Sir Frank Kermode

Sir Frank Kermode , 1919-, English critic, b. Isle of Man. Educated at Liverpool and a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during World War II, Kermode is one of the most distinguished critics of our time. He has taught at numerous universities, including Harvard, Cambridge, and Columbia, and is author or editor of some forty volumes. Best known are his studies of Shakespeare (1963-65) and D. H. Lawrence (1973), his editorship of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (2 vol. 1973), and his provocative studies The Sense of an Ending (1967), The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), and The Art of Telling (1983). Kermode's memoir, Not Entitled, was published in 1995 and his selection of essays, Pieces of My Mind, appeared in 2003. He was knighted in 1991.

Kermode, Sir Frank (1919– ), literary critic, born in Douglas, Isle of Man, studied at the University of Liverpool. He has held academic posts at the universities of Newcastle, Reading, Manchester, Bristol, London, and Cambridge. His critical studies have alternated between the English Renaissance and 20th-cent. literature, in which he has championed the works of W. Stevens and F. M. Ford. His most influential early books are Romantic Image (1957), which demonstrates continuities between late Romantic and early Modernist uses of enigmatic symbols, and The Sense of an Ending (1967), which explores the ways in which narrative fiction makes sense of linear time. Through his editorship of the Fontana Modern Masters series and his seminars on literary theory at University College London, he helped to inject fresh currents of European thought into literary studies in Britain. His later books include The Classic (1975), The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), Essays on Fiction (1983), An Appetite for Poetry (1989), Shakespeare's Language (2000), and a memoir, Not Entitled (1997). He was knighted in 1991.