Product Description: Passionate, controversial and illuminating – this collection contains Empson's best short pieces on Shakespeare, a sally on George Herbert, a defence of Coleridge, and an eager introduction to a French farce, a group of incomparably witty autobiographical articles, and the text to his extraordinary Inaugural Lecture as Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University...read more

Product Description: This collection of William Empson's essays on drama is the second volume of his writings on Renaissance literature. Edited by leading Empson scholar John Haffenden, the contents range from essays on The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone and The Duchess of Malfi to a sprightly piece on Elizabethan spirits...read more

Product Description: Libro clave en la tradición de la crítica británica. Fue publicado cuando su autor tenía 24 años de edad y se convirtió inmediatamente en una obra maestra. Es un estudio sobre el uso de la dilogía, los juegos de palabras y las paradojas, que abarca toda la tradición literaria inglesa que le tocó conocer...read more

A collection of poems that take a wide range of themes from metaphysics to melancholy, social climbing to political satire, and from love to loss.

Presents a selection of the American poet's works dealing with truth, religion, nature, thought age, and other topics (view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Passionate, controversial, illuminating, and - in Empson's own words - 'usually funny or rude', this collection includes all his best short pieces on Shakespeare, a sally on George Herbert, a defence of Coleridge, and in addition the text of Empson's extraordinary Inaugural Lecture as Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University...read more

Product Description: This volume gathers some of William Empson's most passionate and controversial essays and includes previously inaccessible pieces on influential Renaissance writers and scientists. Introduced by leading Empson scholar John Haffenden, this is a book for anyone interested in the Renaissance, the history of science, and the history of literary criticism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: This volume gathers some of William Empson's most passionate and controversial essays and includes previously inaccessible pieces on influential Renaissance writers and scientists. Introduced by leading Empson scholar John Haffenden, this is a book for anyone interested in the Renaissance, the history of science, and the history of literary criticism...read more

Product Description: Empson's classic may "have even more to teach us about language now than It did In 1951. when this remarkable book was first published," writes Jonathan Cutler in his valuable foreword. Empson elegantly demonstrates the weight of allusion and Implication borne by even the simplest words of our language: man, honest, quite, dog...read more

Product Description: Book by Empson, William

Product Description: Book by Empson, William

Analyzes Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, argues that the original text was subjected to religious censorship, and speculates on the original theme of the play

At the time of his death in 1984, the poet and critic William Empson was preparing and revising a collection of his essays on Shakespeare. This collection edited by David Pirie, is a book which the literary world has wanted for over half a century. Here, in a single volume, are major readings of Hamlet and Macbeth; a witty and sometimes impassioned defence of Falstaff, and a new piece on the architecture of the Globe theatre and other Renaissance playhouses, in which Empson explores the problems that the design of contemporary stages posed for a working playwright; there are also essays on the narrative poems, A Midsummer Night's Dream and the last plays. The essays demonstrate the subtlety and agility of Empson's mind, as well as his remarkable breadth of knowledge, while the almost racy wit of his informal prose style argues for a literary criticism which should never become solemn if it is to be truly serious. (view table of contents)

Essays examine how Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce made use of their own experiences in their writing

Verses are accompanied by a series of notes which clarify the meaning, language, and metaphor of individual poems

Product Description: Reprint of the ed. published by New Directions, Norfolk, Conn. in 1961.

Product Description: Some Versions of Pastoral is considered a landmark of modern literary criticism. Mr. Empson sees the pastoral convention as including not only poems of shepherd life but any work "about the people but not by or for" them. Finding examples in the writing of every country and century, from Mencius to William Faulkner or Céline, he concentrates on an analysis of certain works and forms in English literature, several of them, like Alice in Wonderland, Troilus and Cressida, and proletarian novels not traditionally considered pastoral...read more