John Carey (literary historian)

John Carey

John Carey (born April 5, 1934 in Barnes ) is a British literary historian and critic. Until 2002 he was a professor of English literature at the Merton College of the University of Oxford .

Literary criticism

Carey has chaired the Booker Prize Committee twice, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the Man Booker International Prize Jury in 2005 . He is the senior literary critic for the London Sunday Times and has appeared on various British radio and television programs.

Positions

He is an advocate of anti-elitist views on high culture , as he formulated them, for example, in the book “What Good Are the Arts?” (2005). His work "The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939" (1992) dealt critically with modernist writers (namely TS Eliot , Virginia Woolf , William Butler Yeats , DH Lawrence and HG Wells ); he accused them of an elitist and misanthropic view of mass society .

Works (selection)

• Milton (1970)
• Thackeray : Prodigal Genius (1977)
• English Renaissance Studies: Presented To Dame Helen Gardner In Honor Of Her Seventieth Birthday (1979)
• John Donne : Life, Mind and Art (1981), 2nd revised edition 1990
• Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969–1986 (1987)
• The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992)
• Pure Pleasure: a Guide to the Twentieth Century's Most Enjoyable Books (2000)
• What good are the arts? (2005)
• William Golding : The Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies' (2009)
• The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life (2014)

Editorships

• The Poems of John Milton (1968) (with Alastair Fowler )
• Andrew Marvell : A Critical Anthology (1969)
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1969)
• Complete Shorter Poems of John Milton (1971), 2nd, revised edition 1997
• William Golding : The Man and His Books (1986)
• John Donne . The Major Works (1990), 2nd, revised edition 2000
• Selected Poetry of John Donne (1998)
• Faber Book of Utopias (2000)
• George Orwell , Essays (2002)
• Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (2002)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• John Carey website
• A Talent for Writing, and Falling Into Things (by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, July 6, 2010)