Collected Writings: Essays, Poems, Interviews

This boxed set is a unique publishing event that brings together three interrelated volumes by one of the most influential and distinguished scholars currently at work in the humanities. In studies of painters as varied as Caravaggio, Fragonard, and Matisse, Michael Fried has transformed the ways in which we understand artistic form and technique, while his exceptionally insightful literary-critical work has been enriched by his own practice as a highly accomplished poet. This new collection of Fried’s writings is imbued with the distinctive combination of perceptiveness, imagination, and analytical rigour that he has brought to bear on aesthetic artefacts throughout his career. It also serves as a very personal record of its author’s intellectual and critical formation.

The first volume, The Antithetical Imperative and Other Essays, places some of Fried’s most recent work alongside selections from his earlier writings. Ranging in topic from Manet to Pollock, these essays exemplify the acumen and aesthetic sensitivity that make their author one of the great critics of our time. The second volume, The Edge of the Table: Prose Poems, is a collection of exquisitely constructed prose poems accompanied by photographs by James Welling. Finally, the third volume, Exit Interview, is an autobiographical text that, as well as retracing the development of the arguments and ideas that informed such groundbreaking works as Absorption and Theatricality and Manet’s Modernism, proves wonderfully attentive to both the personal and institutional contexts of intellectual labour.

Michael Fried is Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of numerous scholarly works―most recently What Was Literary Impressionism?, Painting with Demons: The Art of Gerolamo Savoldo, and French Suite: A Book of Essays―and four volumes of poetry.