Selected Essays
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Paperback. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
John Bayley, long regarded as one of Britain's most distinguished literary critics, brings together in Selected Essays a rich collection of critical writing that showcases his formidable range and penetrating intellect. The volume gathers Bayley's most celebrated essays on poetry, fiction, and the nature of literary imagination, drawing on subjects from Shakespeare and Keats to Tolstoy and Henry James, illuminating each with the kind of warmth and precision that made him a singular voice in twentieth-century criticism. Bayley argues throughout that great literature is defined not by ideology or system, but by its capacity for what he calls happiness — an almost paradoxical fullness of life that resists reduction. His prose is conversational yet deeply learned, moving between close reading and grand critical statement with effortless authority. Published as part of the Cambridge Paperback Library, this collection stands as an essential document for anyone who wishes to understand what criticism, at its most humane and generous, can achieve — and leaves the reader wondering what, exactly, makes a literary work truly alive.
Author: John Bayley
Format: Paperback
Genre: Essays
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Paperback. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
John Bayley, long regarded as one of Britain's most distinguished literary critics, brings together in Selected Essays a rich collection of critical writing that showcases his formidable range and penetrating intellect. The volume gathers Bayley's most celebrated essays on poetry, fiction, and the nature of literary imagination, drawing on subjects from Shakespeare and Keats to Tolstoy and Henry James, illuminating each with the kind of warmth and precision that made him a singular voice in twentieth-century criticism. Bayley argues throughout that great literature is defined not by ideology or system, but by its capacity for what he calls happiness — an almost paradoxical fullness of life that resists reduction. His prose is conversational yet deeply learned, moving between close reading and grand critical statement with effortless authority. Published as part of the Cambridge Paperback Library, this collection stands as an essential document for anyone who wishes to understand what criticism, at its most humane and generous, can achieve — and leaves the reader wondering what, exactly, makes a literary work truly alive.