The Power Of Delight: A Lifetime In Literature: Essays 1962 2002 - Hardcover

Bayley, John; Carey, Leo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393058409 ISBN 13: 9780393058406

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2005

Synopsis

A survey of the range of the Oxford University professor's distinguished literary career features his treatments of classics, lesser-known works of merit, and modern writings, in a volume divided into such sections as "English Literature," "Russian Novels," and "American Poetry."

About this title

About the Author:

John Bayley is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a retired professor at Oxford University. He is the author of Elegy for Iris, a memoir. He lives in Oxford.

From Booklist:

Bayley began teaching English literature at Oxford in 1955 and soon thereafter began writing reviews, mutually beneficial pursuits that have made him an exceptionally agile reader and a graceful critic. In his introduction to this grand, beautifully titled collection of essays, Bayley details the pleasures of reviewing, and his delight in writing criticism truly is evident in each of the essays judiciously gathered here. Bayley, also the author of two striking memoirs, including Elegy for Iris (1999), his haunting tribute to his late wife, Iris Murdoch, takes on English literature with dash, revisiting Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and Graham Greene, but he is even more passionate in his engagement with an acquired love, Russian literature, writing richly referenced and marvelously conversational assessments of Pushkin, Babel, and Chekhov, among many others. Bayley also writes incisively about key American poets and offers groundbreaking interpretations of such Eastern European writers as Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz, and Paul Celan. Astute not only in matters of aesthetics but also in the ways literature mirrors, and, perhaps, effects social change, Bayley is at once worldly and companionable. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393058409
• ISBN 13: 9780393058406
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512