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Essay Collection

The Critic as Advocate: Selected essays 1941–1988 by Bernard Smith

by Heather Johnson
November 1989, no. 116

The Critic as Advocate: Selected essays 1941–1988 by Bernard Smith

Oxford University Press, $24.95 pb, 389 pp

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In his 1980 bibliography of Bernard Smith’s published works, Australian Art and Architecture (1980), Tony Bradley lists, exclusive of books, well over 200 articles, book reviews, and other miscellaneous items. Allowing for articles written after 1980 and four previously unpublished, The Critic as Advocate contains sixty works from Bradley’s list. Previous collections of Smith’s essays, The Antipodean Manifesto (1976) and The Death of the Artist as Hero (1988) each contains about twenty republished essays – leaving Smith still with over a hundred for future recycling. If this is to be the case it is perhaps well to look at the value or otherwise of this type of enterprise.

 


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The Critic as Advocate: Selected essays 1941–1988 by Bernard Smith

Oxford University Press, $24.95 pb, 389 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


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