Literary theory books written by great authors

[Syd A]

Greetings all,

I am looking for books on literary theory and analysis, and on the process of writing fiction, that were written by great authors. I am NOT looking for the standard literary theory/writing/criticism books that are written by present-day professors and self-described experts. I am intersted in what Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, Walter Scott, and other great English-language writers had to say about the writing process. I am specifically interested in great authors analyzing great works, theirs or others'. Any suggestions or recommendaitons?

Thank you,
Syd

[Alexander III]

Tolstoy and Hugo both wrote several essays on Shakespeare, which are interesting to look at

[stlukesguild]

Coleridge- Biographia Literaria
Samuel Johnson- Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
Virginia Woolf- The Common Reader, The Common Reader Second Series
T.S. Eliot- The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Collected Essays
Ezra Pound- Essays, Guide to Kulchur
Wallace Stevens- Essays in The Palm at the End of the Mind and Opus Posthumous
Ralph Waldo Emerson- Representative Men
Gottfried Lessing- Laocoon: or, The limits of Poetry and Painting
Walter Pater- The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, Greek Studies, Plato and Platonism, etc...
Octavio Paz- Sor Juana de la Cruz, The Bow and the Lyre
J.L. Borges- Selected Non-Fictions, Other Inquisitions
Mario Vargas Llosa- García Márquez: Story of a Deicide, La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y "Madame Bovary" (The Perpetual Orgy)
Italo Calvino- Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Why Read the Classics? The Uses of Literature
Umberto Eco- On Literature
Charles Baudelaire- The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Maurice Blanchot- Fiction and Literary Essays
Samuel Daniel- A Defense of Rhyme
The Poet's Dante- an anthology including essays by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Auden, Borges, Montale, Seamus Heaney, Charles Wright, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Geoffrey Hill and C.K. Williams
Paul Valery- The Art of Poetry

[JCamilo]

Adding,
Dante own work about himself, Il Convivio,Robert Louis Stevenson - Virginius Puberesque
Henry James - Art of Novel, Flaubert Letters,
and guys like D.H.Lawrence, Cortazar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Machado de Assis, Chesterton, Poe, E.M.Foster, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Sartre, Ortega Y Gasseti, Nabokov, Anthony Burgess have in a way or another wrote interesting critical texts, in many forms and which i have no idea who are published in english...

[Syd A]

Thanks all, that's quite a list. I think I'll start with Henry James, although I must say I dislike his style. If you have any more ideas, please add to the list.

[WyattGwyon]

Nabakov wrote essays on Russian literature
Twain skewered James Fenimore Cooper

[Heteronym]

Milan Kundera: The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain
Louis Aragon: Treaty of Style
Henry Miller: The Books in My Life
Gore Vidal: United States: Essays 1952-1992 (one section is devoted to literature)
J.M. Coetzee: Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999; Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000-2005
E.M. Forster: Aspects of the Novel
Umberto Eco: Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
Toni Morrison: Playing in the Dark
Jean-Paul Sartre: What Is Literature?
Philip Roth: Shop Talk, Reading Myself and Others

[Sine_lege]

what is literature-J.P. Sartre
the art of writing -A. Chekhov

[arrytus]

Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature.
Also you might try Walter Benjamin's writings.

[Manchegan]

He's no Tolstoy, but I really enjoyed John Gardner's books: The Art of Writing Fiction and On Moral Fiction.

Especially the latter where he denounces the modern trend of trying to redeem horrible characters who do horrible things. The idea, essentially, is that art must exemplify and uphold that which is beatuiful and good.

[aboad]

Someone mentioned Nabokov's writings on Russian literature. But he has many more! His "Essays on Literature" (not "Essays on Russian Literature") are literary criticism/classes on some of the big-shot classics (Proust, Joyce, Kafka, etc). Not literary theory per se, though I'll be surprised if he didn't write some of that.

[Jozanny]

You might be interested in AS Byatt, Passions of the Mind. As to Henry James, he is difficult to parse, but a fairly astute critic, like when he takes aim at Zola by saying "There is no laughter in Nana." He touches upon a crucial problem with Zola's fidelity to social realism as opposed to giving the reader a reason to care.

[mal4mac]

Orwell skewers Tolstoy for skewering Shakespeare in one of his best essays:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Lear,_Tolstoy_and_the_Fool/0.html