William Empson, Volume I
Oxford University Press

William Empson, Volume I

Subjects: Biography, Biography: general
ISBN13: 9780199539918
Published: 22 Jan 2009

Format - Paperback / softback
By Haffenden, John

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William Empson, Volume I

Regular price A$97.16
Sale price A$97.16 Regular price A$107.95
Product description

William Empson was the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century. He was a man of huge energy and curiosity, and a genuine eccentric who remained imperturbable in the face of all the extraordinary circumstances in which he found himself. The discovery of contraceptives in his possession by a bedmaker at Cambridge University led to his being robbed of a promised Fellowship. Yet Seven Types of Ambiguity, drafted while he was still an
undergraduate, promptly brought him world-wide fame.Empson invented modern literary criticism in English. He acted too as a cultural fifth-columnist, 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. 'To become morally independent of one's formative society . . . is the grandest theme of all literature, because it is the only means of moral progress.'His public life took him through many of the major political events of the modern world -- 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 critical sparring partners included I. A. Richards, Kathleen Raine, J. B. S. Haldane, Humphrey Jennings, George
Orwell, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, Helen Gardner, and T. S. Eliot.'It is of great importance now that writers should try to keep a certain world-mindedness,' he insisted. 'Without the literatures you cannot have a sense of history, and history is like the balancing-pole of the tightrope-walker . . . ; and nowadays we very much need the longer balancing-pole of not national but world history.' His passionate world-mindedness, and his humanism,
combativeness, and wit, are fully in evidence in this, the first of two volumes exploring his remarkable life and work.

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