Seven books of literary criticism everyone should read

Sometimes, when nobody better qualified is about for them to ask, students of mine ask me how they can get better marks for their essays, and how they can learn to sharpen their essay-writing skills. My answer is always the same – ‘How did you get in here?’ Then, when I've recovered my aplomb, ‘Go and read these great people.’ And I send them off armed with one or more of the names listed below. This is, of course, an utterly perverse, wilful, and personal list; there are no women on it, for instance. This is not a reflection on female literary critics, but on my own personal ‘career trajectory’ thus far, and the books that have shaped my own writing. Critics such as Diane Elam, as well as
Gilbert and Gubar, should be on this list as well; but that would have made it ‘nine books’ rather than seven, and anyway, I want to go and have a beer. So these seven will have to do, and feel free to leave disagreements and mildly abusive comments in the box provided underneath.


1. William Empson, Argufying Jonathan Bate, soon-to-be Master of Worcester College, Oxford, said that the three greatest critics of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were, respectively, Dr Johnson, William Hazlitt, and William Empson. These are the greatest, he says, ‘not least because they are the funniest.’ Empson is frequently funny. Humour is a rare thing in literary criticism, with many modern academics confounding moral seriousness with stylistic po-facery: a terrible confusion, if ever there was one. Though Empson is best-known for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (published in 1930 when he was 23, and completed after he was banished from Cambridge following the discovery of condoms in his college rooms), this collection of essays, published posthumously in 1987, are the best place to find the great man at work – whether it’s taking his colleagues to task over their critical blindnesses, or his marvellous suggestion that the slave-trade is an important ‘presence’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. A ‘rag-bag’ of delights that is well worth a read.


2. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny A large work of critical theory and literary criticism, this book, published in 2003 and frequently 'Derridean' in its approach, is essentially a collection of essays inspired by Freud’s celebrated essay on the ‘unheimlich’ or uncanny. Subjects range from being buried alive to such outré considerations as darkness, the double, sex, and the modern university. Funny, poetic, and a real page-turner.


3. Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation Sir Christopher Ricks is undoubtedly the greatest living successor to Empson. This collection from 1996 contains some of his best and most important work, whether it’s his suggestion that plague is an important context for Doctor Faustus (a reading itself partly inspired by Empson’s reading of the slave-trade and Coleridge), or his taking-to-task of literary theorists (Ricks reportedly left Cambridge in the 1980s following a series of disagreements with teachers of theory there). Ricks is a wonderfully close and acute reader of all sorts of ‘texts’ (a word he himself would hate being used of literature), and writes beautifully too. A must-read.


4. H. Coombes, Literature and Criticism While a little dated now, this little book fuses close readings of poetry with broader considerations of the importance of such things as tone, rhyme, and imagery in poems and how we should approach them when reading English poetry. A sort of 'introductory' book but one that every critic of poetry should at least have a look at. Heavily influenced by Leavis and Empson, Coombes is good at reading people like Hopkins and T. S. Eliot, and knows what he likes (and is vocal about what he doesn’t like, much as Leavis was).


5. Frederic Crews, The Pooh Perplex This 1960s book, along with its ‘sequel’, the 2000 work Postmodern Pooh, is a collection of hugely entertaining spoofs of popular schools of literary criticism, all presented as being genuine essays written by completely made-up literary critics. I’ve selected the earlier volume here – being a rather perverse so-and-so – which contains gentle (and not-so-gentle) piss-takes of (among others) psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and F. R. Leavis himself (who is present in this collection of mock essays as the fictional critic, Simon Lacerous). Perhaps the highlight is ‘A Complete Analysis of Winnie-the-Pooh’. Pants-pissingly funny (if you’re a geek).


6. John Carey, The Violent Effigy First published in 1973, this book – subtitled ‘a study of Dickens’ imagination’ – has been more or less in print ever since. (Not sure if it still is, but in these days of Amazon, ebay, and AbeBooks, it'll be available somewhere for the price of a pint.) Carey looks at a number of aspects of Dickens’s writing and relates them to the novelist’s childhood, as well as the broader Victorian culture of which Dickens was a part. Carey is one of the most incisive readers of Dickens, as this book will clearly demonstrate.


7. John Schad, Victorians in Theory An utterly ‘mad’ idea – take five Victorian poets and pair each of them with one of five Francophone post-structuralists, showing how the two thinkers' works overlap and, in the process, demonstrating how problematic our ideas about history, zeitgeists, and even ‘the Victorians’ really are. Browning partners off with Derrida, Arnold with Foucault, Hopkins with Lacan … the results are often surprising and Schad’s distinctive writing style and skills at close reading point up some interesting connections between these ‘writers’. This is a bold book, but a very rewarding one.


And, as I said, it is now time for me to have a beer in the sun. Happy reading and all that...