Some Modern Writers. Two Courses of Sydney University Extension Lectures, by Members of the Departments of English.

Bookseller Notes

R.G. Howarth was a major figure in Australian letters: a non-collegiate student at Oxford at the beginning of the 1930s, he returned to Sydney University, where he remained as a lecturer until 1955 - when he moved to Cape Town, and there taught J.M. Coetzee. The attention of his scholarship was broad, running from the Elizabethan era to the present day. His essays here assess Ezra Pound, his early career but particularly the ongoing Cantos, and Edith Sitwell, and are major contributions to the secondary literature of both poets. The essay on Pound had previously been printed, along with those on Charles Morgan and A.E. Housman (whose anomalous status in relation to Pound, Eliot, Sitwell and Joyce is acknowledged by Howarth), as 'Some Recent Developments in English Literature' - Howarth adds a note to his piece on Pound, reflecting the enlargement of Pound's grand work.Waldock's essay on Joyce considers him in lineage that includes Fielding and Henry James, Eliot (with particular attention to 'The Hollow Men') is considered by E.J. Dobson another academic whose career was divided between Sydney and Oxford (by the time of his Postscript, the publication of this volume following two years after the lectures were delivered, he was at Merton College).