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Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics
 
 

Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Hardcover)

by Stefan Collini (Author) "As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more..." (more)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 376 pages
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford (28 Feb 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0199296782
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199296781
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.6 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 448,298 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

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Product Description

Review

An insightful account of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain. (Ian Irvine, New Statesman )

He is acute, analytical and often killingly funny. (Bevis Hillier, Daily Telegraph )

This collection shows the considerable talents and erudition of one of Britain's finest essayists and writers. Collini is skilled at portraiture... His style is capacious, fair minded and unbuttoned, alert to the quirks of personality and the conflicts of creative restlessness. (Ronan McDonald, THES )

Too many histories of literary and intellectual culture are stuck in the elegiac mode. Stefan Collini avoids this trap in this bracing collection. He is one of the finest essayists we have (Jonathan Derbyshire, Prospect )

One of the finest essayists we have. (Jonathan Derbyshire Prospect )

Collini's linguistic unpredictability is so refreshing... He fleshes out his thesis with sparkling accounts of distinct epochs (Eve Patten, Irish Times )

fascinating and superbly-written (Will Podmore )


Product Description

In this series of penetrating and attractively readable essays, Stefan Collini explores aspects of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from the early twentieth century to the present. Collini focuses on critics and historians who wrote for a non-specialist readership, and on the periodicals and other genres through which they attempted to reach that readership. Among the critics discussed are Cyril Connolly, V.S. Pritchett, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell, while the historians include A.L. Rowse, Arthur Bryant, E.H. Carr, and E.P. Thompson. There are also essays on wider themes such as the fate of 'general' periodicals, the history of reading, the role of criticism, changing conceptions of 'culture', the limitations of biography, and the functions of universities. Explicitly addressed to 'the non-specialist reader', these essays make some of the fruits of detailed scholarly research in various fields available to a wider audience in a succinct and elegant manner. Stefan Collini has been acclaimed as one of the most brilliant essayists of our time, and this collection shows him at his subtle, perceptive, and trenchant best. The book will appeal to (and delight) readers interested in literature, history, and contemporary cultural debate.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more than Eliot or Wilson you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror. Read the first page
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A superb study of aspects of Britain's intellectual life, 2 Jul 2008
By William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. In this fascinating and superbly-written book, he explores a variety of celebrated writers, critics and historians, and analyses aspects of cultural life in 20th-century Britain.

He studies those over-rated Etonians, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell the Foreign Office nark and Aldous Huxley. He writes also of CIA front man Sir Stephen Spender, ex-philosopher Roger Scruton, the reviewers Rebecca West and V. S. Pritchett, the brilliant critics Edmund Wilson, William Empson and Perry Anderson, the legal philosopher Herbert Hart, and the historians A. L. Rowse, Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Herbert Butterfield, E. H. Carr and E. P. Thompson.

He notes, "the disabling paradox of modern `conservatism' - namely, that it wants simultaneously to liberate market forces and to lament the effects of market forces." And he shows how those mainly stirred by opposition to liberal pieties, rather than by the real conditions that reformers aspire to remedy, end up as grumpy old Tories, like the tedious Scruton, who has dumbed himself down so publicly. Collini inveighs against the `anti-industrial nostalgia', shared by the literary elite and Greens, and against reactionary praise of the Empire.

Collini discusses very perceptively the ideas of Anderson, Carr and Thompson. This is a refreshing change from the all-too-numerous British intellectuals who have for a century presented endless idealist alternatives to Marxism, without ever condescending to mention it, never mind engage with it. The dishonest evasiveness of arguing against an absent opponent produced only vacuities.

Collini finishes with brilliant essays on the current state of literary criticism, on the idealising of Victorian culture, on the non-novelty of celebrity, Jonathan Rose's The intellectual life of the British working classes, the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the witless 2003 government White Paper The Future of Higher Education.

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