Selected Writings (Oxford World's Classics)
by William Hazlitt
from Oxford University Press, USA
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) developed a variety of identities as a writer: essayist, philosopher, critic of literature, drama and art, biographer, political commentator, and polemicist. Praised for his eloquence, he was also reviled by conservatives for his radical politics. This edition, thematically organized for ease of access, contains some of his best-known essays, such as "The Indian Jugglers" and "The Fight," as well as more obscure pieces on politics, philosophy, and culture.
On The Pleasure of Hating
by William Hazlitt
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Hazlitt in Love: A Fatal Attachment
by Jon Cook
from Short Books
When William Hazlitt moved into 9 Southampton Buildings, Holborn, England, in August 1820, little did he know that his life would soon be turned upside down. On meeting 19-year-old Sarah Walker, his new landlady's daughter, as she served him breakfast on his first morning, he conceived a deep infatuation. The intensity of this obsession would eventually lead him to divorce his wife and write the most controversial book of his career, Liber Amoris. Passion, intrigue, love, and deception come together in this intoxicating account of a wild and romantic chapter in the life of a genius.
Selected Essays of William Hazlitt 1778 to 1830
by William Hazlitt
from Kessinger Publishing, LLC
1930. Hazlitt was an English writer remembered for his humanitarian essays. He was one of the great masters of the miscellaneous essay, displaying a keen intellect, sensibility, and wide scope of interest and knowledge. His best-known work is The Spirit of the Age, a collection of portraits of his contemporaries, including Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Jeremy Bentham, and Sir Walter Scott. The essays in this volume are divided into the following headings: On Life in General; On Writers and Writing; On Painters and Painting; On Actors and Acting; and Characters. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
Table-Talk, Essays on Men and Manners
by William Hazlitt
from IndyPublish
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, often esteemed the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson. Indeed, Hazlitt's writings and remarks on Shakespeare's plays and characters are rivaled only by those of Johnson in their depth, insight, originality, and imagination. Hazlitt came of Irish Protestant stock, and of a branch of it which moved in the reign of George I from the county of Antrim to Tipperary. In 1798 Hazlitt was introduced to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. He published several volumes of essays, including The Round Table and Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, both in 1817. His best-known work is The Spirit of the Age (1825), a collection of portraits of his contemporaries, including Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Jeremy Bentham, and Sir Walter Scott.
Metropolitan Writings
by William Hazlitt
from Carcanet Press Ltd.
The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays (Blackwell Anthologies)
by William Hazlitt
from Wiley-Blackwell
In this selection from the two-volume Plain Speaker, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu have given priority to essays that address some of the most important critical issues both in romantic studies today and the poetics of prose.
- Provides the only edition of The Plain Speaker available outside libraries since 1928.
- Contains Hazlitt's seminal essays on plain speaking and the major romantic topics.
- Includes a brilliant introduction by Tom Paulin, the greatest poet-critic of his generation and the editorial expertise of Duncan Wu.
The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (Literary Studies)
by Tom Paulin
from Faber & Faber
In The Day-Star of Liberty, Tom Paulin sets out to place William Hazlitt-master of the essay form, the first major art and drama critic, and one of the most outstanding political and literary journalists Britain has ever produced-in his rightful position as a great prose writer and an exemplary literary artist. Not only are the importance of Hazlitt's Irish background and the significance of the Unitarian culture in which he was brought up central to this portrait but the sheer intellectual joy that is evident in Hazlitt's writing and that he wished his readers to share is communicated with comparable energy and relish through Paulin's own prose. A work of critical restitution, The Day-Star of Liberty restores an unjustly neglected figure to the literary canon and shows the means by which Hazlitt's creative genius transformed journalism and criticism into art forms, making it possible for Hazlitt's collected works to be read as one of the great Romantic autobiographies.
16 Pages of Black-and-White Art Notes/Bibliography/Index
Tom Paulin was born in Leeds, England, in 1949. He is the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford University.
Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power (Oxford English Monographs)
by Uttara Natarajan
from Oxford University Press, USA
The "only pretension, of which I am tenacious," wrote Hazlitt, "is that of being a metaphysician"; but his metaphysics, and particularly what this book identifies as his power principle, has until now been neglected. This exciting book studies Hazlitt's development of the power principle as a counter to the pleasure principle of the Utilitarians, and examines the revelation of power in his philosophy of discourse, his account of imaginative structure, his theory of genius, and his moral theory.
Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History
by Deborah White
from Stanford University Press
The book opens with an examination of mid-eighteenth-century debates about the role of superstition in the constitution of a national literary tradition. It considers, in particular, how Collins’s odes figure Scotland as the site of a “superstitious” poetry that must be assimilated into British history even as Collins questions the very framework of assimilation. This ambiguous defense of superstition in the national polity is rewritten by romanticism as a defense of imagination. For the romantics, the concept of imagination involves an explicit theorization of how the mind’s projections play a constitutive role in what appear to be social norms and economic facts.
Hazlitt clarifies this position in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The Essay develops a rhetorical theory of imagination in order to deconstruct the entire metaphysical basis of self-interest on which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy is based. Hazlitt’s political pamphlets bring this argument to bear on his analysis of the economic interests fueling the Napleonic wars. Despite Hazlitt’s enormous and widely acknowledged influence, his writings have been little studied on their own account. Romantic Returns underlies their centrality to the romantic articulation of aesthetics and politics.
The final sections of the book engage Shelley’s complex interrogation of the contradictions involved in just such articulations. In both his poetry and prose, Shelley turns to law and history as fields in which these contradictions can be negotiated or even resolved. But Shelley, who once called poets “unacknowledged legislators,” suggests that violence may be unavoidable in any imaginative legislation that attempts to realize itself in properly “historical” action. The passage from poetry to politics cannot evade the problem of force. Tracing the crossings between “superstition,” “imagination,” and “history” in all three of these writers, Romantic Returns shows how difficult it is to maintain such crossings. In doing so, it shows, too, the continuing challenge of romanticism to contemporary historicism.
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