Books by Frank Kermode

Frank Kermode attempts to determine the criteria for classical literature through an analysis of the social and intellectual importance of great works of the past.

Includes essay on Botticelli that traces the artist's sudden popularity in the nineteenth century for reasons that have more to do with poetry than painting.

This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history.

Kermode assesses the revolutionary transformations in literary criticism over the last fifteen years and places them in historical perspective. Examining novels ranging in scope from a 1907 bestseller to the avant-garde works of various periods, he includes such writers as Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Michel Butor, and Thomas Pynchon.

This classic work, back in print for the first time in over a decade, questions the public's harsh perception of the artist, while at the same time gently poking fun at the artists' own, often inflated self-image.

Kermode examines enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible-and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure.

The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished literary critic, has been thinking about them all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime's thinking. The great English tragedies were all written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. They are often in language that is difficult to us, and must have been hard even for contemporaries. How and why did Shakespeare's language develop as it did? Kermode argues that the resources of English underwent major change around 1600. The originality of Kermodes's writing, and the intelligence of his discussion, make this book a landmark.