Nicolas Tredell

Nicolas Tredell began contributing to PN Review after he sent an unprompted review of Criticism in the Wilderness by Geoffrey Hartman which was published in the magazine in 1981. He first met Michael Schmidt eighteen months later and soon became a regular contributor of both reviews and articles. He served as a contributing editor from 1983 to 1989.

Tredell has had a very fruitful publishing career: aside from writing around 400 essays and articles for journals, books and newspapers, he has also published twenty-one books. These include Conversations with Critics, a book of interviews he conducted with literary figures for PN Review such as C. H. Sisson, Christine Brooke-Rose and Brian Cox (Sheep Meadow Press, 1994).

The subjects of his books are many and varied and include:  Uncancelled Challenge: The Work of Raymond Williams (1990); The Critical Decade: Culture in Crisis (1993); Caute’s Confrontations: The Novels of David Caute (1994); Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B. S. Johnson (2000); Cinemas of the Mind: A Critical History of Film Theory (2002); The Great Gatsby: A Continuum Reader’s Guide (2007) and Novels to Some Purpose: The Fiction of Colin Wilson (2015). His latest book Critical Insights: A Midsummer Night’s Dream was released in 2020 by Salem Press.

Since 1999, he has been consultant editor of the Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism series published by Red Globe Press and he has produced eight of their guides on works by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald amongst others. From 1984 to 2004, he taught literature, film and cultural studies at Sussex University.