Welcome to our literary criticism section, where we gather interviews with the finest scholars of English literature and letters, from the eminent Yale Professor Harold Bloom to the Pulitzer prize-winning author of the defining critical text Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt.
If you’re new to an era and want a big-picture historical view, check out our interviews on Adam and Eve, the Victorian essay, Victorian literature, and modernism, to name a few. After a specific author? Look no further—we have interviews with the foremost experts on Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, D H Lawrence and Jane Austen.
Whether it’s a fresh look at a literary genre you already know well or a granular view of an author completely new to you, Five Books has expert recommendations to help you read more, and read smarter.
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1
Selected Prose
by Charles Lamb -
2
Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings
by Matthew Arnold -
3
Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings
by George Eliot -
4
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
by Walter Pater -
5
The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment
by Marion Milner
David Russell on The Victorian Essay
David Russell on The Victorian Essay
With the advent of the Victorian age, polite maxims of eighteenth-century essays in the Spectator were replaced by a new generation of writers who thought deeply—and playfully—about social relationships, moral responsibility, education and culture. Here, Oxford literary critic David Russell explores the distinct qualities that define the Victorian essay and recommends five of its greatest practitioners.
The best books on Sex in Victorian Literature, recommended by Claire Jarvis
We often assume the Victorians had puritanical attitudes to sex, but this was far from the reality. From familiar classics to neglected gems, Claire Jarvis—Stanford academic and author of Exquisite Masochism: Sex, Marriage and the Novel Form—selects the best books on sex in Victorian literature.
Devoney Looser on The Alternative Jane Austen
Thanks to her ability to be many things to many people at once, Jane Austen is one of the vast minority of writers who manage to be both eternally popular and canonical. Here, Austen scholar Devoney ‘Stone Cold Jane’ Looser presents alternative Austens, from subversive youngster to video-game heroine
The best books on Oscar Wilde, recommended by Sos Eltis
Oscar Wilde cultivated an image of himself as an idle genius, dashing off masterpieces with a lazy brilliance. But below the glittering linguistic surface of his works, suggests Sos Eltis, lies an anarchic politics and a phenomenal analysis of power.
The best books on Adam and Eve, recommended by Stephen Greenblatt
Who were Adam and Eve, really? Over many centuries, the origin story has undergone countless transformations. The Pulitzer Prize-winner and Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt chooses five books that explore the history of Adam and Eve, and tells us why the world isn’t ready to leave the narrative of Eden behind
The best books on D H Lawrence, recommended by Catherine Brown
Although less flamboyantly experimental than his contemporaries Joyce and Woolf, D H Lawrence was a modernist, says literary scholar Catherine Brown. Here, she selects five books that make the case for this most contradictory, and often divisive, of writers—a man whose fictions and ‘philosophicalish’ works were by turns brilliant and bewildering, sublime and ridiculous
The best books on Virginia Woolf, recommended by Hermione Lee
Virginia Woolf was long dismissed as a ‘minor modernist’ but now stands as one of the giants of 20th century literature. Her biographer, Hermione Lee, talks us through the best Virginia Woolf books, novels and essays, and diaries, of Virginia Woolf.
