Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin is a unique
Reader, bridging the gap between Creative Writing (CW) how-to handbooks,
and anthologies of Literary and Cultural Theory. This ground-breaking
guide reveals the historical roots of many of the pedagogic concepts
which underlie the critical study of CW. Graven images in the Old
Testament are echoed in classical mimesis, which, in its turn, resonates
in nineteenth-century realism, presaging one of CW's mantras, 'write
what you know'. The development of twentieth-century literary criticism
travels alongside the development of the philosophical and linguistic
foundations of Literary and Cultural Theory.
An indispensable text for CW lecturers, under- and postgraduate
students, the Reader shows how seminal writers and thinkers have, over
the centuries, considered imaginative writing: Aristotle, Plato,
Montaigne, Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare, Pope, Browning, Wordsworth,
Keats, Kant, Burke, Wollstonecraft, James, Ruskin, Quiller-Couch, T. S.
Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Barthes, Woolf, Bakhtin, and many others, provide a
roll-call of searching, sometimes contesting, voices.
The anthology provides material for flexible use in workshops and
seminars, as well as for critical-creative commentaries. It is about
thinking about writing, and about ways of thinking about thinking about
writing, symbiotically showing Creative Writing and Literature Studies
as two sides of the same coin.
