Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Building on the strength of Keith Walker’s acclaimed The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1984), leading scholar Nicholas Fisher presents a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the work of one the greatest Restoration wits. Includes the text of Lucina’s Rape, Rochester’s adaptation of Fletcher’s revenge tragedy Valentinian, in a text that readily identifies Rochester’s revisions Presents the poems in versions that were current during Rochester’s lifetime, allowing the reader to experience the poems as Rochester’s contemporaries did Incorporates insights and discoveries made over the last twenty-five years and texts of manuscripts that previously were unavailable for study

Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? demonstrates how much Marvin Mudrick loved life and celebrated the dignity of life in literature. “It’s helpful to be reminded now and then,” he writes, that “while novelists persist in their noisy betrayals of human dignity, living has a longer history than reading, and truth than fiction.” Mudrick insists on seeing authors and their characters as people and he describes and judges them as frankly as if they were living among us. In this collection, we meet heroes, monsters, and every shade of character in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics. We get to know each of them, so vivid are Mudrick’s quotations and commentary. Essay after essay demonstrates that good criticism can amplify both life and literature.