| Description |
1 online resource (306 pages) |
| Contents |
Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; Provenance; Introduction; 1 Virgil at the Turn of Time; 2 The Coincidence of Myth and Fact; 3 Classical Translation in Medieval England; 4 On Reading Books from a Half-Alien Culture; 5 Piers Plowman and the Ricardian Age in Literature; 6 The World and Heart of Thomas Usk; 7 Dreaming, Looking, and Seeing: Shakespeare and a Myth of Resurrection; 8 Horace's Kipling; 9 The Achievement of G.K. Chesterton; 10 T.S. Eliot's Metamorphoses: Ovid and The Waste Land; 11 The Innocence of P.G. Wodehouse |
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12 Bill and Mr Golding's Daimon13 Three Modern English Poets: John Betjeman, C.H. Sisson, Geoffrey Hill; 14 Things New-Born; Index |
| Summary |
Stephen Medcalf (1936-2007) was a dedicated University teacher all his life, but in the wider world he was an essayist, in the best traditional sense of that calling: a writer not of books but of substantial and justly celebrated essays, widely read in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Medcalf's abiding question to the world was the Psalmist's: 'What is man that thou art mindful of him?' His was a Blakean sense of Englishness, far from the chocolate-box painting or the television adaptation, and for him the strongest writers were those keenly aware of their roots in the classical, Anglo-Saxon or Celtic past. By gathering together Medcalf's most important work, this volume shows the coherence of his thinking, and of the elusive, complicated literary heritage he celebrated, one which acknowledges the Greco-Roman strain, the Christian strain, the down-to-earth humour and the gentle irony." "Fourteen substantial essays cover Virgil, the Bible, the English translation of Alfred, Piers Plowman, the 'half-alien culture' of the high Middle Ages, Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Usk, Shakespeare's images of resurrection, Horace and Kipling juxtaposed, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot's use of Ovid, P.G. Wodehouse, William Golding, John Betjeman, Geoffrey Hill and other writers. The book concludes with perhaps Medcalf's most personal essay of all: his account of finding a baby in a phone box on a cold Spring night, which first appeared in the Guardian Christmas Supplement in 2002 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
English essays -- 20th century.
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English literature -- History and criticism.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
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English essays
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English literature
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| Author |
Cummings, Professor Brian
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Josipovici, Gabriel
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| ISBN |
9781351540407 |
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1351540408 |
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9781315085203 |
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1315085208 |
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