Harry Levin – författare

"The author explores this tradition in depth and defines it with a breadth of vision, a dynamic vigor and freedom rarely paralleled today....His method, flexible, generous, humane in the best sense of the word, eschews pedantry, dogma, useless theorizing and scholastic argumentation."--The New York Times Book Review. "I wish to make it clear that The Gates of Horn represents an outstanding critical accomplishment."--Saturday Review. In the Odyssey, Homer describestwo gates of the imagination: one of ivory through which fictitious dreams pass, and the other of horn, through which nothing but the truth may pass. Realism is the type of literature that passesthrough the horn, and in this significant study of the genre Levin examines a major form of Realism--the French novel--and focuses on five of its masters--Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. Now available in paperback, Levin's study is a veritable reconstruction of the artistic and intellectual life of a nation.

Harry Levin--one of America's major literary critics--offers a brilliant and original study of the whole world of comedy, concentrating on playwrights through the centuries, from Aristophanes and Plautus in classical times to Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht and their recent successors.Viewing the comic repertory as a richly varied yet broadly unified whole, Levin provides a synthesis of theories and practice. Isolating two fundamental aspects of comedy--the ludicrous and irreverent "playboy," whom we laugh with, and the ridiculous and forbidding "killjoy," whom we laugh at--he traces the dialectical interplay of these components throughout history and across various cultures and media. While mainly focusing on the plays and the stage, with discussions of such major dramatists as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molière, and William Congreve, Levin also includes essays on such related topics as humor, satire, and games.

Because Harry Levin’s view is large, as opposed to the many necessary exegeses and close textual studies, he leads the reader easily into the delights to be found in Joyce, from the comparatively simple prose of Dubliners, through Ulysses and into the complexities of Finnegans Wake. The insight and brilliance of this "critical introduction," first published by New Directions in 1941, make it as rewarding for the expert as the student. For this revised edition, Mr. Levin, who is Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, has made revisions and added a new preface and a long "postscript" which he calls "Revising Joyce." He examines the works that have come to light in the last few years and some of the important later biographical writings about Joyce.

The late Harry Levin had an international reputation as the world's foremost comparatiste, and he was among the most knowledgeable Shakespeare scholars in the world. Before he died, Harry Levin had planned to publish this essay collection which examines key scenes in a number of Shakespeare's plays.

The Power of Blackness is a profound and searching reinterpretation of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, the three classic American masters of fiction. It is also an experiment in critical method, an exploration of the myth-making process by way of what may come to be known as literary iconology.

The essays in this classic volume range from broad concerns with critical theory and aesthetic formulation to specific analysis of forms and texts. Levin discusses such matters as the symbolic interpretation of literature, the development of literary criticism during the past half-century, European attitudes toward contemporary American writers, and re-evaluations of Joyce, Proust, Balzac, Cervantes, Melville, and Hemingway. Because Levin is both a learned scholar and imaginative critic, there is no comparable book that offers the wit, taste, and learning one finds in these pages. His historical and comparative approaches to literary theory enable Levin to place a given work precisely by relating it to other works and manifestations of culture. World literature is not the province of this work. But Levin views it as the horizon against which our own traditions may be measured. Just as anthropologists discover similar processes working through diverse cultures, so through can we glean understanding of common patterns through the analysis of world literature, our own peculiarly specialized branch of the science of man. The effect of convention, in shaping the extent to which literature may be conceived as an institution, has been widely discussed. A Gallery of Mirrors raises theoretical questions that touch the methodology of humanistic scholarship, with regard to other disciplines, and the status of art, with regard to other modes of knowledge. With changing schools of critical thought, Levin relies considerably on semantics as a precision instrument for defining concepts in the terms of those for whom they were most meaningful.

The late Harry Levin had an international reputation as the world's foremost comparatiste, and he was among the most knowledgeable Shakespeare scholars in the world. Before he died, Harry Levin had planned to publish this essay collection which examines key scenes in a number of Shakespeare's plays.