I. A. Richards (Routledge Revivals)
His Life and Work
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- $69.99
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- $69.99
Publisher Description
A pioneering critic, educator, and poet, I. A. Richards (1893-1979) helped the English-speaking world decide not only what to read but how to read it. Acknowledged "father" of New Criticism, he produced the most systematic body of critical writing in the English language since Coleridge. His method of close reading dominated the English-speaking classroom for half a century.
John Paul Russo draws on close personal acquaintance with Richards as well as on unpublished materials, correspondence, and interviews, to write the first biography (originally published in 1989) of one of last century’s most influential and many-sided men of letters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) was one of the most influential modern literary critics, so this first biography of the puckish Cambridge don who turned lit-crit upside-down is welcome. A tubercular child traumatized by his father's early death, Richards pulled himself together by climbing mountains, a sport he pursued well into his 80s. But the real drama lies in his invention of an analytical method capable of tackling the poems of Eliot, Pound and Stevens, the experimental prose of Joyce, Faulkner, Mann, Proust. Today, Richards' name is somewhat misleadingly associated with the New Critics who, like him, downplayed writers' personal lives and historical contexts, treating each poem or novel as a self-contained work. As Russo (who was a close acquaintance of Richards) convincingly argues, the New Critics cut him down to their own size, rejecting his liberalism and his embrace of modern science. Richards borrowed freely from Chinese thought, Darwinism, neuroscience and behaviorism to suit his purposes. A self-styled anarchist, he believed, with Shelley, that, given the right programs and poetry, ``the world's great age begins anew.'' Challenging the reader with fresh insights, this magnificent biography is a tour de force and a reappraisal of the critical enterprise of our times.
