Books
Buster Brown’s America: Recollections, Reveries, Reflections. Incorporating This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year (Chavagnes-en-Paillers, France: Odd Volumes of the Fortnightly Review, 2022).
The book opens with two essays about the author’s arrival in the US as a boy and his becoming, through love of reading, an “American boy.” The second section—“Writing (Mainly) About Friends” includes lauded essays on Philip Roth, Louise Gluck, and Robert Hass. The concluding section incorporates the series “This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year,” a meditation on life and literature in extremity.
From the editor: “In the best tradition of American writing, the book traces the writer’s journey via the love of reading from immigrant boy to an important voice in American letters.”
Anthony Rudolph wrote: “Igor Webb has written a light-touch not but light-weight book. With its knowingness, self-awareness and deconstructive focus, its anti-genre or non-genre composition, and its un-self-defensive irony, it does not seek to be integrated yet thanks to the projection of a charming and seductive voice, Webb has produced an instructive and entertaining book that is deeply serious without taking itself seriously.”
Available from Amazon
Christopher Smart’s Cat (Loveland, Ohio: Dos Madres Press, 2018)
The book jacket says: “This is a book about displacement, flight, settlement and resettlement, about ‘life and death in the Pannonian plain,’ as Igor Webb writes, appropriating the old Roman name for today’s Central Europe in order to identify the geographical place as also the metaphorical center, the crossroads, of twentieth century history and culture. Told from the vantage point of those, like the author, who were children in the Holocaust, the book is a beautifully crafted meditation on great writers—from Virginia Wool to W.G. Sebald, from Philip Roth to Danilo Kis—as well as a gripping tale alive with remarkable character. None more remarkable than Christopher Smart (1722-1771), whose ecstatic verse mysteriously provides the book with its title”
Philip Roth wrote of Christopher Smart’s Cat : “marvelous . . . invitingly told, full of intelligence, funny, often with a novelistic flair . . . as much like a literary miscellany as a memoir, with both genres having equally impressive hefts.”
Available from Dos Madres Press and Amazon
Rereading the Nineteenth Century: Studies in the Old Criticism from Austen to Lawrence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
From the publisher: Moving beyond the fervid theoretical disputes of the last decades of the twentieth-century, Rereading the Nineteenth Century offers a rereading of the development of the nineteenth century English novel. Close readings shed new light on the history of the reading of Mary Barton; on the impact of unprecedented social realities on Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit; and on how we might today enter the far more religious world of the nineteenth century through fresh approaches to Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and what is arguably “the last” nineteenth century novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Stanley Friedman, editor of Dickens Studies Annual, wrote: “In this ambitious, wide-ranging study, Igor Webb carefully considers both the nature of reading fiction and the difficulties in seeking to reread nineteenth century writers in the way they were experienced by their original audience. The subjects discussed include the prevalence of religious belief in this earlier period, the problems that writers faced in trying to depict the unprecedented circumstances of urban life, and the manner in which narrative form was used as a guide to meaning. Focusing on six representative texts, Webb offers new, stimulating insights as he forcefully maintains that reading the past can bring excitement, joy, and significance.”
Against Capitulation (London: Quartet Books, 1984)
Part autobiography, part travelogue, part historical meditation, Against Capitulation, written under the pseudonym Jiri Wyatt, is “a scrupulously argued account of the author’s sense of dual identity and divided allegiances: between the present and the past, between a disinherited Slovak childhood during the Holocaust and an adoptive American youth, between Jewishness and secular political purpose, between history and selfhood.”
Christopher Reid wrote of the book: “I was impressed and moved by Jiri Wyatt’s book. His handling both of the big themes he addresses and of the small authenticating details is exemplary. The journey to Slovakia] he has described, undertaken for personal reasons, but turning out to carry the widest moral and political implications, is treated here with honesty, shrewdness and not a little humour. A remarkable piece of work.”
From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981)
Written from the theoretical vantage point of cultural Marxism (such as the early work of Raymond Williams) From Custom to Capital is a landmark study of historicist literary criticism. The book shows how the English novels written during the years 1780-1850 reflect England’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial nation—from custom to capital. By using close reading, original historical research, and structuralist interpretation, the book establishes correspondences between key elements of social consciousness and the forms of fiction. Among the book’s original contributions is a reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in relation to slavery in Antigua, and of Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley in the full context of the Luddite uprising in the West Riding of Yorkshire.