Francis Bacon

by Francis Bacon, Brian Vickers (Editor)

Overview

This is the first extensive one-volume selection of Bacon's English writings in over 90 years. The latest addition to The Oxford Authors series, it includes all the major literary writings on which his reputation rests—the Advancement of Learning, the Essays (in their first and last versions), and the New Atlantis. It also includes sixteen other works not reprinted for over a century, which show Bacon's remarkable all-round abilities in politics, law, theology, and poetry. The selections are annotated in more detail than in any other edition, with particular emphasis on explaining Bacon's language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192820259
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/09/1996
Series:	The ^AOxford Authors
Pages:	864
Product dimensions:	5.13(w) x 7.75(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

About the Editor: Brian Vickers is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Renaissance Studies at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich.

Editorial Reviews

"Excellent....Certain to replace the Modern Library collection...as the standard anthology....Vickers has gone far beyond the call the normal compilatory duty for such a volume....This exemplary one-volume Bacon has to be judge a 'must' for academic libraries; highly recommended for larger public libraries."—Choice

"This is an ideal book for independent readers to acquaint themselves with Bacon, wise, and, in its terms, complete."—Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

From the Publisher

Bacon's menacing pictures of twisted human torsos, rabid dogs and dismembered men stranded amid carcasses made him a fashionable painter in the 1960s. But what has he been doing in the '80s? As this concise retrospective reveals, the British painter's obsessions and methods have scarcely changed. In his recent pictures, water from a running tap becomes a torrential cyclone; Mick Jagger's face is a cry of despair; a bloodstain on a floor plank suspended in space shocks and outrages; distorted human figures, set against pastel or bright-orange backdrops, perplex. This album combines 155 color reproductions with a perceptive 15-page essay by French ethnographer Leiris who explores Bacon's use of distortions, jazz-like breaks and empty spaces in canvases fraught with good and evil. He aptly compares Bacon's paintings to flash photographs that transform banal details into disturbing presences. (June)

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