Volume 40, Number 17 · October 21, 1993
The Miraculous Mandarin
By Charles Rosen
William Empson: Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume One, Donne and the New Philosophy
edited by John Haffenden
Cambridge University Press, 296 pp., $49.95
William Empson: Argufying, Essays on Literature and Culture
edited by John Haffenden
London: Chatto and Windus, 657 (out of print) pp.
William Empson was the finest critic in our century of English literature, but each of his books sparked a vigorous protest and even expressions of outrage. The first and still most famous of his writings is Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), written when he was a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate at Cambridge University, and the story goes that he produced this very substantial book in only two weeks. He never got his degree at Cambridge because his bedmaker discovered contraceptives in his room. (When charged with this offense, Empson explained that he was sleeping with a lady don, and suggested to the disciplinary committee that they would surely prefer that he did not get her pregnant.) For the next decade, he taught English in Japan and China. Returning to England at the beginning of the Second World War, he worked for the BBC as China editor from 1942 to 1946, and then went back to Peking.
Review, 6981 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |