Research Catalog

Title

What is a book? / David Kirby.

Author

Kirby, David, 1944-

Publication

Athens : University of Georgia Press, ©2002.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvii, 221 pages; 23 cm

Summary

In What Is a Book? David Kirby addresses the making and consuming of literature by redefining the four components of the act of reading: writer, reader, critic, and book. He discusses his students, his work, and his practice as a teacher, writer, critic, and reader, and positions his theories and opinions as products of "real" life as much as academic exercise. Among the ideas animating the book are Kirby's beliefs that "devotion is more important than dissection" and "practice is more important than theory." Covering an impressive range of writers--from Emerson, Poe, and Melville to James Dickey, Charles Wright, Richard Howard, Susan Montez, and others--Kirby considers the evolution of critical theory from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth and explores the role of criticism in contemporary culture.

Subject

• Universidad Sergio Arboleda
• Bibel
• American literature > History and criticism
• American literature > History and criticism > Theory, etc
• Books and reading > United States
• Book reviewing > United States
• Criticism > United States
• American literature
• Book reviewing
• Books and reading
• Criticism
• Leser
• Leseverhalten
• Literatur
• Literaturtheorie
• Buch
• United States
• USA

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-207) and index.

Contents

What is a reader? -- What is a writer? -- Breakfast with the Cumaean sibyl, or, A poet's education -- Don't know much about history : sameness versus originality in poetry -- Is there a Southern poetry? -- Poet as pitchman : James Dickey, American poet -- Emerson, Poe, and American criticism in the nineteenth century -- Slouching toward Baltimore : twentieth-century literary criticism -- What is a critic? -- Mr. Post-everything : the life and times of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch -- "The thing you can't explain" : theory and the unconscious -- Reviewers in the popular press and their impact on the novel -- M.L. Rosenthal and our life in poetry -- Ghosts and gadabouts : gothic and picaresque in the American novel -- Born in the marketplace : the emergence of the American novel -- It isn't about America, it is America : Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn -- What is a book?

ISBN

• 0820324418
• 9780820324418
• 0820324787
• 9780820324784

LCCN

2002002105

OCLC

• ocm48967798
• 48967798
• SCSB-1270251

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library