“These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.” — Christine de Pizan Copy Share Image
“The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress.” — C.S. Lewis Copy Share Image
After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.” — C.S. Lewis Copy Share Image
“I don’t generally publicly respond to reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’… — China Miéville Copy Share Image
I don't believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology. — Robert Christgau Copy Share Image
“Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf ’s first novel is a self-conscious meditation on… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
“...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.” — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at… — Oscar Wilde Copy Share Image
“Most critics agree with the seventeenth-century printer who gave them to the world, that the Mutabilitie Cantos seem to be part of… — Janet Spens Copy Share Image
“The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.” — Kenneth McLeish Copy Share Image
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are… — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
I also encourage my students to read literary criticism that is deeply personal yet formally inventive and intellectually expansive... books that offer… — Rob Nixon Copy Share Image
“...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
“What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps… — Ian Gregor Copy Share Image
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
“Lawrence's claims for the vital self and his inability to make it convincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the… — John E. Stoll Copy Share Image
“In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
“It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the… — John Leonard Copy Share Image
“Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
“I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings , and I was always on my… — Christopher Hitchens Copy Share Image
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me… — H.L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single type of propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the… — Peter Swirski Copy Share Image
“At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
“Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“I’ve seen middle grade books criticized by adult readers for leaving things for the reader to figure out, for not having perfect… — Anne Ursu Copy Share Image
“I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Nowhere is the sense of medium felt more strongly, even by the casual reader, than in a story about to end. For… — Ian Gregor Copy Share Image
“It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Milton argued, in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that a people 'free by nature' had a right to overthrow a… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment focused attention on Glasgow and Edinburgh as centres of intellectual activity. The Scottish Enlightenment was… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
