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5.0 out of 5 stars
Theory and Love of Literature, September 6, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age (Hardcover)
Edward Ahearn, honored University Professor at Brown University, here commits to paper subjects he has examined through reading and teaching. To deal with the visionary, he makes the obligatory stop through Blake, whose fiery social conscience and mythological incoherence made him the template for future literary "visionaries": Nerval and Lautreamont among the French; Burroughs; and the voices of Dadaism and Surrealism. As some of these writings are impenetrably concentrated, and outright antagonistic towards the reader, it is Ahearn's task to bridge the reader and these fictions, in order to communicate his own analyses of them. This task he handles with the same directness and precision of his college lectures, along with the exactness of a critic who presupposes some familiarity with these texts. As a work of criticism and of writing, an achievement
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