Puzzles and Epiphanies

by Sir Frank Kermode

Published 14 October 2014

This book, first published in 1962, is a collection of twenty-four essays written by Frank Kermode between 1958 and early 1961, and are all concerned with criticism and fiction. Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 includes essays on the works of James Joyce, William Golding, E. M. Forster, and J. D. Salinger, amongst many others. This book is ideal for students of literature.


In this book, which was first published in 1983, Frank Kermode looks in particular at the revived Russian Formalism, a highly original body of literary theory that flourished in the years immediately following the Revolution, and at the work of Roman Jakobson, one of its most distinguished exponents. He discusses its modern 'structuralist' descendants, recalling the importance of Roland Barthes and the invigorating effect of his fertile and surprising mind. He considers also the work of Foucault, Laca and Levi-Strauss, as well as that of Jacques Derrida, which uses a novel and de(con)structive method of analysis to question to tacit assumptions on which structuralism is based. In an opening chapter, Professor Kermode surveys his relationship with the new theory, explaining that it is a relation from which he has benefited without ever feeling disposed to join a movement. These essays will be of interest to students of literature.


Various aspects of Milton are explored in this collection of essays by scholars whose reputations were, at the time of publication in 1960, perhaps largely based on their writings on more modern subjects. This had the advantage of demonstrating that Milton as a poet is "alive" and that other attempts to represent him as irrelevant to the interests of the modern reader had failed. The essays offer to admirers of Milton and of modern poetry cogent and mature arguments for restoring a great poet to his proper authority in our literary life.