Tony Tanner

Tony Tanner is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and an authority on American literature. He is the author of The Reign of Wonder and City of Words. Adultery in the Novel was published in 1980.

Letter

Voice of America

23 September 1993

A word was somehow omitted in my review in the last issue of the LRB (LRB, 23 September). The praise by DuBois for the female reformers who went to the South after the Civil War should conclude: ‘they did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls and more.’ In my review, that has been reduced to a meagre ‘one hundred’. Out of respect for those brave and maligned...

In Praise of Vagueness

Richard Poirier, 14 December 1995

From the beginning of his distinguished career, with his influential The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature, on to the more recent Adultery and the Novel and his fluently...

Read more reviews

Yawning and Screaming

John Bayley, 5 February 1987

The past is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in...

Read more reviews

Fine Chances

Michael Wood, 5 June 1986

Henry James was a great haunter of drawing-rooms and dining-rooms, but it is not easy to picture him in a place called the Library of America, which is the name of the edition of which these...

Read more reviews

Novels about Adultery

Frank Kermode, 15 May 1980

It calls for no great acumen to spot a connection between adultery and theft. According to Dr Johnson, ‘the essence of the crime’ lay in ‘the confusion of progeny’, for by...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences