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…
Keith Wilson
Keith Wilson is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa.
Articles by
Keith Wilson
Talent and Self-Destruction
Since the 19th century, De Quincey’s addiction haseclipsed his once-brilliant literary reputation November 2010
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…