UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "Talking Back to Emily Dickinson, and Other Essays" by W.H. Pritchard

William H. Pritchard

Eloquent commentaries on English and American writers

This collection makes the case for literary criticism as an informed, aggressive, personal, and often humorous response to writers and writing. An unrepentant academic, William Pritchard nonetheless finds himself looking vainly, in much current professional study of literature, for what he sees as criticism's central task. This involves, in part, an attentiveness to the performing voice of the novelist, poet, or essayist under discussion. To bring out that quality, the critic must exploit, with invention and intrepidity, his or her own responsive voice—must "talk back" to the work of art.

The essays, all of them about English and American writers, are arranged chronologically, beginning with Shakespeare and Edmund Burke, and proceeding through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to end with contemporaries like Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, and Doris Lessing. Pritchard writes with equal authority about poetry and fiction; the collection also includes assessments of critics such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle, Ford Madox Ford and R.P. Blackmur.

"As demonstrated in these essays, Pritchard's sympathetic, kinetic engagement with the canon has always distinguished him from other voices of the academy."

Kirkus Reviews
"These essays are responses of the best sort—opinionated, informed, highly articulate, but never, ever pompous. . . Pritchard is a wonderful writer."

Sven Birkerts
"William H. Pritchard is one of those rare academics with whom it would be fun to discuss literature off campus. When he asks, 'How deep should close reading go?' and confesses that the very mention of Saussure 'causes my consciousness to glaze over,' you know you won't be held hostage to a lot of theoretical cant. And when he reminds you of useful readings by Northrop Frye, Richard Poirier, Yvor Winters, Randall Jarrell and A.C. Bradley, it is clear that Pritchard's rejection of what he calls a `nameable approach' to literary analysis is far from naive. For although he regards such critics 'literary motives and practices' as preferable to the 'fiefdoms and baliwicks' of more politicized stances, he is chary of romanticizing the critical past. For a main course in this bookish meal one might turn to Prtichard's title essay, a meaty, sustaining reflection upon the difficulty in engaging with the often elusive work of this poet 'who is much of the time not speaking to me.' Desert could prove a difficult choice: a savory critique of Doris Lessing, perhaps, or a trifling but delicious reappraisal of Julian Symons. Prtichard serves up a tempting and palatable blend of the erudite and the informal, an antidote to his own complaint that modern literary commentary 'has absolutely severed itself from being of interest to anyone not exclusively professional.'"

New York Times Book Review

William H. Pritchard is Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College.

Essays/ Literary Studies
320 pp.
LC 98-10322
$40.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-138-4

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