Witty and heartfelt essays, shaken and stirred.
Criticism, such as the essays in this book, is a way of seeing back..
Incarnation & Metamorphosis is a book about living with literature--Mason writes that Literature is telling us that we are seen, warts and all.
He takes up such contemporary figures as the daring Australian writer Helen Garner, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the poet-critic Dana Gioia; has fresh things to say about the perils of fame in the careers of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney; and mourns the loss of poet Michael Donaghy.
He discusses the lives and works of writers like Montaigne, Diderot, and Neruda as well as his colorful father\'s fascination with a fictional character.
Mason considers the many kinds of Change we encounter in our lives, our desire for justice, and the ways great writers complicate that desire.
In these essays Mason tells stories about embodiment and change, Incarnation and metamorphosis, drawing connections between art and life without confusing the two.
Incarnation & Metamorphosis is engaging all the way through, not least when Mason acts on the assumption, \'The imagination is free.\' --James Campbell, author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin Literary criticism, David Mason writes, ought to entertain as well as illuminate.
He looks into the political in order to find the personal--not the other way round.
Mason is a reader as much as he is a writer.
These essays move comfortably from the lines of a Nobel Prize-winning poet to the dwelling of a Greek peasant who could have stepped out of Homer, on to the perils of literary biography.
He has no wish to have his standing position confirmed, and is alert to the ways in which his subjects are changed, both by their writing and its reception.
He reads to be changed--drenched, burned, blown away. -- Publishers Weekly David Mason believes in Literature as a weather event--even an extreme one.
Book lovers will find much to ponder. -- Kirkus Reviews Mason\'s sharp interpretations make a persuasive case that great literature\'s complexity and ambiguity can, at its best, produce empathy and understanding in readers.
Witty and heartfelt essays, shaken and stirred
