David Daiches – författare

"Why do we spend time reading and discussing books which tell of events which never in fact occurred?" The question is elementary – and yet, as David Daiches suggests in this provocative study, it is the elementary questions that are never answered. Although literary criticism today is more concerned with technique than with the basic question of value, the question of value underlies all the others. Professor Daiches therefore directs this book to the search for the basic function and purpose of imaginative prose and poetry.A Study of Literature is not, however, an obscure book of literary theory; it contains abundant and pungent examples and critical analyses – of prose fiction, of modern writing, and of the nature of poetry. "It's main purpose," as Professor Daiches says, "is to help the reader of works of imaginative literature to see what he is reading, to understand just what it is that he gets from different kinds of reading, and to discriminate between those different kinds."

A work by an eminent critic which addresses itself to values in literature, and attempts to answer the simple and elusive question, Why read a work of imaginative literature?

Edinburgh is a city whose history is written on its face. The Old Town on its crowded rock, sloping down from the Castle to Holyroodhouse, has not significantly changed its atmosphere since the turbulent fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when riots, processions, or public executions jammed the High Street. And the very different era that followed the bloody religious wars of the seventeenth century is epitomized by the elegant streets and squares of the New Town - the eighteenth-century Enlightenment whose writers, philosophers and lawyers made Edinburgh famous. This anthology of extracts from letters, memoirs, diaries, novels and biographies of interesting visitors and inhabitants, including the writings of Scott, Boswell, Cockburn, John Knox and many others, recreates for today's visitors the drama, the history, and the life of the city in buildings and places that can still be visited. The daring Scottish recapture of the Castle from the English in 1313; the confrontation between Calvinist John Knox and Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in Holyroodhouse; an eye-witness account of the execution of Montrose at the Mercat Cross in 1650; reeking slop-pails in the wynds and polite manners in the ballrooms. . .