The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

James Wood

Nov 2013 · Kuthengiswe ngu-Modern Library

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This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revo-
lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is.
        In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.

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Born in Durham, England, in 1965, James Wood has been a full-time literary critic since leaving Cambridge University, first at The Guardian in London and currently at The New Republic. His essays and reviews have appeared in a number of other publications, including The New Yorker and The London Review of Books.