A Study of Literature for Readers and Critics
Potpourri
by, Cornell Univ. Press, $2.75.
David Daiches, Professor of English at Cornell, has written a lucid and extremely illuminating inquiry into literary values, addressed not so much to his fellow critics as to thoughtful readers in general. Mr. Daiches is free of the vices frequently encountered in “the higher” criticism. His prose is innocent of jargon, his thought unpretentious, and he does not ever lose himself — and lose sight of literature — in abstract cerebration. “Literature,” he writes, “is valuable as a unique kind of knowledge about man.”
Daiches brings out very forcefully the uniqueness of literary insights; also the distinction between novels and pseudonovels — journalism and sociology presented as literature. He has some trenchant things to say about the relation of style and plot, and about the tangled question of how important are the novelist’s beliefs. This “study of literature” is one of the very best of recent books in its field.