Occupation Literary critic Name John Carey Language English Role Professor | Nationality British Spouse Gill (1960–present) | |
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Born 5 April 1934 (age 90) Barnes, London ( 1934-04-05 ) Notable works What Good are the Arts? Books The Unexpected Professor, The Intellectuals and the M, What Good are the Arts?, William Golding: The Man, The Faber Book of Science Similar People Margaret Drabble, George Orwell, Fred Inglis | ||
Education St John's College, Oxford | ||
John Carey (born 5 April 1934) is a British literary critic, and post-retirement (2002) emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books. He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.
Contents
- John carey at the auckland writers and readers festival 2010
- Education and career
- Literary criticism
- Views
- Personal
- Works
- References
John carey at the auckland writers and readers festival 2010
Education and career
He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys' Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. He has held posts in a number of Oxford colleges, and is an emeritus fellow of Merton, where he became a Professor in 1975, retiring in 2002.
Literary criticism
He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes such as Saturday Review and Newsnight Review.
Views
He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expressed for example in his book What Good Are the Arts? (2005). Carey's 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 was a critique of Modernist writers (particularly T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells) for what Carey claims were their elitist and misanthropic views of mass society. In his review of the book Geoff Dyer claimed that Carey picked out negative quotations from his subjects. Stefan Collini responded that disdain for mass culture amongst some Modernist writers was already well-known among literary historians.
Personal
Carey was born in April 1934 in Barnes, then on the Surrey/London border, the youngest of their four recorded children, to Charles W Carey and Winifred E Cook/Carey.