John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Walter David Jones CH was a British painter and modernist poet. As a painter he worked mainly in watercolour on portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and inscription painter. In 1965, Kenneth Clark took him to be the best living British painter, while both T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden put his poetry among the best written in their century. Jones's work gains form from his Christian faith and Welsh heritage.
Regeneration is a historical and anti-war novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1991. The novel was a Booker Prize nominee and was described by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication. It is the first book in the Regeneration Trilogy of novels on the First World War, being followed by The Eye in the Door in 1993, and then The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995.
Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet and artist. His Poems from the Trenches are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during the First World War.
Maxine Hong Kingston is an American novelist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction.
William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
Paul Fussell Jr. was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system. Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University (1955–1983) and at the University of Pennsylvania (1983–1994). He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt was the gap between the romantic myth and the reality of war; he made a "career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it".
Annette Kolodny was an American feminist literary critic and activist, held the position of College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her major scholarly writings examined the experiences of women on the American frontiers and the projection of female imagery onto the American landscape. Her other writings examined some aspects of feminism after the 1960s; the revision of dominant themes in American studies; and the problems faced by women and minorities in the American academy.
J. Neil Carmelo Garcia is a Filipino writer, professor, and cultural critic. He is currently a professor of English, Creative Writing, and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman and is known for his works on queer studies and gay culture in the Philippines.
In Parenthesis is a work of literature by David Jones first published in England in 1937. Although Jones had been known solely as an engraver and painter prior to its publication, the book won the Hawthornden Prize and the admiration of writers such as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Based on Jones's own experience as an infantryman in the First World War, In Parenthesis narrates the experiences of English private John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment, starting with embarkation from England and ending seven months later with the assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme. The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse and prose, is highly allusive, and ranges in tone from formal to Cockney colloquial and military slang.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar and Professor of English. He specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart (2010) and the essay collections Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Nina Baym (1936–2018) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1963 to 2004.
Tom Zoellner is an American author and journalist. He is the author of popular non-fiction books which take multidimensional views of their subject. His work has been widely reviewed and has been featured on The Daily Show. His 2020 book Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize in history and in 2021 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
John Felstiner, was an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests included poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic poems, literary translation, Vietnam era poetry and Holocaust studies. John Felstiner died in February 24, 2017 at the age of 80. He had been suffering from the effects of progressive aphasia at his time of death, at a hospice near Stanford.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
Choi Jae-seo was a South Korean literary scholar, a critic of English literature, and a novelist. He graduated from Keijō Imperial University, received his M.A. from this University, and later taught at Yonsei University. As editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Humanities Review, he was a forerunner of progressive literary criticism. Although he later presided over pro-Japanese literary journals under pressure from the ruling Japanese, he undoubtedly remains an important figure in Korean modernism of the 1930s.
