Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us?

Literary criticism,
David Mason writes, ought to entertain as well as illuminate. In these essays he tells stories about embodiment and change, Incarnation and Metamorphosis, drawing connections between art and life without confusing the two. Mason considers the many kinds of change we encounter in our lives, our desire for justice and the ways great writers complicate that desire. He discusses the aesthetic differences of poets Claudia Rankine and Kay Ryan, his own colorful father’s fascination with a fictional character,
and the lives and works of writers like Montaigne, Diderot, and Neruda. He then takes up such contemporary figures as the daring Australian writer Helen Garner, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the poet-critic Dana Gioia, the perils of fame in the careers of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney, and the loss of poet Michael Donaghy. Incarnation and Metamorphosis is a book steeped in love of life and the love of reading.