Full name: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

Author: James Wood Year: 1999 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Essays, Non Fiction, Philosophy Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780312429560 0312429568

This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revolutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is.          In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice. Similar books: Fiction and the Figures of Life by William H. Gass The Irresponsible Self by James Wood The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling The Fun Stuff by James Wood A Temple of Texts by William H. Gass The World Within the Word by William H. Gass Selected Essays by T. S. Eliot Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson The War Against Cliche by Martin Amis Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov Inner Workings by J. M. Coetzee The Curtain by Milan Kundera Due Considerations by John Updike How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport How Fiction Works by James Wood Mythologies by Roland Barthes The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin The Wave in the Mind by Ursula K. Le Guin Minima Moralia by Theodor W. Adorno