William Empson

Some Versions of Pastoral

By: William Empson

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Hardcover | 12 November 2020

At a Glance

Hardcover
496 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
16.3 x 24.3 x 3.6

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William Empson is, alongside T. S. Eliot, the greatest genius among twentieth-century critics, and Some Versions of Pastoral is widely recognised as one of the most extraordinary works of the golden age of English literary criticism. Ranging with astonishing virtuosity between works of several centuries and moving purposefully between cultures, William Empson has dazzling things to say here about Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatre, the political poetry of Marvell, Milton's Paradise Lost, the complex satire of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and the convoluted psychology at work in the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. The book is alert to questions of politics, psycho-analysis, and anthropology, and speaks to a wide range of contemporary concerns. Written in Empson's charismatically informal and wonderfully approachable voice, the book appeared in 1935 without footnotes or references. This edition is the first to identify the quotations and allusions, to explain the pertinence of his
references, and to place the work within its Empsonian context. It is published with an appendix of other texts by Empson which illuminate the issues at work in the book.

Industry Reviews

Some Versions of Pastoral has an implicit (occasionally explicit) commitment to interpreting literature as an aspect of 'social conflict', recognizing that the genre of the pastoral has an ideological function: to represent 'the beautiful relation between the rich and the poor'. * David Greenham, Modern Language Review *
Lucid, meticulous, and admirably calibrated ... for anyone hoping to probe beneath the surface of Empson's rich and turbulent texts, the materials here will be an inexhaustible treasure trove. * Marshall Brown, Critical Inquiry *
Empson's ear for nuances of intonation was as sharp and precise as the intellect he brought to bear on an historical understanding of patterns of thought and feeling in written texts. These annotated volumes from Oxford University Press, paying the scholarly respect Empson deserves, should become the definitive editions of Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words. * Sean Sheehan, Dublin Review of Books *

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