ABRAMS, Meyer Howard.

£875 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper in the year following publication, "Best Sarafan(?) - In memory of Cambridge in the salad days. Mike Abrams, November, 1954". This book "almost single-handedly conferred legitimacy on the study of Romantic poetry, which had been held in low regard by the followers of New Criticism, then in its ascendancy" (Grimes).In the work, M. H. "Mike" Abrams (1912-2015) argues that pre-Romantic literature and art sought to, as Shakespeare said, "hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature"; in contrast, the Romantics invented the concept of the mind as a lamp, or "a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives" (p. viii). Abrams also famously edited the Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962).

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