The spirit of England
Subtitle: selected essays of Stephen Medcalf
By: edited by Brian Cummings and Gabriel Josipovici
Contributors: Cummings, Brian; Josipovici, Gabriel, 1940-
Publisher: Legenda
Published: 2010
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 287
ISBN-13: 9781906540371
Description: "Stephen Medcalf (1936-2007) was a dedicated University teacher all his life, but in the wider world he was an essayist, in the best traditional sense of that calling: a writer not of books but of substantial and justly celebrated essays, widely read in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Medcalf's abiding question to the world was the Psalmist's: 'What is man that thou art mindful of him?' His was a Blakean sense of Englishness, far from the chocolate-box painting or the television adaptation, and for him the strongest writers were those keenly aware of their roots in the classical, Anglo-Saxon or Celtic past. By gathering together Medcalf's most important work, this volume shows the coherence of his thinking, and of the elusive, complicated literary heritage he celebrated, one which acknowledges the Greco-Roman strain, the Christian strain, the down-to-earth humour and the gentle irony." "Fourteen substantial essays cover Virgil, the Bible, the English translation of Alfred, Piers Plowman, the 'half-alien culture' of the high Middle Ages, Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Usk, Shakespeare's images of resurrection, Horace and Kipling juxtaposed, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot's use of Ovid, P.G. Wodehouse, William Golding, John Betjeman, Geoffrey Hill and other writers. The book concludes with perhaps Medcalf's most personal essay of all: his account of finding a baby in a phone box on a cold Spring night, which first appeared in the Guardian Christmas Supplement in 2002"--Jacket.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Virgil at the turn of time; title: The coincidence of myth and fact; title: Classical translation in medieval England; title: On reading books from a half-alien culture; title: Piers Plowman and the Ricardian age in literature; title: The world and heart of Thomas Usk; title: Dreaming, looking, and seeing: Shakespeare and a myth of resurrection; title: Horace's Kipling; title: The achievement of G.K. Chesterton; title: T.S. Eliot's Metamorphoses: Ovid and The waste land; title: The innocence of P.G. Wodehouse; title: Bill and Mr. Golding's Daimon; title: Three modern English poets: John Betjeman, C.H. Sisson, Geoffrey Hill; title: Things new-born.