Routledge Writers and Thinkers: Selected Literary Criticism

This is a collection of critical essays that integrate literature and ideas. Daniel Fuchs presents the writer's individuality as artist and thinker, focusing on the writer's interaction within a wide range of cultural, political, and historical periods and situations representative of the modern period. The essays reflect a progression that goes beyond chronology or historical survey in the consistency and interrelation of the literary and cultural themes explored and the references within them. The book is built around writers who are of central concern to the author. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive framework for analysing modernism. Fuchs first deals with high modernism, in discussions of Hemingway and Stevens, who in different ways critique tradition and collapsing values. The essays that follow deal with the "contemporary,"and here the focus is mainly on American Jewish writers and their cultural impact after modernism. The author's stance is in relation not only to these traditions but to others that might be thought antagonistic: the formalism of the New Critics and the deconstructionism that reduces the author to a replaceable variable in the dialects of cultural power relations. Fuchs pays tribute to the former, illustrating wider points in literary, socio-cultural, and political history. The overall emphasis on these "extrinsic" matters underscores the book's appeal to a wide audience. Review -Daniel Fuchs is a distinguished critic in what is now a beleaguered humanist tradition. With its focus on a writer's character and cultural situation, Writers and Thinkers gives us a rich flow of insight, elegantly phrased, into the moral imagination of three major novelists (Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow an Bernard Malamud) and a major American poet (Wallace Stevens). As the title of the book promises, Fuchs writers are thinkers. Fuchs is particularly illuminating in his pairings of Stevens and Santayana, Bellow and Freud, Bellow and Dostoevsky and their affinities and disaffinities in their views of self and world.- --Eugene Goodheart, Brandeis University, and author of Mostly Grave Thoughts and Holding the Center "Daniel Fuchs is a distinguished critic in what is now a beleaguered humanist tradition. With its focus on a writer's character and cultural situation, Writers and Thinkers gives us a rich flow of insight, elegantly phrased, into the moral imagination of three major novelists (Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow an Bernard Malamud) and a major American poet (Wallace Stevens). As the title of the book promises, Fuchs writers are thinkers. Fuchs is particularly illuminating in his pairings of Stevens and Santayana, Bellow and Freud, Bellow and Dostoevsky and their affinities and disaffinities in their views of self and world." --Eugene Goodheart, Brandeis University, and author of Mostly Grave Thoughts and Holding the Center "Daniel Fuchs is a distinguished critic in what is now a beleaguered humanist tradition. With its focus on a writer's character and cultural situation, Writers and Thinkers gives us a rich flow of insight, elegantly phrased, into the moral imagination of three major novelists (Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow an Bernard Malamud) and a major American poet (Wallace Stevens). As the title of the book promises, Fuchs writers are thinkers. Fuchs is particularly illuminating in his pairings of Stevens and Santayana, Bellow and Freud, Bellow and Dostoevsky and their affinities and disaffinities in their views of self and world." --Eugene Goodheart, Brandeis University, and author of Mostly Grave Thoughts and Holding the Center About the Author Daniel Fuchs is emeritus professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA. He is author of The Limits of Ferocity, Saul Bellow: Vision and RevisionThe Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens.