|
|
|
Eight Modern Essayists
|
|
Major Modern Essayists (2nd Edition)
Freshman Composition; Intermediate or Advanced Composition. This essay reader provides in-depth introductions to fifteen of this century's most distinctive writers of nonfiction prose in the English language. The collection is arranged chronologically-from Virginia Woolf to Barry Lopez-and includes authors from the United States and Great Britain. A final section of essays offers a single selection by each of ten outstanding writers from around the world..
Price: $41.24
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Ten on Ten: Major Essayists on Recurring Themes
|
|
Essayists And Prophets (Bloom's Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection)
|
|
The Half-Life of an American Essayist
In his first book, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, which was heralded by such diverse crtics as Jacques Barzun and Morris Dickstein, Arthur Krystal demonstrated that the literary essay is alive and well. Conversational in tone, but capable of addressing the political and semiotic methods adopted by the academy, Krystal's clear and allusive style constituted a reprimand to the fashionable idea that literature is the theorists' domain. His new book, The Half-Life of an American Essayist, continues to demonstrate that the literary essay in the right hands can itself be a subset of literature. Whether he's examining the evolution of the typewriter, the nature of sin, the cultural implications of physiognomy, the works of Paul Valery and Raymond Chandler, or his own ineffable laziness, Krystal's buoyant prose always speaks to the common reader. The twelve essays in The Half-Life - the title is from Goethe's "Experience is only half of experience" - go deeper than the standard book piece; they hew to the line first drawn by Montaigne and later extended by Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Woolf and Orwell. Although there may be no preordained way of writing about literature, Krystal takes his cue from Edwin Denby, who maintained that the first duty of the critic is to be "interesting." No matter how large the subject - whether it is the history of boxing or the growth of the Holocaust industry, Krystal paints broad subjects with precise brushstrokes. Erudite, lettristic, and informative, his essays are still accessible to the general reader. The reason is simple: as Dr. Johnson noted, "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." To this one might add that there is satisfaction to be had in the effort itself. How else could one write as committedly and entertainingly about Paul Valery's Cahiers as about Joe Louis's left jab?.
Price: $5.99
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Hazlitt in Love: A Fatal Attachment
When William Hazlitt moved into 9 Southampton Buildings, Holborn, England, in August 1820, little did he know that his life would soon be turned upside down. On meeting 19-year-old Sarah Walker, his new landlady's daughter, as she served him breakfast on his first morning, he conceived a deep infatuation The intensity of this obsession would eventually lead him to divorce his wife and write the most controversial book of his career, Liber Amoris. Passion, intrigue, love, and deception come together in this intoxicating account of a wild and romantic chapter in the life of a genius. .
Price: $3.38
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
The Essay: An Introduction
|
|
Allan Ramsay: Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in Britis)
Allan Ramsay, Court painter to King George III, was one of the major portrait painters of the eighteenth-century British school. Born in Edinburgh, he was also an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment; his Dialogue on Taste merits an honoured place among eighteenth-century belles lettres. This book, by the world's foremost authority on Ramsay, gives an entirely fresh account of Ramsay's life and sheds new light on his artistic and intellectual development. A classical scholar and master of several modern languages, Ramsay was unquestionably the most erudite artist of the age. His friends included such celebrated men of letters as David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell; he also came to know the French philosophes Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach and Rousseau (whose portrait he painted). Alastair Smart describes Ramsay's early years, his artistic training in Scotland, England and Italy, his rise to prominence as the leading portrait painter in England, his two marriages, his travels abroad, and his appointment as painter to the King. He discusses Ramsay's ideas, especially as revealed in the Dialogue on Taste. He analyzes the various phases in Ramsay's development as a painter and explores his relationship to such established painters as Hogarth and Highmore and to the younger painters Reynolds and Gainsborough. Smart's extensive discussions of Ramsay's major works are accompanied by numerous reproductions of his paintings, many appearing for the first time. Smart's biography of a remarkable Enlightenment figure - the fruits of sustained research over many years - fills a considerable gap in our knowledge of British eighteenth-century art..
Price: $74.99
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|