William Empson : among the Mandarins / John Haffenden.
William Empson (1906-1984) was the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century. He was a man of huge energy and curiosity and a genuine eccentric. The discovery of contraceptives in his possession at Cambridge led to his losing a fellowship, yet his first book, drafted while he was sti...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford [England] ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
2005.
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| Summary: | William Empson (1906-1984) was the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century. He was a man of huge energy and curiosity and a genuine eccentric. The discovery of contraceptives in his possession at Cambridge led to his losing a fellowship, yet his first book, drafted while he was still an undergraduate, brought him world-wide fame. Empson invented modern literary criticism in English, challenging received doctrine in life and literature. "It is a very good thing for a poet ... to be saying something which is considered very shocking at the time," he maintained. His public life took him through the rise of imperialism in Japan, the Sino-Japanese war in China, wartime propaganda for the BBC, and the Chinese civil war and Communist takeover of Peking in 1949. His friends and sparring partners included I.A. Richards, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, Helen Gardner, and T.S. Eliot. --From publisher description. |
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| Physical Description: | xxi, 695 pages, 16 unnumbered leaves of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 572-671) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0199276595 9780199276592 0199276609 9780199276608 |