Fame & folly : essays / by Cynthia Ozick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ozick, Cynthia.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

English literature--History and criticism.

English literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Essays.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1-3)

Physical Description:

xii, 287 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

Uncorrected proof.

Other Title:

Fame and folly

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1996.

Summary:

From one of America's great literary figures, a new collection of essays on eminent writers and their work, and on the war between life and art. The perilous intersection of writers' lives with public and private dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays. Written with wit and passion, they touch on the inmost identity of literature and the literary artist - with biographical, historical, and psychological overtones. T.S. Eliot sympathizes with fascists, Isaac Babel rides with Red Cossacks - yet both are luminous shapers of modernism. Modernism itself is resisted by the American cultural establishment.

Henry James, magisterial psychologist, remains at the mercy of his own mysterious psyche. Anthony Trollope's masterliness is obscured, first by charges of writing too much and too fast, and then by cultism. Salman Rushdie's gifts are assailed amid bitter contemporary controversy. And the secret pulse of ambition (and loss) is exposed in the brokenhearted waywardness of the once-celebrated and now nearly forgotten writer Alfred Chester.

Contents:

T.S. Eliot at 101 : The man who suffers and the mind which creates

Alfred Chester's wig : images standing fast

Our kinsman, Mr. Trollope

What Henry James knew

Isaac Babel and the identity question

George Steiner and the errata of history

Mark Twain's Vienna

Saul Bellow's Broadway

Rushdie in the Louvre

Of christian heroism

Existing things

The break

Old hand as novice

Seymour : homage to a bibliophile

Helping T.S. Eliot write better (notes toward a definitive bibliography)

Against modernity : annals of the temple, 1918-1927

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

OCLC:

904025819