The Pensive Citadel

"Victor Brombert's title, borrowed from William Wordsworth's ingenious metaphor, "the pensive citadel," refers to the singular world of universities. In essays on the paradoxical nature of laughter, the art of rereading, Shakespeare, Montaigne (his model as essayist), and more, Brombert reflects on a lifetime of learning whose institutional supports have greatly changed since he began his university career in the 1950s. Yet, as Christy Wampole writes in her foreword, for all that has changed, so much of Brombert's long experience as a reader and teacher is richly familiar: "the angst of not doing enough during one's sabbatical, the stage fright before an important lecture, or the recurrent teaching-related nightmares. But also the good things: the joy of learning from one's students, of discovering something new each time you reread a book whose meanings you thought you'd depleted, or of realizing that you've changed the lives of many through your vocation." A veteran of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge who witnessed history's worst nightmares first hand, Brombert nevertheless approaches literature with a lightness of spirit, making the case for intellectual mobility and an openness to change. Indeed, the central section of this deeply pleasurable book, entitled "The Ludic Mode," stresses the playful aspect of all serious commerce with ideas, of all good teaching and good learning"--

A reflective volume of essays on literature and literary study from a storied professor. In The Pensive Citadel, Victor Brombert looks back on a lifetime of learning within a university world greatly altered since he entered Yale on the GI Bill in the 1940s. Yet for all that has changed, much of Brombert’s long experience as a reader and teacher is richly familiar: the rewards of rereading, the joy of learning from students, and most of all the insight to be found in engaging works of literature. The essays gathered here range from meditations on laughter and jealousy to new appreciations of Brombert’s lifelong companions Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, and Stendhal. A veteran of D-day and the Battle of the Bulge who witnessed history’s worst nightmares firsthand, Brombert nevertheless approaches literature with a lightness of spirit, making the case for intellectual mobility and openness to change. The Pensive Citadel is a celebration of a life lived in literary study, and of what can be learned from attending to the works that form one’s cultural heritage.

... a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase in the mind itself. Thus Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Stephen Hero: defines the phenomenon that has ever since been known as the literary epiphany. The essays gathered in this volume comprise a wide survey of this phenomenon. With recurrent reference to its most famous creators, notably William Wordsworth, who was the first to consciously explore and delineate those momentous spots in time in his Prelude, Walter Pater, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, this book intends to provide a broad and unbiased exploration into the various types and categories of the moment of moment that can be distinguished, ranging from William Blake, Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin through the nineteenth-century sonnet tradition and the naturalistic novel to modernist and postmodernist exponents such as Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bowen, Philip larkin and Seamus Heaney, and include contributions by acclaimed experts in the field such as Martin Bidney, Robert Langbaum, Jay Losey, and Ashton Nichols.

National Book Critics Circle Award, Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian Best Books of 2016 Thomas De Quincey was an obsessive. He was obsessed with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose Lyrical Ballads provided the script to his life, and by the idea of sudden death. Running away from school to pursue the two poets, De Quincey insinuated himself into their world. Basing his sensibility on Wordsworth’s and his character on Coleridge’s, he forged a triangle of unusual psychological complexity. Aged twenty-four, De Quincey replaced Wordsworth as the tenant of Dove Cottage, the poet’s former residence in Grasmere. In this idyllic spot he followed the reports of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families, including a baby, were butchered in their own homes. In his opium-soaked imagination the murderer became a poet while the poet became a murderer. Embedded in On Murder as One of the Fine Arts, De Quincey’s brilliant series of essays, Frances Wilson finds the startling story of his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Opium was the making of De Quincey, allowing him to dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, and divest himself of guilt. Opium also allowed him to write, and under the pseudonym “The Opium-Eater” De Quincey emerged as the strangest and most original journalist of his age. His influence has been considerable. Poe became his double; Dostoevsky went into exile with Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in his pocket; and Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vladimir Nabokov were all De Quincey devotees. There have been other biographies of Thomas De Quincey, but Guilty Thing is the first to be animated by the spirit of De Quincey himself. Following the growth of his obsessions from seed to full flowering and tracing the ways they intertwined, Frances Wilson finds the master key to De Quincey’s vast Piranesian mind. Unraveling a tale of hero worship and revenge, Guilty Thing brings the last of the Romantics roaring back to life and firmly establishes Wilson as one of our foremost contemporary biographers.