Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin is a unique Reader, bridging the gap between Creative Writing (CW) how-to handbooks, and anthologies of Literary and Cultural Theory. This ground-breaking guide reveals the historical roots of many of the pedagogic concepts which underlie the critical study of CW. Graven images in the Old Testament are echoed in classical mimesis, which, in its turn, resonates in nineteenth-century realism, presaging one of CW's mantras, 'write what you know'. The development of twentieth-century literary criticism travels alongside the development of the philosophical and linguistic foundations of Literary and Cultural Theory.

An indispensable text for CW lecturers, under- and postgraduate students, the Reader shows how seminal writers and thinkers have, over the centuries, considered imaginative writing: Aristotle, Plato, Montaigne, Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare, Pope, Browning, Wordsworth, Keats, Kant, Burke, Wollstonecraft, James, Ruskin, Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Barthes, Woolf, Bakhtin, and many others, provide a roll-call of searching, sometimes contesting, voices.


The anthology provides material for flexible use in workshops and seminars, as well as for critical-creative commentaries. It is about thinking about writing, and about ways of thinking about thinking about writing, symbiotically showing Creative Writing and Literature Studies as two sides of the same coin.