Patrick Thomas Henry

How do creative writers reach their audiences through the public art and craft of criticism? How do their creative philosophies infuse and inflect the analyses and insights offered in their criticism?

These are the central questions that propel The Work of the Living. Through a study of criticism by five modernist artist-critics, this book evaluates the art of criticism as an aesthetic and intellectual project. Through their formal choices, narrative strategies, rhetorical techniques, and even publication venues, the artist-critics of the modernist era bring their creativity and craft to the genre of critical nonfiction. In little magazines and lecture halls, in newspapers and classrooms, and in the multimedia afterlives offered by citational practices and digital archives alike, the criticism of modernism’s artist-critics generates not only sites for critical inquiry, but communities of readers that gather and discourse through—the text across time and contexts.

Rather than probing the history of literary criticism as an academic enterprise, the essays in The Work of the Living turn their attention to the public cultures of literary and art criticism through historically informed close-readings of a select group of artist-critics—Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Rebecca West, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, and E.M. Forster.

PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF THE LIVING

“In a series of sharply-realized and deeply-contextualized case studies, Patrick Henry’s The Work of the Living: Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Public Craft of Criticism provocatively explores the ways in which artist-critics such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Rebecca West, Robert Penn Warren, and others, brought their literary craft to bear on the construction of a variety of “publics,” and in so doing broadened the cultural role of criticism. Complementing his subject, Henry’s elegant and attractive style brings together close analysis, biography, theory, and a sweeping concern with the democratizing potential of critical discourses outside the narrow confines of the university. It’s an impressive contribution to long-standing debates about modernism and its audiences.”
– Thomas Strychacz, Northeastern University

“Proof that our map of modernism is still under construction, The Work of the Living expands its borders by examining the efforts of modernist critics to craft “publics” for their own creative work. In sympathetic and lively prose, Patrick Henry engages with a cast of early-twentieth century characters whose critical work invites our reconsideration of what it means to be a public intellectual. His book—deeply researched and refreshingly readable—resoundingly affirms the thesis that fine criticism, then as now, deserves a place in the category of fine art.”
– Jennifer Green-Lewis, The George Washington University

“Patrick Thomas Henry’s The Work of the Living challenges the distinctions between art and criticism that stubbornly persist even as many scholars and artists, like Henry himself, create both. Examining a set of modernist “artist-critics,” Henry shows that these figures not only treated art and criticism as related parts of a larger project, but also that their critical work hailed a distinct public and thereby expanded the social contexts in which their work might be received. Amidst intense contemporary debates about criticism’s relationship to various public spheres and the university, The Work of the Living deeply enriches our understanding of the forms and aims of criticism. It also brilliantly revises our account of the place of criticism in modernism as well as modernism’s relationship to the public sphere. This is an elegant, engaging, and important book.”
– Elizabeth Sheehan, The Ohio State University