Geoffrey H. Hartman
Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970.
Yale University Press, 1970. First edition. 0300013272 xvi/396 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 5.5" x 8.25", is bound in orange cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Name of previous owner on front flyleaf has been blacked out and original price is stamped at the top edge of the same. Book is otherwise in fine condition, with firm binding, clean and bright pages. Dust jacket, with price of $12.50 on front flap, displays light shelfwear, with sunning to spine panel. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"This cohesive harvesting of essays by one of America's foremost younger critics encompasses a wide variety of topics yet is consistently marked by an informed concern for the richness of particular texts. Blending the broader emphases of literary theory and history with the more pragmatic and discontinuous tasks of criticism, Mr. Hartman restores the power of the balanced textual imagination, which too often has been bewitched by the thrill of speculative patterns  or the particular pleasures of exegesis. The reconciliation of opposing tendencies is perhaps the central quality of his unique comprehension of literature.
The title essay concludes introductory reflections on such topics as Anglo-American Structuralism and Northrop Frye. The discussion of the novel focus first on the problematic heroics of realism and then turn to the writings of Virginia Woolf, Camus, Malraux, and Blanchot. A series of essays on poetry discusses aspects of Milton, Marvell, Blake, Wordsworth, and Hopkins and concludes with cogent analyses of the poet's politics and the "maze of modernism" represented by MacNiece, Graves, Hope, Lowell, and others. The final section includes two discussions of Romanticism, a penetrating analysis of language from the point of view of literature, and a culminating theoretical statement titled simply "Toward Literary History."