Category: literary-criticism
Quotes of Category: literary-criticism
The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group {Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner} were members of the elite and secret society of Cambridge Apostles. aesthetic understanding, and broader philosophy, were in part shaped by, and at first primarily interpreted in terms of, {male} Bloomsbury's dominant aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, rooted in the work of {a central influence on the Apostles}, and culminating in Fry's and differing brands of pioneering aesthetic formalism. 'The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters,' recalls, 'were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.'Increasing awareness of Woolf's feminism, however, and of the influence on her work of other women artists, writers and thinkers has meant that these Moorean and male points of reference, though of importance, are no longer considered adequate in approaching Woolf's work, and her intellectual development under the tutelage of women, together with her involvement with feminist thinkers and activists, is also now acknowledged. book-quoteliterary-criticismcambridgeBut even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book so that his very absence becomes a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, il brille par son absence - "he shines by his absence." In connection with Bleak House we are concerned with one of those authors who are so to speak not supreme deities, diffuse and aloof, but puttering, amiable, sympathetic demigods, who descend into their books under various disguises or send therein various middlemen, representatives, agents, minions, spies, and stooges. {...} Roughly speaking, there are three types of such representatives. Let us inspect them. First, the narrator insofar as he speaks in the first person, the capital I of the story, its moving pillar. {...} Second, a type of author's representative, what I call the sifting agent. {...} The third type is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with foil as in fencing. But this does not matter much since anyway I invented the term myself many years ago. book-quoteliterary-criticismhow-to
