Shelf life : literary essays and reviews
"In this collection of essays and reviews, William H. Pritchard focuses on the work of English and American writers, most of them from the twentieth century. At a time when English studies in the academy seems increasingly impelled by historical and political concerns, Pritchard's aim is to reinstate the aesthetic as the major motive for literary study. Indeed "study" may be the wrong word for it, as the poet Philip Larkin made forcefully evident when he once snapped at an interviewer, "Oh, for Christ's sake one doesn't study poets. You read them and think, that's marvelous, how is it done, could I do it?""--BOOK JACKET
Print Book, English, ©2003
University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, ©2003
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xiv, 303 pages ; 24 cm
9781558493759, 1558493751
51728666
Poetry and poets
Frost in his letters
A witness tree and Frost's biography
Reading The waste land today
Richard Wilbur: The beautiful changes fifty years on
James Merril collected
Robert Graves remembered
L.E. Sissman: innocence possessed
R.P. Blackmur and the criticism of poetry
Novels and novelists
Lawrence and Lewis
Ford once more
The trouble with Ernest
Classic Chandler
The early novels of Anthony Burgess
John Updike: Rabbit is rich
J.F. Powers: Wheat that springeth green
Kingsley Amis: The old devils
Robert Stone: Outerbridge reach
Philip Roth: Sabbath's theater
Critics, belletrists
Authorizing Samuel Johnson
John Churton Collins: forgotten man of letters
Cheers for Aldous Huxley
Impossible
Talking piss: Kingsley Amis in his letters
A.N. Wilson's literary life
At the Goreyworks
Music, teaching, and teachers
Keyboard reflections
Hymns in another man's life
All the jazz
The classroom in literature
Teaching Shakespeare
Amherst English: Theodore Baird
Amherst English: Reuben A. Brower