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William Empson, Volume II

Against the Christians

John Haffenden author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:2nd Nov '06

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William Empson, Volume II cover

Following the acclaimed first volume, Among the Mandarins, this is the second and concluding volume of the authorized biography of William Empson, one of the foremost poets and literary critics of the twentieth century. Against the Christians begins during the Second World War and follows Empson's turbulent years of writing wartime propaganda for the BBC. As Chinese Editor, he organised broadcasts to China and propaganda programmes for the Home Service, during which time his friends and colleagues included the prickly George Orwell. The effectiveness of Empson's work for the BBC provoked the Nazi propagandist Hans Fritzsche to call him a 'curly-headed Jew' -- a charge which gave him enormous satisfaction. In 1947 he returned to China, where he was caught up in the Communist siege of the Peking and witnessed Mao Tse-tung's triumphant entry. 'I was there for the honeymoon between the universities and the communists; we were being kept up to the mark rather firmly.' He saw 'the dragooning of independent thought and the hysteria of the confession meetings'. In the late 1940s he also taught in the USA, where he relished the irony of his situation. 'My position here really seems to me very dramatic; there can be few other people in the world who are receiving pay simultaneously and without secrecy from the Chinese Communists, the British Socialists, and the capitalist Rockefeller machine.' From 1953 to 1971 he held the Chair of English Literature at Sheffield, where he engaged more vigorously than ever before in public controversy, being driven by a desire to correct the wrong-headed orthodoxies of modern literary criticism -- most notably 'neo-Christianity'. He acquired massive publicity for his views on the wickedness of Christianity when he published Milton's God in 1961: 'The poem is wonderful because it is an awful warning. The effort of reconsidering Milton's God, who makes the poem so good just because he is so sickeningly bad, is a basic one for the European mind.' Haffenden presents a full account of the work on Milton, along with analyses of Empson's many other writings on subjects including Marlowe, Donne, Marvell, and Coleridge, and The Structure of Complex Words (1951). In a full and candid study of the public and private Empson, John Haffenden enables the reader to understand one of the most gifted, eccentric, witty, and controversial figures of our age -- a giant of modern literature and criticism.

John Haffenden is calm and accepting in his account of Empson's private life. * John Batchelor, Modern Language Review *
John Haffenden's monumental two-volume biography leaves us in no doubt of the importance of Empson's upbringing as a scion of Yorkshire gentry...One of the big achievements of Haffenden's narrative is the painstaking account of Empson's gradual maturation as a critic. * Jason Harding, Essays in Criticism *
Haffenden's narrative is driven along with such gusto, such alert intelligence, such obvious pleasure in the task, that no one could reasonably grumble at the story's inordinate length. It is a virtuoso feat of scholarship: a telling demonstration of what biography, as it finest, can actually achieve. * Ian Donaldson Australian Book Review *
This is scholarship in the grand style * Contemporary Poetry Review *
Biography is a dominant form these days, and Haffenden's is one of the best. * Fred Inglis, The Independent (Review) *
The culmination of a majestic achievement * Mark Bostridge, Independent on Sunday *
This is a definitive work, brimming with dry humour, acute political and literary analysis and a quiet respect for Empson's defining idiosyncrasies. * Tim Martin, Telegraph *
His two-volume Empson now ranks, with say, Holmes on Coleridge. McCarthy on Morris, Bellos on Perec, Ellman on Joyce and Wilde: it is one of the great literary biographies. * Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times Culture *
It would be high enough praise to say that Haffenden has equalled the achievement of his first volume; the reality is that he has excelled it. * Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times Culture *
Haffenden has given us an Empson we should be arguing about, and arguing with, well into the future. * Peter McDonald, Literary Review *
Impressive. * Andrew Motion, The Guardian *
Resolutely unhysterical, affectionately written and delightfully incisive. * Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph *
Magisterial biography. * Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph *
Immense and magnificent biography * Frank Kermode, London Review of Books *
[A] superlative work * Eric Griffiths *
Haffenden's collection of material and mastery of the mass of published and unpublished documents is exemplary...Taken together his two volumes give a splendid sense of their subject, and of the literary, intellectual and political milieux in which Empson worked. * David Fuller, The Review of English Studies, Volume 58, Number 237 *

  • Winner of The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and The Sunday Times Christmas Picks 2006.

ISBN: 9780199276608

Dimensions: 241mm x 167mm x 48mm

Weight: 1356g

836 pages