Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader

by David Lodge

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism is a major anthology of key representative works by fifty leading modern literary critics writing before the structuralist revolution. It is a companion volume to Modern Criticism and Theory (Longman 1988), also edited by David Lodge, which anthologises contemporary criticism as it has developed through structuralism and post-structuralist theory. Together these volumes provide the most comprehensive survey available of traditional and radical literary theory in action.

The critics collected together in this volume have been drawn from England, America and Europe, and each essay has been prefaced by an editor's introduction which suggests the historical and methodological significance of the piece and gives bibliographical and biographical information.

This writers collected
M. H. Abrams, W. B. Yeats, Sigmund Freud,Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Hulme, I. A. Richards, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, William Empson, G. Wilson Hight, C. G. Jung, Maud Bodkin, Christopher Caudwell, L. C. Knights, John Crowe Ransom, Edmund Wilson, Paul Valéry, D. W. Harding, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Wiinters, Erich Auerbach, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, Francis Fergusson, Northrop Frye, C. S. Lewis, Leslie Fielder, Alain Robbe-Grillet, George Lukács, Richard Hoggart, Walter J. Ong, Norman O. Brown, Ian Watt, Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Welleck, Wayne Booth, Raymond Williams, R. S. Crane, Marshall McLuhan, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, W. H. Auden, Frank Kermode.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Literature, Essays, Nonfiction, Reference, Criticism

704 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

David John Lodge was an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View (Henry James), The Stream of Consciousness (Virginia Woolf) and Interior Monologue (James Joyce), beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.

Reviews

[Marcus Ansley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must-own book for any Literature student at university level. These essays have been expertly chosen by David Lodge with almost all of them being classics/staples of 20th Century literary thought. At the very least I think there is something here for everyone with an interest in literature, and some of these essays can really change and perhaps even 'mature', so-to-speak, the way you read and think about texts. Lodge's ordering of these (with one exception which he recognises) is helpfully chronological, often allowing students to get a sense of how literary criticism was finally emerging as an official 'practice' or discipline in this period (Abrams' 'Orientation of Critical Theories' from his exceptional Mirror and the Lamp is especially great in thinking about some of this).

These essays are all of a very modest, readable length, and if you're having to choose between 1 hour of lecture and 1 hour of reading I hardly think you can go wrong by spending that hour on properly reading and note-taking from any one of these. The brief introductions to the writers and their essays by Lodge are generally helpful for contextualising what you've read/are about to read, and can often point you in various directions if you're interested in pursuing a particular essayist or topic.

It should be noted that these essays (as with any criticism you read) are often highly persuasive but never gospel. You gain the most from a collection like this by reading both with and against the grain: by giving them and their arguments the benefits of the doubt and then switching over to questioning and even challenging their assumptions when it's most appropriate to you. These essays will hopefully give you plenty to consider, maybe even plenty to agree with, but nevertheless be prepared to find yourself disagreeing with them from time to time.

In short, this collection certainly includes some very influential and 'noteworthy' opinions or stances (with many coming from some huge names of the period such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, E.M. Forster, I.A. Richards and more) but nonetheless do not feel that you are unable to find fault with their views or their logic. While there are too many honourable mentions for me to bring up out of this list, I will at least give a highlight to Paul Valery's 'Poetry and Abstract Thought' which is (in my opinion) one of the greatest essays ever written on literature and you should read it regardless of whether or not you can justify the forty-or-so pounds this collection costs.

Happy reading (and hope you enjoy exploring all this book has to offer)!

[Vidhya]

just let me read first