Reviews of Beyond the Blurb will be posted to this page on an ongoing basis as they appear.
“If, like me, you feel the obsession with theory over the last forty years has caused many critics to lose sight of the primary purpose of criticism, Daniel Green’s splendid primer returns us to square one. In assured, lucid prose, Green reminds us that a literary work should be analyzed for its own sake, ‘apart from any value it might have as the object of some other discourse or inquiry,’ and that the focus should be on language, not on ‘meaning’ or ideology. For practicing critics, Beyond the Blurb is an excellent refresher course, and for everyone else, Daniel Green demonstrates how to enhance the reading experience.” - STEVEN MOORE
“The introduction to Beyond the Blurb and the first of its three sections, in which Green elucidates his own critical principles, are as clear and stark an explication of the nature and potential of literature as I have ever read.”
read beyond this blurb“In Beyond the Blurb Daniel Green has written an accessible and contrary-minded work that is at war or in agreement (mild or strong) with prevailing trends of critical writing.”
read beyond this blurb“And yet this is exactly what Daniel Green’s enlightening new book, Beyond the Blurb: On Critics and Criticism has come to tell us: literary criticism needs to be rescued, both from the confines of academic criticism [...] and from the book review industry. [...] Instead, it is time to bring the focus back to the literary work itself, and to the interpretive possibilities inherent in taking the formal dexterity of the text seriously for a change.” - W.D. CLARKE
read beyond this blurb“Green’s acutely contrarian considerations illustrate examples of critics he holds out as particular 'failures' and 'successes,' and in doing so they point toward his conception of the task of criticism, which is to describe the experience of reading based on close attention to the language of the text and the effects it produces — something that sounds simple but is often neglected in practice.”
read beyond this blurb“Throughout his book, Green writes about critical successes and failures with the same objectiveness and near dispassioned quality that defines New Criticism. Except for these succulent digs which he doles out like dog treats, and for which I positively live."
read beyond this blurb