- ホーム
- > 洋書
- > 英文書
- > Literary Criticism
Full Description
Seven masterly essays on those inspired writings, both sacred and secular, in which things inaccessible are made suddenly accessible, and diction and desire are miraculously at one. In this, his first collection of essays in more than a decade, Geoffrey Hill again returns to "the Enemy's country," that fallen world where both scholarship and ignorance lie in ambush of Truth, to rescue inspired literature from misreading. His texts include the Oxford English Dictionary, Tyndale's Bible , and poems by Henry Vaughan and T. S. Eliot, as well the vast apparatus of opinion about them. Style and Faith --seven essays in the moral life of literature and the moral burden of the poet--will interest anyone who values precision and concision, and literary criticism in the service of the commonweal.
Contents
Foreword. 1. "Common Weal, Common Woe," an essay on the Oxford English Dictionary and the very special religious-poetical diction of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hill reveals the glories and shortcomings of the OED in its dealings with the genius of the English language and the individual genius's inspired employment of individual words. 2. "Of Diligence and Jeopardy," on a new edition of the Holy Bible as translated by William Tyndale, which is the King James Bible, and on editor David Daniell's apparatus, which shows limited understanding of Tyndale's language. 3. "Keeping the Middle Way," on Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as a supreme book of Christian praise, Burton's debt to Hooker, Nashe, and Donne, and what Burton means when he says "We must live by faith, not by feeling." 4. "A Pharisee to Pharisees," a close reading of Henry Vaughan's poem of conversion "The Night" and of words vs. faith as a road to Divine Grace. 5. "The Eloquence of Sober Truth," on the contemporary literary and political response to Hobbes's Leviathan and what it tells us about ideals of political and religious commonwealth in the 17th century. 6. "Style and Faith," on the failure of Isabel Rivers's book Reason, Grace and Sentiment, a study of the language of religion and ethics in England 1660-1780, and its failure to grasp the historical differences between the civil and religious vocabulary of Wesley and Locke and the civil and religious vocabulary of the author's present. 7. "Divided Legacies," on T. S. Eliot's The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, and on the influence of such metaphysical poets as Donne and Crashaw on Eliot's own poetry. BACK: Sources & Acknowlegments.
