Keith Wilson

I was first introduced to the study of English literature in a British high school in the 1960s. At that time, English teachers around much of the world were instilling the mysteries of literary criticism in impressionable young minds by means of the writings of two men, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, who over the previous 30 or so years had become the effective high priests of English…

By the close, on December 8, 1859, of Thomas De Quincey’s troubled and chaotic life, which endured far longer than the opium dependence infiltrating every aspect of it made predictable, he was the last representative of the cluster of evocative names— Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Blake, Southey, Hazlitt, Lamb—that had defined English Romanticism. He outlasted his only…

In this age of canon reformation, Joseph Conrad’s readership, at least as evidenced by the relative infrequency with which his major novels turn up on school and university course syllabi, is smaller than it once was. It has been a long time since F.R. Leavis confidently charted for the English novel a great tradition that began with Jane Austen and passed through George…

Period novels populated with actual historical figures have perennially proved a tricky genre to pull off with any great originality, not least when the figures in question are eminent writers whose lives are well-documented public property and the plots little more than variations on familiar biographical themes. The inevitable nudge and wink component in the narrative line—our young heroine Jane fossicking around for a felicitous title for her new manuscript (“I…