Broken Estate: Essays On Literature; Author: Wood, James; Paperback

Author: Wood, James
Paperback
288 pages
Published: July 2000
Random House USA Inc
ISBN: 0375752633

This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role in our lives. In a series of long essays, The Broken Estate ingeniously, innovatively explores the work of some of our greatest writers -- from Austen, Flaubert, and Woolf, to Pynchon,Updike and Morrison.Every sentence of every essay registers Wood's fierce involvement with language, and his belief that criticism must take creative risks and not merely act as placid commentary.Central to his work has been a passionate interest in the progress and destiny of contemporary fiction, a desire to read it in the light of its history. For that, and for much else, he has been called