“This volume... never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians” (Anthony Burgess). Edited and with an Introduction by Fredson Bowers; illustrations.

    . . But I think it is sometimes done—or very, very nearly done—in stories.”C.S. Lewis is widely known for his fiction, especially his stories of science fiction and fantasy, for which he was a pioneering author in an age of realistic fiction. In On Stories, he lays out his theories and philosophy on fiction over the course of nine essays, including “On Stories,” “The Death of Words,” and “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.” In addition to these essays, On Stories collects eleven pieces of Lewis’s writing that were unpublished during his lifetime. Along with discussing his own fiction, Lewis reviewed and critiqued works by many of his famous peers, including George Orwell, Charles Williams, Rider Haggard, and his good friend J.R.R. Tolkien, providing a wide-ranging look at what fiction means and how to craft it from one of the masters of his day.

    Alter takes the old yet simple step of reading the Bible as a literary creation.

    In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

    A guide to more than one hundred of the most popular and controversial cult classic films ever made includes coverage of All About Eve, Tarzan and His Mate, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

    Frye persuasively presents the Bible as a unique text distinct from all other epics and sacred writings. “No one has set forth so clearly, so subtly, or with such cogent energy as Frye the literary aspect of our biblical heritage” (New York Times Book Review). Indices.

    Here, the author examines 100 all-time favorites to discover their particular appeal.

    Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence. "No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

    By juxtaposing several translations of the same passage from Homer; an elegy from Ovid and lines from Herrick that read like an adaptation of Ovid; or a 15th-century poem about a rooster and a contemporary poem about white chickens, Louis Zukofsky has established a means for judging the values of poetic writing.A wonderful education for the fledgling poet, this handbook, first published in 1948, is the best elucidation of Zukofsky's "objectivist" premises for recognizing value in specific instances of poetry.

    These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings of Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others.Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the "Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics.

    Their female protagonists were strong, independent, and sophisticated. Here, Stanley Cavell names this new genre of American film — “the comedy of remarriage” — and examines seven classic movies for their cinematic techniques and for such varied themes as feminism, liberty, and interdependence.Included are Adam’s Rib, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve, and The Philadelphia Story.

    At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.

    Barthes replied to questions—on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism—in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.

    His work is deeply perceptive, often outrageously funny and always compulsively readable.'Thus the judges of the British Press Awards, in naming Clive James Critic of the Year for 1981. The Crystal Bucket offers a further selection of his inimitable 'visions before midnight ...''C.J. didn't get where he is today just by being funny. He is humane, liberal and compassionate ... What he writes is always pertinent and always witty ... We own him a deep debt of gratitude.' —Gavin Ewart, Listener'Few critics have a more unerring ear for woolliness and doubletalk or a more scathing and entertaining way of dealing with it.' —Lesley Garner, Good Housekeeping'He is one of the most remarkable figures in British cultural life at the moment: a poet and gifted literary critic who is also genuinely liked by the mass audience.' —Michael Mason, London Review of Books'One of the few columnists who make you laugh aloud ... if there were angels he would be on their side: and that would certainly include Charlie’s Angels.' —Melvyn Bragg, Sunday Times

    It sends one back to the original texts with a whole host of new questions.... And it also helps us to understand the place of the 'official' writer in that peculiar mixture of ideology, collective pressure, and inspiration which is the Soviet literary process." --Times Literary Supplement"The Soviet Novel has had an enormous impact on the way Stalinist culture is studied in a range of disciplines (literature scholarship, history, cultural studies, even anthropology and political science)." --Slavic Review"Those readers who have come to realize that history is a branch of mythology will find Clark's book a stimulating and rewarding account of Soviet mythopoesis." --American Historical ReviewA dynamic account of the socialist realist novel's evolution as seen in the context of Soviet culture. A new Afterword brings the history of Socialist Realism to its end at the close of the 20th century.

    Conflating a biography and a criticism of Tolstoy, Shklovsky uses this great author to make a case for a revolutionary way of reading and appreciating literature.

    He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Britain, which turned critical skills honed on textual analysis to the examination of structures and forms of resistance apparent in everyday life. Politics and Letters is a volume of interviews with Williams, conducted by New Left Review, designed to bring into clear focus the major theoretical and political issues posed by his work. Introduced by writer Geoff Dyer, Politics and Letters ranges across Williams’s biographical development, the evolution of his cultural theory and literary criticism, his work on dramatic forms and his fiction, and an exploration of British and international politics.

    In solitude, listening to his own voice, the events of his life reached into the past and the future.We live on the surface, he discovered. It is the land that makes people. If a poet will see, will feel, will interpret his place and then relate that experience to what he knows of the world at large, he will have a life in imagination, a vitality beyond appearances.John Haines is author of At the End of Summer: Poems 1948-1954; Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays; and The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer. He received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1991.

    He shows how Sophoclean tragedy reflects the human condition in its constant and tragic struggle for order and civilized life against the ever-present threat of savagery and chaotic violence, both within society and within the individual. For this edition Segal also provides a new preface discussing recent developments in the study of Sophocles.

    

    Victor Terras’s companion work provides readers with a richer understanding of the Dostoevsky novel as the expression of a philosophy and a work of art.     In his introduction, Terras outlines the genesis, main ideas, and structural peculiarities of the novel as well as Dostoevsky’s political, philosophical, and aesthetic stance. The detailed commentary takes the reader through the novel, clarifying aspects of Russian life, the novel’s sociopolitical background, and a number of polemic issues. Terras identifies and explains hundreds of literary and biblical quotations and allusions. He discusses symbols, recurrent images, and structural stylistic patterns, including those lost in English translation.

