Bøger af John Carey

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature

After its publication in 1667, John Milton's Paradise Lost was celebrated throughout Europe as a supreme achievement of the human spirit.

A study of the fascinating relationship between media and everyday life. It investigates the human factors involved in technological change and their implications for future media. It is suitable for media and communication scholars, historians, organizational theorists, and industry professionals.

Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxford's oldest English Literature professorship.He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also his inspiring meetings with writers and poets - Auden, Graves, Larkin, Heaney - and his forty-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times.This is a book about the joys of reading - in effect, an informal introduction to the great works of English literature. But it is also about war and family, and how an unexpected background can give you the insight and the courage to say the unexpected thing.

The Faber Book of Science introduces hunting spiders and black holes, gorillas and stardust, protons, photons and neutrinos. In his acclaimed anthology, John Carey plots the development of modern science from Leonardo da Vinci to Chaos Theory. The emphasis is on the scientists themselves and their own accounts of their breakthroughs and achievements. The classic science-writers are included - Darwin, T.H. Huxley and Jean Henri Fabre tracking insects through the Provencal countryside. So too are today's experts - Steve Jones on the Human Genome Project, Richard Dawkins on DNA and many other representatives of the contemporary genre of popular science-writing which, John Carey argues, challenges modern poetry and fiction in its imaginative power.

A new approach to Thackeray. Although this study embraces all his work, it switches attention from his late novels, and bases the case for his imaginative vitality on the multifarious material - reviews, travel books, burlesques, Punch articles - that he turned out, mostly under severe financial stress, at the start of his writing career. Here was the breeding ground of Vanity Fair; here we find the subversive Thackeray, foe of humbug and high art, waylaying snobbery and the cant of social reformers with bravura and buffoonery - the Thackeray who, in Trollope's words, 'laughed, and ate, and drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion.' In portraying the range and intensity of Thackeray's imagination, topics singled out include: light and painting; ballet dancers; pantomime; haute cuisine; time's ruins; and the rainbow realm of commerce. The picture of Thackeray, as man and artist, that emerges, is fresh and challenging.

An exploration of the strange poetry of Dickens's imagination by leading academic and critic John Carey.Setting aside the usual interpretations of Dickens's work, A Violent Effigy delves into the wonderful, terrible fantasy world it inhabited. It shows Dickens torn between the appeal of violence and a fanatical orderliness: he was attracted by characters who commit murder or burst into flame or want to eat one another, but also required people soaped and regimented. The children he created were either the pious gnomes beloved of Victorian readers or callous, sharp-nosed children who pick out adults by the odd personal atmospheres they carry around. Among his females are mythic women whose insidious miniature weapons - needles, scissors - threaten the dominant male. He created a shadow-land between life and death, peopled by effigies, walking coffins, waxworks, stuffed creatures and disturbingly animated corpses. John Carey skilfully shows how Dickens demolished Victorian shams, while keeping at bay the terrors of his fantasy. He celebrates, above all, Dickens' peculiar genius for renewing the world by the curious lights he saw in it.

'Donne is perhaps the most intellectual of English poets, and John Carey is perhaps the most intelligent of contemporary English literary critics. The encounter, as one might expect, is fierce and enthralling... This book is sensitive, searching, powerful, exciting, provocative and witty. It is a superb achievement.' Christopher Hill, TLSJohn Donne: Life, Mind and Art is a unique attempt to see Donne whole. Beginning with an account of his life, it takes as its domain not only the whole range of the poetry, but also the sermons, the letters, the spiritual and controversial works, and such highly personal documents as the treatise on suicide. The result is a clearer picture than has hitherto emerged of one of the most intricate and compelling of literary personalities.'The one book we have needed all along... A magnificent exercise in reappraisal. I have never read a critical work which reaches as deeply inside the mind of its subject.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times'Carey's book is itself alive with the kind of energy it attributes to Donne.' Christopher Ricks, London Review of Books

William Golding was born in 1911 and educated at his local grammar school and Brasenose College, Oxford. He published a volume of poems in 1934 and during the war served in the Royal Navy. Afterwards he returned to being a schoolmaster in Salisbury. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was an immediate success, and was followed by a series of remarkable novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and was knighted in 1988. He died in 1993.

C++ is a mature multi-paradigm programming language that enables you to write high-level code with great control over the hardware. This book updates your working knowledge of modern C++ by showing how you can use algorithms and data structures to build scalable, efficient modern applications.

This book is a study of the rich and fascinating traditions found early Irish literature concerning smiths and the fashioning of metal. The smith had a special status within the traditional societies of early Ireland and elsewhere in the Celtic-speaking world.

An exploration of the links between the languages, cultures and traditions of the Celtic peoples of Ireland and Britain through an analysis of literary sources, place or people names and the Gaelic language.

Do the arts make us better people? Why should "high" art be thought higher than "low"? In the first part of this spirited polemic, Carey returns startling answers to these and related questions. In the second part he makes a provocative case for the superiority of literature to all other arts.

Contains Milton's English poems, with the exception of "Paradise Lost", together with translations and texts of his Latin, Italian and Greek poems. This work presents extensive notes and headnotes to show Milton's allusions and synthesize the judgements and disagreements of a bewildering array of modern critics.

English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in honour of her seventieth birthday