Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Jane Austen
Has there ever been a critic of Jane Austen equal to her verve, her animation and independence of thought? Marvin Mudrick’s Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, his first book, was published in 1952, and remains a fundamental work of commentary on Austen. It is filled with idiosyncratic insights about what makes Austen’s novels so daring and alive. Mudrick writes, for example, that this book “began as an essay to document my conviction that Emma is a novel admired, even consecrated, for qualities which it in fact subverts or ignores.” He goes on to show Austen to be a writer of irreverent sensibilities who, despite the constricted circumstances of her life, managed to create in her novels an enduring microcosm of the larger world. Mudrick examines her writings as aspects of a developing personal irony, an irony that later became the vital principles of her art. It was her ironic detachment, he maintains, that enabled her to expose and dissect, in novels that are masterpieces of comic wit and brilliant satire, the follies and delusions of eighteenth-century English society—and of human society even today.
Conrad
Thirteen essays exploring Conrad's dramatic and moral concepts, especially the importance of action and sacrifice.
Nobody Here But Us Chickens
Nobody Here But Us Chickens is a virtuoso display of literary and hiNobody Here But Us Chickens is a virtuoso display of literary and historical portraiture by Marvin Mudrick, whom the Washington Post called a “literary curmudgeon, randy iconoclast, and a delight.” Mudrick believed that in books, as in life, people matter, and that it matters in books, as it does in life, whether people are decent or not. Sticking to this plain common sense, Mudrick assembles an eye-opening hall of fame and rogues gallery that includes devastating, satirical attacks on Shakespeare, Jesus, and Flaubert, as well as a wide-ranging meditation on heroism. Mudrick devotees will know that he favors Chaucer, Jane Austen, and D. H. Lawrence, all of whom appear here, but we also get to know what he thinks about Coriolanus, Van Gogh, and Solzhenitsyn. Readers unfamiliar with the daring of Mudrick’s opinions and the special texture of his prose will come away from Nobody Here But Us Chickens wishing that critical biography was always this much fun.storical portraiture by Marvin Mudrick, whom the Washington Post called a "literary curmudgeon, randy iconoclast, and a delight."
Mudrick Transcribed
Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks exists only because of the diligence and ingenuity of a student, Lance Kaplan, who recorded some of Marvin Mudrick’s classes on cassette tapes. After Mudrick’s untimely death in 1986, Kaplan began to transcribe and edit the recordings. “Transcribe” and “edit” are, however, inadequate words to describe the creation of this extraordinary book, which is a kind of miracle of attention. It is entertaining, freakishly smart, and full of love—a love of life, books, music, and people. The transcriptions include a class on eighteenth-century English prose, a class on the writing of narrative prose, two interviews about the College of Creative Studies, and talks on literary criticism, artistic response, genius, and the craft of teaching. The only volume that has never been commercially published, this may well be the gem of the Berkshire Classics Mudrick collection.
Critical Approaches to Fiction
Critical Approaches To Fiction Is Designed To Offer The Post-Graduate Student, And The General Reader, A Comprehensive Cross-Section Of Some Of The Best Critical Material Available On The Theory And Practice Of Fiction. Within The Compass Of This Volume, The Authors Have Included Representative Essays By Such Eminent Critics And Writers As Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Mark Schorer, Philip Rahv And Wayne C. Booth. This Book Covers, Every Significant Aspect Of Fiction Plot, Character, Language, Theme, Setting And The Diverse Modes Of Presentation.It Is Earnestly Hoped That This Book Would Be Found Eminently Useful Both By Teachers And Students Of Indian Universities.
Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?
Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? demonstrates how much Marvin Mudrick loved life and celebrated the dignity of life in literature. “It’s helpful to be reminded now and then,” he writes, that “while novelists persist in their noisy betrayals of human dignity, living has a longer history than reading, and truth than fiction.” Mudrick insists on seeing authors and their characters as people and he describes and judges them as frankly as if they were living among us. In this collection, we meet heroes, monsters, and every shade of character in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics. We get to know each of them, so vivid are Mudrick’s quotations and commentary. Essay after essay demonstrates that good criticism can amplify both life and literature.
Creating Anna Karenina
The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel. Critic and professor Bob Blaisdell unravels Tolstoy’s family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna Karenina. In the process, we see where Tolstoy’s life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways. Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself. At once a nuanced biography and portrait of the last decades of the Russian empire and artful literary examination, Creating Anna Karenina will enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.
Jane Austen's Emma
This sourcebook introduces not only Jane Austen's text, but also the literary and historical contexts and the many different critical readings that it has generated, from the time of its publication to the twenty-first century.
The Man in the Machine
The Man in the Machine consists of lively, iconoclastic assessments of major writers and critics by Marvin Mudrick, about whom the critic Roger Sale wrote: "T. S. Eliot was not so good a reviewer as Marvin Mudrick." The book takes its title from Mudrick’s introduction, in which he writes about Edgar Allan Poe’s pervasive influence on modern literature: "[Poe] had the effrontery to palm off on us the silliest, least interesting, and most influential of twentieth-century critical dogmas: that books are machines with nobody inside." Writing about such masters as Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, Trollope, Saint-Simon, Conrad, Chekhov, and Solzhenitsyn, Mudrick shows us the pyrotechnics that can occur when a towering intellect meets characters from the past with all dogma and theories of literature tossed to the wind.
