerns.