The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel

Lionel Trilling; Edited by Geraldine Murphy

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Paper, 224 pages, cover image
ISBN: 978-0-231-14451-3
$18.50 / £13.00

May, 2008
Cloth, 224 pages, cover image
ISBN: 978-0-231-14450-6
$26.95 / £18.95

"A satisfying if partial portrait of a great critic and his ambitions as a novelist." — Times Literary Supplement

"A genuinely revealing text by a famous critic, a man with quite an enigmatic personality, The Journey Abandoned is of great interest. The book adds significantly to our understanding of Lionel Trilling, who remains in many ways a fascinating figure. Though academic theorists consider him an old-fashioned man of letters, and perhaps a reactionary to boot, Trilling's work, like Edmund Wilson's, remains a point of reference for all serious literary intellectuals in England and America. I'm sure there are many others who will read this long, aborted, and completely unknown work with as much interest as I did." — Morris Dickstein, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Related Subjects

• American Literature
• Fiction
• Literary Criticism and Theory

About the Author

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was born in New York and educated at Columbia University, to which he returned as an instructor in 1932, and where he continued to teach in the English department throughout his long and highly distinguished career. Among his many works are critical studies of Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster; two essay collections, The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self; a novel, The Middle of the Journey; and the Norton lectures at Harvard, entitled Sincerity and Authenticity. Trilling was married to the writer and critic Diana Trilling.Geraldine Murphy is a professor of English and Deputy Dean of Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York, CUNY. She has published essays on Lionel Trilling and the New York Intellectuals and is working on a book-length study, "Anti-Stalinist Poetics."

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