Literary criticism Quote by Ronald Carter

“The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy’s writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary…

— Geoffrey Harvey

“Insisting that his writing did not offer a philosophy of life, Hardy claims that each poem was an ‘impression’, intensely subjective and evanescent.”

— Geoffrey Harvey

“We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration…

— James Shapiro

“A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his indebtedness to…

— Geoffrey Harvey

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

— David Foster Wallace

“I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that…

— Pat Conroy

“The modern period is defined by a distinctive worldview, forged in all its essentials during the Enlightenment, which we’ll label “modernism” for lack of…

— Heath White

“As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read…

— Carl F. Hovde

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather…

— Lion Feuchtwanger

“The English departments were clogged with worthy but outworn and backwardlooking scholars whose tastes in the moderns were most often superficial, random, and vulgar.…

— Robert Lowell

“Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it…

— Franz Rottensteiner

“Literature...describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its…

— Martin Amis