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“... Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest ...”

“... now admired, though not for their technical stunts, have gone in for ‘experiment’, from James, Ford and Conrad and Joyce to, say, Golding and Ian McEwan. Lawrence saw how much might be done in a novel, how free it could be of constraints, how apt to the business of making it new; the novel was protean, insisting ...”

“... Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic sub-tendencies such as maximalism and minimalism. Despite his professed indifference to the pro-con debate, however, McGurl also sets out to ...”

“... as much as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all ...”

“... she met Yeats, was part of the spirit of the age. In 1891, the year before George’s birth, Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose the thing “medium” has done more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest form of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything ...”

“... her brother-in-law Molesworth Phillips was a bullying and unfaithful husband; her elder brother James had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. It sounds like a Mrs Radcliffe family in a castle in the Apennines, but in spite of these events the Burneys were a cheerful and devoted clan, closely-knit in a web of affectionate laughter and tribal ...”

“... in the business of making it new would have to establish, to name but a few, the belatedness of Joyce, Proust and Kafka, Picasso and Schönberg. Still, the vigour of the American revolt against feminisation no doubt had its effect elsewhere. The period of Freud’s major American influence was still in the future, but he was already much talked about, and ...”

“... culture, are just as much a part of the best German and Russian art at this time. Rilke and Musil, Joyce and Jules Romains, were all in a sense honorary Jews, the natural fellows of Proust or Svevo. It was a family atmosphere, in which German and Russian, Italian and French, were for members the natural media of intelligence and imagination. Pushkin’s ...”

“... course of the book. Tom Gallagher is himself a Scottish playwright, best-known as the author of Mr Joyce is leaving Paris: he has written other plays, two of which he here attributes to his creation, Howard Murray. ‘Reality and illusion’, says Murray, seem to have ‘refused to hold their separate places’. He is credibly annoyed about this. He tells us ...”

“... he’s never so lively as when anticipating his death, and there’s no shortage of humour. Clive James is known to make jokes about the slowness of his passing but Barbellion got there first: ‘Won’t all this seem piffle if I don’t die after all! As an artist in life I ought to die; it is the only artistic ending – and I ought to die now or the third ...”

“... tension between bleakness of content and richness of form, a contrast equally notable in Synge, Joyce and O’Casey. The plot of On Canaan’s Side is action-packed enough – indeed, a little too much so, as one disaster follows hard on the heels of another. Lilly and Tadg Bere are forced by the IRA to flee to the United States, where Tadg is ...”

“... the most dubious morality. Building on the classic image of Walsingham as spymaster established by James Anthony Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for ...”

“... of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the outlaw wordsmiths, the rescue operation, this time round, falls to Bradford, a professor at the University of Ulster who’s already written biographies of the Amises, father and son, plus Larkin, among others, and isn’t ...”

“... it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of the human atmosphere. And it ...”

“... In a discussion​ of literary brothers Theroux mentions not just Thomas and Heinrich Mann and James and Stanislaus Joyce but Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, ‘both of whom I’d known’. At this moment the notional Jay Justus completely disappears within Paul Theroux, who had a famous if not enduring friendship with ...”