The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism (Classics) - Softcover

James, Henry; Gard, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140432701 ISBN 13: 9780140432701

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1988

Synopsis

'The critic, in his conception, was not the narrow lawgiver or the rigid censor that he is often assumed to be; he was the student, the inquirer, the interpreter, the taker of notes, the active, restless commentator...' James's words on Sainte-Beuve could very easily be applied to himself. The pleasures of his own criticism - wit and urbanity, metaphorical artistry, his way of stalking and teasing out his subject - always lift his essays from the merely instructive to the delightful.

About this title

About the Author:

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York and died in London in 1916. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.

Synopsis:

Provides an introduction to and a selection from James' writings on individual authors (Flaubert, Turgenev, Hawthorne, Balzac and George Eliot among others) as well as from his Prefaces, and from the general essays which have been so influential in shaping 20th-century views of literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0140432701
• ISBN 13: 9780140432701
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 640