John Carey (critic)

Last updated

John Carey
Professor John Carey.jpg
Professor John Carey
Born (1934-04-05) 5 April 1934 (age 90)
Barnes, London
OccupationLiterary critic
LanguageEnglish
NationalityBritish
Alma mater St John's College, Oxford
Notable worksWhat Good are the Arts?
SpouseGill (1960–present)
ChildrenLeo & Thomas
Website
www.johncarey.org

John Carey, FBA , FRSL (born 5 April 1934) is a British literary critic, and post-retirement (2002) emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books. He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2003, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

Contents

Education and career

He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys' Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. He has held posts in a number of Oxford colleges, and is an emeritus fellow of Merton, where he became a professor in 1975, retiring in 2002. [1]

Literary criticism

Carey's scholarly work is generally agreed to be of the highest order and greatly influential. Among these productions is his co-edition, with Alastair Fowler, of the Poems of John Milton (Longman, 1968; revised 1980; 2nd ed. 2006); John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (Faber and Faber, 1981; revised 1990), a revolutionary study of Donne's work in the light of his life and family history; and The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens's Imagination (1973; 2nd ed. 1991).

He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. Since 1977, he has been the chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes including Saturday Review and Newsnight Review .

Views

He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expressed for example in his book What Good Are the Arts? (2005). Carey's 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 was a critique of Modernist writers (particularly T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells) for what Carey argues were their elitist and misanthropic views of mass society; in their place he called for a reappraisal of Arnold Bennett, 'the hero of this book', whose 'writings represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals' case against the masses'. [2] In his review of the book Geoff Dyer wrote that Carey picked out negative quotations from his subjects, while Stefan Collini responded that disdain for mass culture among some Modernist writers was already well-known among literary historians. [3]

Memoir

In 2014, he published a memoir The Unexpected Professor. It comprised distinct parts; childhood in wartime and the era of rationing, schooling, national service in the army; the academic career and scholarly study; his later period of book reviewing and literary journalism.

The early career described his first encounters with poetry, among them Milton, Jonson, Donne, Browning. The book contained crisp critical summaries of prose writers, among them Thackeray, Lawrence and Orwell. [4]

Personal

Carey was born in April 1934 in Barnes, then on the Surrey/London border, the youngest of their four recorded children, to Charles W. Carey and Winifred E. Carey, née Cook. [5] He was for decades a beekeeper.

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Arnold</span> English poet and cultural critic (1822–1888)

Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. He has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. He was also an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, and supported the concept of state-regulated secondary education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intellectual</span> Person who engages in critical thinking and reasoning

An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting, producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Gardner (critic)</span> English literary critic and academic

Dame Helen Louise Gardner, was an English literary critic and academic. Gardner began her teaching career at the University of Birmingham, and from 1966 to 1975 was a Merton Professor of English Literature, the first woman to have that position. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot, but also published on John Milton and William Shakespeare. She published over a dozen books, and received multiple honours.

John Andrew Sutherland is a British academic, newspaper columnist and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.

<i>The Examiner</i> (1808–1886) 19th century weekly newspaper

The Examiner was a weekly paper founded by Leigh and John Hunt in 1808. For the first fifty years it was a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles, but from 1865 it repeatedly changed hands and political allegiance, resulting in a rapid decline in readership and loss of purpose.

John Rayner Heppenstall was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Kermode</span> Manx writer, literary critic and professor

Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing.

John Haffenden is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Sheffield.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Bate</span> British author, scholar and critic

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment in the Department of English in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Sustainability in the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.

Karl Fergus Connor Miller FRSL was a Scottish literary editor, critic and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H. W. Garrod</span> British classical scholar

Heathcote William Garrod was a British classical scholar and literary scholar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Romer</span> British poet

Stephen Romer, FRSL is an English poet, academic and literary critic.

John Whitworth was a British poet. Born in India in 1945, he began writing poetry at Merton College, Oxford. He went on to win numerous prizes and publish in many highly regarded venues. He published twelve books: ten collections of his own work, an anthology of which he was the editor, and a textbook on writing poetry.

Selected Essays, 1917–1932 is a collection of prose and literary criticism by T. S. Eliot. Eliot's work fundamentally changed literary thinking and Selected Essays provides both an overview and an in-depth examination of his theory. It was published in 1932 by his employers, Faber & Faber, costing 12/6.

Constantinos Apostolos Patrides was a Greek–American academic and writer, and "one of the greatest scholars of Renaissance literature of his generation". His books list the name C. A. Patrides; his Christian name "Constantinos" was shortened to the familiar "Dinos" and "Dean" by friends.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murray Roston</span>

Murray (Meir) Roston is an Israeli Emeritus professor of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University.

Annabel M. Patterson is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.

<i>Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown</i> 1924 essay by Virginia Woolf

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity.

Arthur Lionel Stevenson (1902–1973) was a North American writer and lecturer. A leading authority on the literature of the Victorian period, he published biographies of William Makepeace Thackeray and George Meredith as well as a panoramic study of the English novel. He was James B. Duke Professor of English Literature at Duke University from 1955 until 1972.

References

  1. "Professor John Carey, MA, DPhil, FBA, FRSL". Merton.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 May 2015. Retrieved 30 January 2016.
  2. Carey, John (1992). The intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. Faber and Faber. p. 152. ISBN   0-571-16926-0.
  3. Collini, Stefan (1999). "With Friends Like These: John Carey and Noel Annan". English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture . Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.  298–303. ISBN   0-19-158890-3.
  4. Colllni, Steffan (27 February 2014). "The Unexpected Professor review – the puzzle of John Carey". The Guardian.
  5. "Index entry". FreeBMD. ONS. Retrieved 31 March 2014.