First book to look at Empson's intellectual career as a whole Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity is a seminal text

Committed Styles offers a new understanding of the politicized literature of the 1930s and its relationship to modernism. It reclaims a central body of literary and critical works for modernist studies, offering in-depth readings of texts by T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards, as well as by key left-wing authors including William Empson, David Gascoyne, Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings, and Edward Upward. Building on substantial new archival research, Benjamin Kohlmann explores the deep tensions between modernist experimentation and political vision that lie at the heart of these works. Taking as its focus the work of these writers, the book argues that the close interactions between literary production, critical reflection, and political activism in the decade shaped the influential view of modernism as fundamentally apolitical. Intervening in debates about the long life of modernism, it contends that we need to take seriously the anti-modernist impulse of 1930s left-wing literature even when attention is paid to the formal complexity of these 'committed' works. The tonal ambiguities which run through the politicised literature of the 1930s thus effect not a disengagement from but a more thorough immersion in the profoundly conflicted political commitments of the decade. At the same time, the study shows that debates about the politics of writing in the 1930s continue to inform current debates about the relationship between literature and political commitment.

John Haffenden's acclaimed biography of William Empson (1906-1984), the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century, is now available in paperback. An authoritative and compelling account and the first of two volumes exploring his remarkable life and work.

Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.

William Empson was one the most important poet-critics of the twentieth century. Following on recent scholarly developments and the centenary of his birth in 2006 there has been a resurgence of interest in his work. In this book of critical essays on Empson - the first in over a decade - fourteen scholars consider the full range of his work, studying his poetry alongside his criticism in order to reassess the scale of his achievement.

This volume offers a comprehensive account of modern literary criticism, presenting the field as part of an ongoing historical and intellectual tradition. Featuring thirty-nine specially commissioned chapters from an international team of esteemed contributors, it fills a large gap in the market by combining the accessibility of single-authored selections with a wide range of critical perspectives. The volume is divided into four parts. Part One covers the key philosophical and aesthetic origins of literary theory, while Part Two discusses the foundational movements and thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. Part Three offers introductory overviews of the most important movements and thinkers in modern literary theory, and Part Four looks at emergent trends and future directions.