How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.

    To some they offer tantalizing glimpses of other worlds. to others a subversive counterpoint to human arrogance and weakness. Like no other author. Katharine Briggs throughout her work communicated the thrill and delight of the world of fairies. and in this book she articulated for the first time the history of that world in tradition and literature.From every period and every country. poets and storytellers have described a magical world inhabited by elfin spirits. Capricious and vengeful. or beautiful and generous. theyve held us in thrall for generations. And on a summers morn. as the dew dries softly on the grass. if you kneel and look under a toadstool. well ...

    Konstantin Mochulsky's critical biography is, in the words of George Gibian, the "best single work in any language about Dostoevsky's work as a whole." Joseph Frank has called it one of the "indispensable studies by Russian critics." An established classic, it is here available for the first time in paperback in English translation.

    Frye describes the basis of the tragic vision as "being in time," in which death as "the essential event that gives shape and form to life ... defines the individual, and marks him off from the continuity of life that flows indefinitely between the past and the future."In Dr. Frye's view, three general types can be distinguished in Shakespearean tragedy, the tragedy of order, the tragedy of passion, and the tragedy of isolation, in all of which a pattern of "being in time" shapes the action. In the first type, of which Julius caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet are examples, a strong ruler is killed, replaced by a rebel-figure, and avenged by a nemesis-figure; in the second, represented by Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida, authority is split and the hero is destroyed by a conflict between social and personal loyalties; and in the third, Othello, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, the central figure is cut off from his world, largely as a result of his failure to comprehend the dynamics of that world. What all these plays show us, Dr. Frye maintains, is "the impact of heroic energy on the human situation" with the result that the "heroic is normally destroyed ... and the human situation goes on surviving."Fools of Time will be welcomed not only by many scholars who are familiar with Dr. Frye's keen critical insight but also by undergraduates, graduates, high-school and university teachers who have long valued his work as a means toward a firmer grasp and deeper understanding of English literature.

    He found his answer in dynamic symmetry, one of the most provocative and stimulating theories in art history. Hambidge's study of Greek art convinced him that the secret of the beauty of Greek design was in the conscious use of dynamic symmetry — the law of natural design based upon the symmetry of growth in man and in plants. But Hambidge, who was not only a theoretician but also a practicing artist, did much more than analyze classical art and its principles of design: he worked out a series of root rectangles that the artist, using the simple mathematics supplied in this book, can easily follow and apply in his own work.Originally published as a series of lessons in Hambidge's magazine, The Diagonal, this engrossing book explains all the basic principles of dynamic symmetry. Part I sets forth the fundamental rectangles with their simple divisions based on the proportioning law found in nature; Part II explains compound rectangles, many of which were taken from or suggested by analysis of objects of Greek art. Whether read for its historical importance in art theory, for its illuminating insights into Greek art, or for its practical value to today's artists and commercial designers, The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry has much to offer anyone who is interested in the principle of design.

    And although these pieces were primarily intended to help students improve their creative writingn abilities, they are also an effective introduction to Hughes's own work and the influences other writers have had on him. Hughes, who was Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II at the time of his death in 1998, casually and colorfully discusses how he came to write, what inspires him (and why), and the difficulties that he (and other writers) confront when writing.

    Cultural criticism has been too obsessed with the rage for order to be able to grasp the import of Peckham's search for "some human activity, which serves to break up orientations, to weaken and frustrate the tyrannous drive to order, to prepare the individual to observe what the orientation tells him is irrelevant, but what may very well be relevant." This book is destined to force a sharp turn in critical cultural studies because it addresses the rage for chaos in traditional "high culture, " not just in popular culture.

    Yeats, were rightly considered the most eminent poets of their time, but they were also much concerned with theories of poetry and they came to exciting and original conclusions about it. This study of the movement to which they belonged is the first attempt in English to see it as a whole and to assess the peculiar qualities of its achievement and consider some of its fundamental ideas.

    The payment was $3.50. The time was 1927, and for Gruber this first sale meant much more than being able to get a job as an editor of a farm paper on the basis of being a published author. It meant the beginnings of a massive assault on the pulp jungle.

    S. Lewis at his death. It is Lewis longest piece of literary criticism, as distinct from literary history. It approaches The Faerie Queene as a majestic pageant of the universe and nature, celebrating God as 'the glad creator', and argues that conventional views of epic and allegory must be modified if the poem is to be fully enjoyed and understood.

    In the present work, based on lectures read at Brandeis University in 1965, Mr. Barfield sets out "to consider what light the three subjects of history, language, and literature can be made to shed on each other." These topics have been among his central interests for four decades of study and writing; and as his readers have come to expect, his consideration of them is wonderfully subtle, far-ranging, and buttressed by impressive erudition. That his conclusions are as startling as they are logical goes without saying. Owen Barfield was for many years a practicing solicitor in London and a regular contributor to such journals as The New Statesman and The London Mercury. He is the author of highly original and stimulating books, including Worlds Apart, Unancestral Voice, and Romanticism Comes of Age. Since his retirement in 1959, Mr. Barfield has lived in Dartford in Kent, though in recent years he has spent periods in the United States in residence at Drew University, Brandeis University, and Hamilton College. Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

    Book by hirsch, eric

    The impressive collection of essays and reviews of this gifted commentator from that period is a kind of topical chronicle of the era. From hundreds of reviews and essays, Henry Dan Piper has selected and arranged these articles to offer a source book of readings in the epoch’s intellectual, social, and literary history.                      The volume is divided into two parts, and the articles are arranged chronologically. Part 1, The Social Record, illuminates the issues, problems, and ideas of the period. Part 2, The Literary Record, contains articles which deal chiefly with literary values. In addition, Mr. Cowley has written a lively, new, retrospective essay for this volume, “Adventures of a Book Reviewer,” in itself a classic on the art of the book review. No important name and no vital issue of this significant period is omitted from this record, attesting to Mr. Cowley’s remarkable discernment and to the purity of his artistic judgment. Thus, the record has a special value for the student of the era.