    Yet critics have argued about the precise nature of this novel, or biography, or "criticism-fiction" which is the summation of Sartre's philosophical, social, and literary thought. Sartre writes, simply, in the preface to the book: "The Family Idiot is the sequel to The Question of Method. The subject: what, at this point in time, can we know about a man? It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case." "A man is never an individual," Sartre writes, "it would be more fitting to call him a universal singular. Summed up and for this reason universalized by his epoch, he in turn resumes it by reproducing himself in it as singularity. Universal by the singular universality of human history, singular by the universalizing singularity of his projects, he requires simultaneous examination from both ends." This is the method by which Sartre examines Flaubert and the society in which he existed. Now this masterpiece is being made available in an inspired English translation that captures all the variations of Sartre's style—from the jaunty to the ponderous—and all the nuances of even the most difficult ideas. Volume 1 consists of Part One of the original French work, La Constitution, and is primarily concerned with Flaubert's childhood and adolescence.

    Christopher Frayling approaches the Westerns produced at Cinecitta Studios in Rome from a variety of perspectives, placing them in the Italian, social, political, industrial and cinematic contexts from which they evolved. Over 400 Spaghetti Westerns were produced during their 1960s peak period; Frayling deals with the most interesting examples, giving special attention to the films of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.

    The heroic Anglo-Saxon story survives to the world in one eleventh-century manuscript that was badly burned in 1731, and in two eighteenth-century transcriptions of the manuscripts.Kevin S. Kiernan, one of the world's foremost Beowulf scholars, has studied the manuscript extensively with the most up-to-date methods, including fiber-optic backlighting and computer digitization. This volume reprints Kiernan's earlier study of the manuscript, in which he presented his novel conclusions about the date of Beowulf. It also offers a new Introduction in which the author describes the value of electronic study of Beowulf, and a new Appendix that lists all the letters and parts of letters revealed by backlighting.This important volume will be a must-read not only for the scholar of early English history and literature, but for all those who are interested in practical applications of the new technologies.

    It is a contribution to genre theory. But most of all it is a book that finally puts science fiction into a context achieved enough in its individual readings and broad enough in its allusions to non-science fiction works to recoup this vital literature for serious scholarly study." (Michael Holquist)

    Consistent recognition of these hidden significances in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would require an encyclopedic knowledge of life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dublin such as few readers possess. Now this substantially revised and expanded edition of Don Gifford's Notes to Joyce: "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" puts the requisite knowledge at the disposal of scholars, students, and general readers. An ample introductory essay supplies the historical, biographical, and geographical background for Dubliners and Portrait. The annotations that follow gloss place names, define slang terms, recount relevant gossip, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, and illuminate cryptic allusions to literature, theology, philosophy, science and the arts. Professor Gifford's labors in gathering these data into a single volume have resulted in an invaluable source-book for all students of Joyce's art.

    

    Butler relates the French and American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the expansion of agriculture, trade, and industry, and growing economic and social pressures to the cultural forces which shaped their work. She reveals the common factors which engaged the separate efforts of so many individual creative minds, and the fierce personal and artistic politics of an age in the midst of profound change. Demonstrating that the literature produced during this dynamic, restless time is not as homogenous as is generally assumed, Butler illuminates the ways in which these various experimental works reflected radically new sensibilities and aspirations.

    This is the second edition of The Radical Enlightenment.

    'La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc,' Vampyr', 'Day of Wrath,' and 'Gertrud' are the most famous works of this rigorous, austere, and powerful filmmaker. In the most extensive and intensive book yet devoted to Dreyer, David bordwell shows how Dreyere's films offer unique challenges to the dominant filmmaking style. He analyzes how Dreyer confronts the viewer with problems of attention, orientation, and narrative comprehension. In the early works, flat tableau compositions alternate with intensively active facial close-ups to shift our attention from physical action to psychological states. In the late masterpieces, Dreyer's style achieves its great complexity, compellingus to concentrate on nuances of space and time...in 'Jeanne d'Arc,' the close-up and a discontinuous space; in 'Vampyr,' an uncertain topography and wrenching camera movements; in 'Day of Wrath,' a circular staging of the action and a slowing of viewing time; in 'Ordet,' a theatrical use of the long take; and in 'Gertrud' an obstinate stasis that verges on boredom. Bordwell shows that Dreyer's style achieves its unique force by violating our expectations and by organizing our film experience in radically new ways. All of Dreyer's works are discussed. Over 300 frame enlargements to clarify points of technique, Bordwell also examines the Hollywood filmmaking style, the concept of authorship in the cinema, and principles of narrative construction.

    Vicki Goldberg has brought together more than 75 essays and excerpts that cover a vast and provocative range of topics. We have the first-hand accounts of photographers, from Fox Talbot to Alfred Stieglitz to Ansel Adams, and the thoughts of leading critics and philosophers, from Baudelaire to George Bernard Shaw to Susan Sontag. Some of the pieces illuminate important aspects of photographic history; others give unique insights in particular photographers; and some are just for fun. Together, they offer a lively approach to the history, art, and philosophy of photography.

    Roche's highly readable style and use of contemporary quotations enliven the reader's view of eighteenth-century Paris and Parisians.

    The description for this book, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, will be forthcoming.