ABSTRACT
William empson has been widely acclaimed as ‘the finest literary critic the English-speaking world has had in our century’. Before the appearance in 1930 of Seven Types of Ambiguity, no critic had ever written with such persuasive detail of the effects of language, such searching and imaginative analysis. Not only did Empson achieve the main feat of inventing modern literary criticism in English, he went on to produce a series of ground-breaking works including Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Milton’s God (1961), and the posthumous Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (1987).
