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Doris L. Eder

Author

Yeats & Company

A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers. By Hugh Kenner. Knopf. $16. 95. Kenner's title is taken from Yeats's self-epitaph: "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death." In his introduction Kenner says he might have subtitled this book "Yeats and His Shadow [...]

Class In America

Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. By Paul Fussell. Summit Books. $13.95. Social class is a touchy topic anywhere; in America it is more ticklish, for the United States prides itself on being a classless society. Rank and status are [...]

The Contemporary Literary Scene

Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing. Edited by Daniel Hoffman. Harvard. $18.50. Can ten writers and critics make sense of the past 30 years' proliferation of American fiction, drama, poetry, criticism, and intellectual thought, all in o [...]

Getting Away From It All

Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. By Paul Fussell. Oxford. $14.95. Ways of Escape. By Graham Greene. Simon & Schuster. $12.95. Paul Fussell is master of a particular genre of literary intellectual history. The Great War and Mode [...]

From High Modernism to Postmodernism

A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. By David Perkins. Harvard $25.00. Nine years ago I reviewed for Southern Review the first volume of David Perkins' history of modern poetry, which had taken him seven years to write. Now Perkins' se [...]