Critical-Creative Writing

Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin is a Reader which bridges the gap between Creative Writing (CW) how-to handbooks, and anthologies of Literary and Cultural Theory. Designed for CW lecturers and students, it shows how to roll a call of seminal writers and thinkers have, over centuries, considered imaginative writing. The extracts range from graven images in the Old Testament to the concept of genre, to the development of 20th Century literary criticism, and onto the philosophical and linguistic foundations of the Literary and Cultural Theory. 



The Reader offers a selective, ground-breaking, historical guide to the pedagogic concepts which underlie the critical study of CW. Classical mimesis becomes, in the 19th century a debate about realism, and later, links with one of CW's mantras, 'write what you know'. Guiding keywords after each extract enable a flexible use in workshops, seminar discussions, and critical-creative commentaries. 



As well as being an indispensable text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, the Reader is a good Read (!) in its own right; Aristotle, Montaigne and Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, Alexander Pope, Elizabeth Barratt Browning, Wordsworth, Keats, Kant, Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry James, Ruskin Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Roland Barthes, Virginia Woolf, Bakhtin, Elaine Showalter and others. The anthology will stimulate further reading, drawing into symbiosis Creative Writing and Literature studies, and bringing together reading and writing - both sides of the same coin - in the academy. It is about thinking about writing, and thinking about thinking about writing.