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A Critical History of English Literature 2…
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A Critical History of English Literature 2 volumes (Volumes I and II) (edition 1960)

by David Daiches (Author)

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492518,615 (5)None
This is a fairly old book but it was a favourite of mine when I was studying for English Honours at the final high school examinations. (What was I thinking?). Daisches is endlessly erudite but still beautifully clear. Though I just looked at one of his sentences and found it had over 200 words....which should qualify for making it rather unreadable. I've actually been looking for this book for years but never been able to track it down. At least I think it is more or less the same reference that I used to pore over in my teens. (Though this is in two volumes and the version that I used was just one volume). I did a bit of a background search on Daiches and found that he is a Scottish Jew. (Rather a difficult life style I would think....and he says that he didn't have much of a normal childhood.....it was all study). But he does have a formidable knowledge of English Literature and he has written extensively about other writers. I've often thought that literary criticism was a rather strange profession and that literature was rather best left to stand or fall on its own. But it is definitely true that somebody like Daiches can draw our attention to things that I would certainly have missed myself and he often knows other facts. For example, writing about the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins....I didn't know that his work was only published after he was dead. And this: "The modulation of tone in this poem is remarkable, from the initial excitement to the calm, confident, secure feeling of the final line". "He never was content to rest in accepted poetic feeling. He charged older words with new meanings by the contexts in which he set them".
And with Dicken's: "If Dickens moved on to profounder and better organised works , he never left behind him the qualities he demonstrated in Pickwick. He never lost his touch for the burlesque, his sense of the inn as symbolical well as a literal crossing of the ways". I must say I rather enjoyed "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club Containing a Faithful record....etc". Though, as Daiches says "The Pickwick Papers" were originally planned as a series of sketches to accompany a set of sporting prints"......and it's a kind of "bedside book to be taken up and put down at any point".
I find myself agreeing with some of the critics at the time of publication such as this comment from Daniel George: "No other work of its kind is so well composed and so well proportioned, so continuously interesting, so liberal and so good-humoured".
An interesting thing about this sort of work is that it doesn't age very much. Maybe, today, we lose some context from being unable to compare these classical writers with modern writers but for it's time it remains pretty much rock-solid.
Happy to give it 5 stars. ( )
  booktsunami | Oct 9, 2019 |
Showing 2 of 2
This is a fairly old book but it was a favourite of mine when I was studying for English Honours at the final high school examinations. (What was I thinking?). Daisches is endlessly erudite but still beautifully clear. Though I just looked at one of his sentences and found it had over 200 words....which should qualify for making it rather unreadable. I've actually been looking for this book for years but never been able to track it down. At least I think it is more or less the same reference that I used to pore over in my teens. (Though this is in two volumes and the version that I used was just one volume). I did a bit of a background search on Daiches and found that he is a Scottish Jew. (Rather a difficult life style I would think....and he says that he didn't have much of a normal childhood.....it was all study). But he does have a formidable knowledge of English Literature and he has written extensively about other writers. I've often thought that literary criticism was a rather strange profession and that literature was rather best left to stand or fall on its own. But it is definitely true that somebody like Daiches can draw our attention to things that I would certainly have missed myself and he often knows other facts. For example, writing about the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins....I didn't know that his work was only published after he was dead. And this: "The modulation of tone in this poem is remarkable, from the initial excitement to the calm, confident, secure feeling of the final line". "He never was content to rest in accepted poetic feeling. He charged older words with new meanings by the contexts in which he set them".
And with Dicken's: "If Dickens moved on to profounder and better organised works , he never left behind him the qualities he demonstrated in Pickwick. He never lost his touch for the burlesque, his sense of the inn as symbolical well as a literal crossing of the ways". I must say I rather enjoyed "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club Containing a Faithful record....etc". Though, as Daiches says "The Pickwick Papers" were originally planned as a series of sketches to accompany a set of sporting prints"......and it's a kind of "bedside book to be taken up and put down at any point".
I find myself agreeing with some of the critics at the time of publication such as this comment from Daniel George: "No other work of its kind is so well composed and so well proportioned, so continuously interesting, so liberal and so good-humoured".
An interesting thing about this sort of work is that it doesn't age very much. Maybe, today, we lose some context from being unable to compare these classical writers with modern writers but for it's time it remains pretty much rock-solid.
Happy to give it 5 stars. ( )
  booktsunami | Oct 9, 2019 |
hi
  randeep | Oct 22, 2009 |
Showing 2 of 2

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