In On Culture and Literature Marvin Mudrick explores the work of major figures in a wide range of fields: literature, political and musical criticism, autobiography, the novel and science.
In this thoughtful appraisal of the novels and writings of Jane Austen, Mr. Mudrick shows Austen to be a writer of acute and irreverent sensibilities who, despite the constricted circumstances of her life, managed to create in her novels an enduring microcosm of the larger world. With deep insight into the creative mind and its artistic motives, Mr. Mudrick examines all of her writings as aspects of a developing personal irony, an irony that later became the vital principle of her art. It was her ironic detachment, he maintains, that enabled her to expose and dissect, in novels that are masterpieces of comic wit and brilliant satire, the follies and delusions of eighteenth-century English society.
A collection such as Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? is an invitation to meet some of them. We meet heroes and monsters and plenty of people in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics.
Mudrick Transcribed contains riveting and comical dialogue from transcripts made in the early 1980s of Marvin Mudrick's classes and talks. “A one-man commando squad and independent operator, Marvin Mudrick was the most maverick literary critic of his time and ours—ferocious, funny, and fearlessly honest," says James Wolcott of Vanity Fair.
The Man in the Machine consists of new assessments of major writers and critics by the author of whose last book Roger Sale wrote: "T. S. Eliot was not so good a reviewer as Marvin Mudrick is."
The man the Village Voice called "the Mickey Spillane of Belles Lettres" and the Washington Post called a "literary curmudgeon, randy iconoclast, and a delight" outdoes himself in his fifth book, an outrageous and virtuoso display of literary and historical portraiture.
Writing Great Tom: T. S. Eliot & the Keepers of the Flame was T. S. Matthews’s backup project as he worked on the first major biography of T. S. Eliot, Great Tom: Notes Towards a Definition of T. S. Eliot, published by Harper & Row in 1973. So many barriers were put in his way that he thought he might not be able to produce a biography. He decided to keep this account, which he described as "living a detective story," in reserve. It is composed of reflections, interviews, and dozens of letters to and from people ranging from Robert Lowell and Edmund Wilson, Mary Trevelyan and Valerie (Mrs. T. S.) Eliot. In the end, he managed to complete his biography and this diary was filed away with his papers, which eventually went to Princeton University. Writing Great Tom is the story of a writer’s efforts to deal with the guardians of the flame. Biographers will sympathize. Readers will get a direct, intimate look at the challenging work biographers do. Matthews was able to interview people who had died before later biographers began their work, and Writing Great Tom provides the background to much of the detail that appeared in the book. Writing Great Tom also shows how two women important in Eliot’s life, his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, and his companion of many decades, Emily Hale, were for many years hidden from view. He also interviewed Mary Trevelyan, whose account of her relationship with Eliot was published in 2022 - more than sixty years after she wrote it - having faced similar barriers. Sara Fitzgerald, who discovered the Matthews archive, has contributed a foreword. Fitzgerald is the author of the novel A Poet’s Girl. Her biography of Emily Hale will be published in 2024. Read the foreword.
Sherman’s Invisible Poets pioneered in the rediscovery of nineteenth-century Afro-American literature. Black poets of that century not only were invisible: they were also forced to publish ‘mute’ texts, texts doomed not to be read because of the pervasive racism in American society. Sherman’s work of literary resurrection is a signal achievement, combining deft historical detective work with a subtle critical sensibility.
The Berkshire Edition includes a foreword by Jaki Shelton Green, 9th Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century brings into view over 130 other Black men and women who published poetry in America during the century between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. In spite of their impressive achievements, these poets’ works have been out of print, their few biographies incomplete and unreliable, and criticism of their poetry rare and often biased. The author, Joan R. Sherman, was ahead of her time in seeking "to strip myth and misinformation from their lives and to offer the most accurate biographies and bibliographies obtainable after a century of neglect." In the only comprehensive and realistic appraisal of their contributions to American literature, Sherman intensively studies twenty-six representative poets of the nineteenth century, analyzing their poetry and providing the first significant profiles of their extraordinary life experiences. About three dozen other poets also receive attention. Their work, which ranges from "militant, race-proud jeremiads to sentimental nature and love lyrics," faithfully conforms to nineteenth-century poetic standards. At the same time, it reflects the changing American political and cultural scene and provides an invaluable record of over a hundred years of Black experience as articulated by sensitive and talented American writers.-- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard
- Sale!
The Waste Land and Other Poems in this centenary edition presents one of the twentieth century's most influential poetic works, first published in 1922, in the aftermath of a world war and global pandemic. In addition to The Waste Land, the book includes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “La Figlia che Piange,” and “The Hollow Men.” The layout is open, elegant, and easy to read. The design is based on both the original Hogarth Press edition, produced by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and the American Boni & Liveright design. These poems have wide emotional range and resonance, and the foreword by QIU Xiaolong explains how he, as a student in China, came to love Eliot's poetry and what it has meant, and means today, to readers around the world. (As a young editor, Berkshire's CEO Karen Christensen worked for Valerie Eliot, who recounted her work on the 1971 facsimile edition of the rediscovered manuscript.) 
The Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World explores the topic at the heart of social initiatives and academic endeavors from around the world.
Back to School? Check out Books for Courses including This Is China & This Fleeting World|cservice@berkshirepublishing.com
