Hailed by The Times Educational Supplement as "superb", Penguin Critical Studies is a distinguished series of critical essays on the major works of literature. Ideal for students as well as serious readers.

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (Penguin Critical Studies)

Education & Teaching

Mengham, Rod

Studying & Workbooks

Penguin Uk

A noted poet investigates the origins of language development and how it affected societies and individuals throughout history, analyzing the way cultures are organized around language.

On Language: Descent from the Tower of Babel

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Little,Brown & Co

Henry Green (1905-1974) was the writer of nine technically outstanding novels, and of an autobiographical text. In the role of author he was intensely private, even secretive (Henry Green being a pseudonym), and his strange and heady writings derive their power in some way from their very secretiveness. In this 1982 study, Dr Mengham sets out to uncover the systematic basis of this quality in Green's writing, and to account for it in terms of the 'conditions of knowledge' of each text. Green, he argues, writes to maintain an 'idiom of the time', which constantly renews itself in a critical relation with the changing understanding of what goes to make us up - intellectually, socially, unconsciously. On the one hand, each of Green's books is treated on its own chronological succession; on the other, there is a continuous examination of manuscripts and typescripts making clear the development of certain writing procedures.

The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction: A Critical Study

This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader mounted in Hardy's later stories reveal the complexity of his motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry.

Gilmartin, Sophie

Edinburgh University Press

Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop. Mengham is a significant curator, organising exhibitions: 'There is no more productive engagement with someone else's artworks than finding the right way to show it, since artworks are always direct statements or questions about articulations of space, and the curator's job obviously is to enhance such questions and statements.' This discipline gives the writer a series of uniquely privileged perspectives, touching, lifting, moving, and re-moving the objects: 'nothing compares to living with art.' The book opens with themes: what is domestic space? what does the atrocity exhibition tell us? what is the refugee aesthetic? Essays on particular artists follow, including Marc Atkins, Stephen Chambers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anselm Kiefer, Laura Owens, Doris Salcedo, Agnes Thurnauer, Koen Vanmechelen, and Alison Wilding. Always, he is in dialogue with the work, rather than with the artist.

Midnight in the Kant Hotel: Art in Present Times

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Little Island Press

Laura Owens once said of more doctrinaire painters that "the weight of art history is what gets you that crusty, stodgy feeling, when you look at a work of art and you feel that the person hasn't stepped outside, hasn't looked in other wings of the Met, hasn't gone to a natural history museum." There is no danger of that in her own good-natured and elegant works, which seem to emulate Rousseau, Grandma Moses and the aesthetics of the 1960s and of vintage decorative arts at once. Robots in the garden, lions, hunters, romance and war are some of the subjects parading through, under passing influences as wide ranging as Dada performance, Japanese prints and Hindu beliefs. Birds grow larger than the trees they perch on, cats sniff at a pair of skulls and monkeys exchange wary glances. Elsewhere, Owens has broken away from the fine arts to move into wallpaper and textiles. Beyond all this straightforward beauty is constant inquiry into her chosen media. She has rejected naturalism in favor of depiction, representation and an unashamed pleasure in ornamentation, which, with her delight in pictorial grace, affords decoration a new dignity. She combines the abstract with the representational in a highly personal vocabulary, from which she creates an elaborate, elegant and quietly exuberant whole. Laura Owens collects the artist's complete works to date.

Laura Owens

Ruf, Beatrix

JRP|Ringier

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