Shaping Joy

A Shaping Joy, first published in 1971 and now reissued by Routledge, is a collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks on modern literature and on the criticism developed to engage with it. Brooks was an American literary critic closely associated with the New Criticism.

Most of the essays deal with twentieth-century poets and novelists. They cover William Faulkner and the literature of the American South, and writers more familiar to British readers, such as Joyce, Auden and T.S. Eliot. Others turn to nineteenth-century American writers including Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and to older English poets such as Wordsworth, Milton and Marlowe.

The opening essay sets out what literature is for. Among the functions it names are nourishing the imagination, keeping the language alive and keeping the channels of communication open. The essays that follow put those concerns into practice.

The book is aimed at students and researchers of English literature, especially those interested in literary criticism.