Fülszöveg
The Devil in the Fire
RETROSPECTIVE ESSAYS ? N
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
1351-1371
John W. Aldridge
John W. Aldridge is one of the few American critics of importance who have written consistently and vigorously about the contemporary literary and social scene in this country. Over the past twenty years, in his many books and essays, he has produced a large body of work which represents both a historical chronicle of the major literary developments and a running critique of most of the significant writers of the post-World War II period. His writing is characterized by wit, stylistic eloquence, and a quality of resolute indifference to the pressures of fashion. He has been concerned throughout his career with one primary interest: the affirmation of his belief in the importance of artistic standards and in the function of criticism as an educator of taste, an adversary of the second-rate.
The Devil in the Fire, Mr. Aldridge's new volume, provides a broad and highly...
Tovább
Fülszöveg
The Devil in the Fire
RETROSPECTIVE ESSAYS ? N
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
1351-1371
John W. Aldridge
John W. Aldridge is one of the few American critics of importance who have written consistently and vigorously about the contemporary literary and social scene in this country. Over the past twenty years, in his many books and essays, he has produced a large body of work which represents both a historical chronicle of the major literary developments and a running critique of most of the significant writers of the post-World War II period. His writing is characterized by wit, stylistic eloquence, and a quality of resolute indifference to the pressures of fashion. He has been concerned throughout his career with one primary interest: the affirmation of his belief in the importance of artistic standards and in the function of criticism as an educator of taste, an adversary of the second-rate.
The Devil in the Fire, Mr. Aldridge's new volume, provides a broad and highly personalized view of American literature
(continued on back flap)
Ccontinued from front flap)
and culture from the early fifties into the seventies, years which may now be seen to constitute a distinct and remarkable period of our literary history. This realization serves, in fact, as one of the guiding principles of the volume, the realization that a period of time which most of us still think of as contemporary can and should be placed in historical perspective. The volume therefore includes a sampling of representative selections from Mr. Aldridge's earlier writings (including After the Lost Generation, In Search of Heresy, Time Jo Murder and Create) as well as his latest assessments of such writers as Hemingway, Frost, Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Updike, Eudora Welty, James Jones, Wright Morris, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, and others—materials never before published in book form. There are, in addition, studies of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, James T. Farrell, Styron, Bellow, and Cheever, and essays on such general literary and social topics as the writer in the university, politics and the novel, the function of the book critic, the youth movement, the cultural environment, and the little magazine at the present time. The collection offers what is by far the most penetrating assessment yet available of the last twenty years in American literature. It is also the first offering in one volume of the best and most challenging work of a critic who has had an important influence on the literary life of his time, a critic who, as Harry T. Moore recently wrote, may actually have "invented organized criticism of the postwar novel."
Jacket design by Muriel Nasser
Vissza