`The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."' Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the `intellectual poetry' of the critic who, whether or not he `represents the future of the profession', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism. Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.

Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style (Critics of the Twentieth Century)

Atkins, G. Douglas

Biographies & Memoirs

Routledge

The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Univ Pr of Kentucky

Reading deconstruction, deconstructive reading

University Press of Kentucky

Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems

Humor & Satire

John Dryden's celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism is revealed in this provocative study as the culmination of a lifelong search that began with his youth in an actively Puritan family. Atkin's familiarity with the religious thought of the times allows him to range widely among Dryden's contemporaries and predecessors and to bring a fresh perspective to those key poems in Dryden's religious development: Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. Through a sensitive reappraisal of all Dryden's texts―including those less widely known―Atkins shows that Dryden had a lifelong antipathy for all "priests" of whatever sect, whether pagan or Christian; by concentrating on the theme of Dryden's opposition to the clergy and his efforts toward articulating a faith for the layman, Atkins provides an important new way of tracing and evaluating the changes in Dryden's religious position and, with this perspective, offers a new interpretation of Dryden's conversion.

Atkins, George Douglas

Religion & Spirituality

In this eminently readable book, G. Douglas Atkins continues the efforts undertaken in Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading to open eighteenth-century texts to the insights of recent critical theory. Through close readings of most of Pope's major poems, Atkins demonstrates how the powerful theoretical movement known as deconstruction enriches, challenges, and significantly modifies our understanding of the work of the greatest poet of the eighteenth century. The first full-scale deconstructive study of Augustan poetry, Quests of Difference at once offers a fresh and compelling reading of Pope and makes an important contribution to constructive criticism. Though it will be of particular interest and importance to specialists in both eighteenth-century studies and criticism and theory, Quests of Difference is written with the general reader in mind. All readers will appreciate the intelligence and balance of Atkin's approach as well as the clarity, informality, and grace that distinguish his writing.

Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Univ of Georgia Pr

Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth

The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a “greased pig,” for example, or a “pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters.
Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means―and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. “The essay was, historically,” notes Atkins, “the first form to take the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of literature.”
Atkins also considers the essay’s basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is “home-cosmography,” to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the essay’s supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain “sneakiness” as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.

University of Georgia Press

Reading Essays: An Invitation

Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the “art of living.”Atkins’s readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language―and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of the form, including Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are included, as are works by Americans James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and E. B. White. Atkins also provides readings of a number of contemporary essayists, among them Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Cynthia Ozick.Many of the readings are of essays that Atkins has used successfully in the classroom, with undergraduate and graduate students, for many years. In his introduction Atkins offers practical advice on the specific demands essays make and the unique opportunities they offer, especially for college courses. The book ends with a note on the writing of essays, furthering the author’s contention that reading should not be separated from writing.Reading Essays continues in the tradition of such definitive texts as Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. Throughout, Atkins reveals the joy, delight, grace, freedom, and wisdom of “the glorious essay.”

Essays & Correspondence

Twelve clear and effective essays shed new light on Shakespeare. The contributors write in, on, and sometimes against deconstruction, the most powerful and controversial theoretical movement in decades. Writing about several plays and sonnets, the critics explore the contribution of deconstruction to our understanding of Shakespeare. This unique and wide-ranging collection of essays will interest Shakespeareans and theorists alike.

Shakespeare and Deconstruction: 2nd Edition (American University Studies)

Bergeron, David M.

Dramas & Plays

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

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