Common Writing
Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:17th Mar '16
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- Paperback£28.49(9780198813118)
In a series of penetrating and attractively readable essays, Stefan Collini explores aspects of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from the early twentieth century to the present. Common Writing focuses chiefly on writers, critics, historians, and journalists who occupied wider public roles as cultural commentators or intellectuals, as well as on the periodicals and other genres through which they attempted to reach such audiences. Among the figures discussed are T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, J.B. Priestley, C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ignatieff. The essays explore the variety of such figures' writings - something that can get overlooked or forgotten when they are treated exclusively in terms of their contribution to one established or professional category such as 'novelist' or 'historian' - while capturing their distinctive writing voices and those indirect or implicit ways in which they position or reveal themselves in relation to specific readerships, disputes, and traditions. These essays engage with recent biographies, collections of letters, and new editions of classic works, thereby making some of the fruits of recent scholarly research available to a wider audience. Collini has been acclaimed as one of the most brilliant essayists of our time, and this collection shows him at his subtle, perceptive, and trenchant best. Common Writing will appeal to (and delight) readers interested in literature, history, and contemporary cultural debate.
eloquently acerbic prose * Robert Irwin, Books of the Year 2016, Times Literary Supplement *
His [Collini's] task here, which he performs with admirable aplomb, is to eulogize the passing order ... [an] absorbing book * David Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement *
One of the strengths of Common Writing is the success with which Collini is able to show why his discipline matters. * Rafe McGregor, Review 31 *
Collini offers a series of companionable, entertaining and often insightful considerations of his subjects. He has a gift for evoking a powerful sense of a particular writer's work and personality; his attention to their use of language is usually careful, sensitive and revealing; and he shows a willingness to argue against himself that lends his judgements extra subtlety, interest and weight. * Prospect *
elegant and arch series of essays on modern English intellectual life * Oxford Today *
at his best he [Collini] transforms our understanding of an author and the world in which he -- and it is almost always he -- works ... it would be worth handing these volumes on to students to give them a keener sense of how to write, for both these authors are brilliant stylists as well as important thinkers; indeed, they make the point ... that to write well is to think well. If they convey nothing more than that -- and, read attentively, they will convey far more -- these books will have served a most useful purpose. * William Whyte, Twentieth Century British History *
Collini provides intelligent discussions of the lives and works of a range of individuals -- writers, literary critics, historians, and other intellectuals -- whose work has appealed to an audience beyond the strictly scholarly or academically inclined ... The range of the book is welcome, in particular because it offers thoughtful commentary on figures who may be less familiar, such as R. M. Titmuss, Herbert Butterfield, Timothy Garton Ash, and specialists in other fields ... Recommended. * CHOICE *
ISBN: 9780198758969
Dimensions: 236mm x 171mm x 26mm
Weight: 668g
366 pages