Patrick Parrinder

Patrick Parrinder is a reader in English at the University of Reading. His books include Authors and Authority and Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching. A study of James Joyce has recently appeared.

Letter

Literary Criticism we could do without

21 February 1980

SIR: As the perpetrator of one of the ‘unpublished theses’ (actually, a brief essay) cited in Colin MacCabe’s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, may I say how delighted I am that Miss Brophy, author of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, is bringing her sledge-hammer to bear on works of literary criticism (LRB, 21 February)? How soon may we expect to know the names...
Letter

Ulyssean Realism

18 April 1985

SIR: Denis Donoghue has taken the part for the whole in saying that I read Ulysses as a ‘realistic novel, complete with characters and plot’ (LRB, 18 April). In fact, as stated in the preface to my James Joyce, I specifically avoided using the term ‘novel’ to describe Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses does have characters, and a plot based on the Odyssey – who ever doubted that? – but...
Letter

Conrad and Eliot and Prejudice

22 June 1989

Suppose that in England crimes of violence, ranging from domestic murder and rape to organised football hooliganism, are rife. A Martian visitor asks Craig Raine (LRB, 22 June) if he is himself a mugger or rapist, and Mr Raine for reasons best known to himself replies: ‘Yes, I’d like to kill off the whole human race.’ The visitor sends his postcard home and another Martian uses the anecdote to...
Letter

Life’s Diversity

14 May 1992

John Ellis (LRB, 14 May) seems addicted to the notion of literary criticism as inter-generational struggle. Frank Kermode’s tolerance and responsiveness to the variety of literary texts thus becomes an attribute of ‘criticism as Kermode’s generation understood it’. (This is the generation of Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, Paul de Man and other critics famous for not having an agenda of their...
Letter

The Great Copyright Disaster

12 January 1995

David Lewisohn (Letters, 9 March) wonders what effect European copyright extension will have on the availability in this country of American scholarly editions of English writers out of copyright in America 50 years after their death, but still with 20 years’ protection in the United Kingdom. He should know that British, not merely American, scholarly editions of English writers are likely to be...

Pieces about Patrick Parrinder in the LRB

Devil take the hindmost

John Sutherland, 14 December 1995

Among other certain things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time...

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Outside the Academy

Robert Alter, 13 February 1992

These two meticulous surveys of modern criticism in all its vertiginous variety lead one to ponder what it is all about and where it may be heading. The book by René Wellek, focused on...

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Post-Humanism

Alex Zwerdling, 15 October 1987

When the history of late 20th-century literary culture comes to be written, the extraordinary vogue of metatheoretical works will surely require explanation. What can account for the obsessive...

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Raiding Joyce

Denis Donoghue, 18 April 1985

Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It...

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