Tag Archives: Edmund Wilson

Literary Studies 1920 – 1970 – An Aspirational Reading List

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‘Anglophone literary studies between about 1920 and 1970 are to be understood, I think, as one of the twentieth-century’s most significant and original intellectual accomplishments.’ Simon During’s argument is worth reading for anyone interested, as I am, in this most formative period of literary criticism. During lists the ‘path-breaking and exciting’ works, which establish an aspirational reading list, many which I’ve yet to read.

  1. T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1921)
  2. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921)
  3. J. Middleton Murry, Problems of Style (1922)
  4. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)
  5. T.S. Eliot, Homage to John Dryden (1924)
  6. I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry (1926)
  7. John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927)
  8. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927)
  9. T.S. Eliot, For Launcelot Andrewes (1928)
  10. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
  11. George Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930)
  12. F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930)
  13. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (1931)
  14. Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932)
  15. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)
  16. William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (1935)
  17. Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime (1935)
  18. Richard Blackmur, The Double Agent (1935)
  19. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery (1935)
  20. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936)
  21. Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays (1936)
  22. L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937)
  23. John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (1938)
  24. Yvor Winter, Maule’s Curse (1938)
  25. Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (1938)
  26. Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (1939)
  27. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939)
  28. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)
  29. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941)
  30. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942)
  31. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947)
  32. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (1947)
  33. Rosamond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947)
  34. F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948)
  35. T.S. Eliot, Notes towards a definition of Culture (1948)
  36. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (1948)
  37. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, The Theory of Literature (1949)
  38. Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot (1949)
  39. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)
  40. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (1951)
  41. Reuben Brower, Fields of Light (1951)
  42. W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (1951)
  43. R.S. Crane, Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern (1952)
  44. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction (1952)
  45. F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (1952)
  46. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)
  47. Dorothy van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (1953)
  48. Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (1953)
  49. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (1953)
  50. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: technology and the pastoral ideal (1954)
  51. W.J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (1955)
  52. Allen Tate, The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1955)
  53. R.W. B. Lewis, American Adam (1955)
  54. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957)
  55. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957)
  56. Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (1957)
  57. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
  58. Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (1957)
  59. Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience (1957)
  60. Yvor Winter, The Function of Criticism (1957)
  61. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958)
  62. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (1958)
  63. Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (1959)
  64. Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959)
  65. Vincent Buckley, Poetry and Morality (1959)
  66. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)
  67. Graham Hough, Image and Experience (1960)
  68. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
  69. S.J. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (1961)
  70. Fredric Jameson, Sartre: the Origins of a Style (1961)
  71. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett; a critical study (1961)
  72. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961)
  73. William Empson, Milton’s God (1961)
  74. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (1962)
  75. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (1962)
  76. Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (1962)
  77. Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier, In Defense of Reading (1962)
  78. Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision (1962)
  79. D.W. Harding, Experience into Words (1963)
  80. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (1963)
  81. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (1963)
  82. Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (1963)
  83. Harry Levin, Gates of Horn (1963)
  84. Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964)
  85. C.K. Stead, The New Poetic (1964)
  86. Angus Fletcher, Allegory (1964)
  87. Barbara Hardy, The Appropriate Form (1964)
  88. Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965)
  89. Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder (1965)
  90. Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (1966)
  91. Richard Poirer, A World Elsewhere (1966)
  92. Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
  93. George Steiner, Language and Silence (1967)
  94. E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (1967)
  95. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1967)
  96. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (1968)
  97. Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters (1968)
  98. Mark Schorer, The World we Imagine (1968)
  99. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968)
  100. Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings (1969)
  101. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970)
  102. Rosalie Colie, My Echoing Grove (1970)

The Principal Actor is the People

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Photography of Jules Michelet by Félix Nadar F...

Photography of Jules Michelet by Félix Nadar Français : Photographie de Jules Michelet par Félix Nadar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another thing which this History will clearly establish and which holds true in every connection, is that the people were usually more important than the leaders. The deeper I have excavated, the more surely I have satisfied myself that the best was underneath, in the obscure depths. And I have realised that it is quite wrong to take these brilliant and powerful talkers, who expressed the thought of the masses, for the sole actors of the drama. They were given the impulse by others much more than they gave it themselves. The principal actor is the people. To find the people again and put it back in its proper role, I have been obliged to reduce to their proportions the ambitious marionettes whose strings it manipulated and in whom hitherto we have looked for and thought to see the secret play of history.

Revered by Barthes, Michelet is subject of the first section of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station. Everything I read, including the paragraph above suggests his work is truly exciting.

Bloom on Castorp

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Harold Bloom writing of one of my favourite novels Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain:

When I was a boy, first reading fiercely, some sixty years ago, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain was widely received as a work of modern fiction almost comparable to Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Bloom’s comparison recalls Nabokov’s disdain for central European modernism in an argument with Edmund Wilson, “How could you name that quack Mann in one breath with P. and J.?” Nabokov considered Mann one of those “puffed-up writers” that traded in “great ideas,” risking, of course, the criticism often made against Nabokov that in avoiding great ideas he was “all style and no substance. [Paragraph added November 2014.]

Bloom continues:

. . . I urge the reader not to refuse the pleasures of identification with favourite characters, any more than authors have been able to resist such pleasures. There are limits to my urging: Cervantes is not Don Quixote, Tolstoy (who loved her) is not Anna Karenina, and Philip Roth is not “Philip Roth (either of them!) in Operation Shylock.

And:

Why read? Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing.