San Antonio College Library

"The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics revisits the work and place of eight scholars roughly contemporary with Anglo-American New Criticism: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Beguin, Jean Rousset, C.S. Lewis, F.O. Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. First, William Calin considers the achievements of each critic, examining their methodologies and basic presuppositions as well as the critiques marshalled against them. Calin then...

A biography of the Victorian Renaissance man explores Ruskin's wide-ranging interests in botany, geology, art criticism, and social theory, among other topics.

"What is it the legacy that humankind has been living with since 1945? We were once convinced that time was the agent of change. But in the past decade or two, our experience of time has been transformed. Technology preserves and inundates us with the past, and we perceive our future as a set of converging and threatening inevitabilities: nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation. Overwhelmed by these horizons, we live in an ever broadening...

Highlights of this illustrated biography include: his boyhood in Eastern Canada, and his early years of intellectual growth at Victoria College and Oxford; his dramatic encounter with the work of William Blake, bringing him to his life-long study of imaginative vision; the impact and importance of Anatomy of Criticism; Fry's gradual development of a theory of culture; his culminating achievement, after twenty years, of a comprehensive study of the...

Witty and sympathetic biography of this 19th century French critic who was disagreeable as a man but unmatched as a perceptive critic.

Leonard Feather's autobiography is also the story of jazz over the last half-century. Since arriving in New York from London in 1935, he has managed to distinguish himself as a producer, composer, pianist, and one of the music's most acute critics. He was one of the first to champion the innovations of bebop in the pages of Esquire and Downbeat, also an ardent campaigner against racial barriers, and a friend to dozens of musicians. There are stories...

Benchley was a best-selling author of a dozen hilarious books chronicling the comic futility of the human condition, and one of the most influential humorists not only of his own generation but of successive ones as well. A sharp-witted theater critic whose reviews graced the pages of Life and The New Yorker for nearly two decades, he was a much sought after radio personality. Besides appearing in character roles in scores of feature films, he starred...