About the Book
In a series of penetrating and attractively readable essays, Stefan Collini explores aspects of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from the early twentieth century to the present. Common Writing focuses chiefly on writers, critics, historians, and journalists who occupied wider public roles as cultural commentators or intellectuals, as well as on the periodicals and other genres through which they attempted to reach such audiences. Among the figures discussed are T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, J.B. Priestley, C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ignatieff. The essays explore the variety of such figures' writings - something that can get overlooked or forgotten when they are treated exclusively in terms of their contribution to one established or professional category such as 'novelist' or 'historian' - while capturing their distinctive writing voices and those indirect or implicit ways in which they position or reveal themselves in relation to specific readerships, disputes, and traditions. These essays engage with recent biographies, collections of letters, and new editions of classic works, thereby making some of the fruits of recent scholarly research available to a wider audience. Collini has been acclaimed as one of the most brilliant essayists of our time, and this collection shows him at his subtle, perceptive, and trenchant best. Common Writing will appeal to (and delight) readers interested in literature, history, and contemporary cultural debate.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Part I: Literary Culture
1: Modernists: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
2: Hierophants: C. Day-Lewis and Graham Greene
3: Notables: J.B. Priestley, C.S. Lewis, Maurice Bowra
4: Critics (I): William Empson and F.R Leavis
5: Critics (II): Lionel Trilling and Raymond Williams
6: Realists: 'The Movement', Kingsley Amis, David Lodge
Interlude
7: Media: Little Magazines, the TLS, New Left Review, Radio Four
Part II: Public Debate
8: Moralists: J.L. and Barbara Hammond, R.H. Tawney and Richard Hoggart, R.M. Titmuss
9: Migrants: Nikolaus Pevsner, Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Gellner
10: Historian-intellectuals? Eileen Power, Herbert Butterfield, Hugh Trevor-Roper
11: New Orwells'? Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Timothy Garton Ash
12: Politician-intellectuals? Roy Jenkins and Michael Ignatieff
13: Social Analysts: 'Aspiration', Attitudes, Inequality
About the Author :
Stefan Collini was Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge until 2014. Educated at Cambridge and Yale, he taught at the University of Sussex for 12 years before moving to Cambridge in 1986. He is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other periodicals. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical
Society.
Review :
eloquently acerbic prose
His [Collini's] task here, which he performs with admirable aplomb, is to eulogize the passing order ... [an] absorbing book
One of the strengths of Common Writing is the success with which Collini is able to show why his discipline matters.
Collini offers a series of companionable, entertaining and often insightful considerations of his subjects. He has a gift for evoking a powerful sense of a particular writer's work and personality; his attention to their use of language is usually careful, sensitive and revealing; and he shows a willingness to argue against himself that lends his judgements extra subtlety, interest and weight.
elegant and arch series of essays on modern English intellectual life
at his best he [Collini] transforms our understanding of an author and the world in which he -- and it is almost always he -- works ... it would be worth handing these volumes on to students to give them a keener sense of how to write, for both these authors are brilliant stylists as well as important thinkers; indeed, they make the point ... that to write well is to think well. If they convey nothing more than that -- and, read attentively, they will convey far more -- these books will have served a most useful purpose.
Collini provides intelligent discussions of the lives and works of a range of individuals -- writers, literary critics, historians, and other intellectuals -- whose work has appealed to an audience beyond the strictly scholarly or academically inclined ... The range of the book is welcome, in particular because it offers thoughtful commentary on figures who may be less familiar, such as R. M. Titmuss, Herbert Butterfield, Timothy Garton Ash, and specialists in other fields ... Recommended.
