It falls in line with a tradition of books of poets writing about poets who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. This is more personal than a biography in that it is a writer's concern with Dickinson's place in history and what she was trying to do with her poetry. Howe does a wonderful job of trying to get into the poems through playing with language. It's a place to meet Dickinson as a lover of games and words.

    This collection collects what he wrote under those conditions. He writes in a conversational voice, but he is impassioned, persuasive, abusive and hilarious by turns.

    Re-publication of the essays by the author whose criticism of Taiwan¡'s political culture became the seed of an essay wild fire for motivating the people of Taiwan.

    In 1985, under the editorship of Margaret Drabble, the text was thoroughly and sensitively revised to bring it up to date.The sixth edition, published in 2000, was extensively revised, expanded, and updated. Almost 600 new entries covered new writers, genres, and issues, and existing entries were reworked to incorporate the latest scholarship. In addition to the extensive coverage of writers, works, literary theory, allusions, and characters, there are sixteen featured entries on key topics including black British literature, fantasy fiction, and modernism. The Companion remains an unrivaled work that places English literature in its widest context: no other book offers such extensive exploration of the classical roots of English literature, and the European and non-European works and writers that have influenced its development.The sixth edition has now been revised to ensure that it remains absolutely up to date: the invaluable appendices - the chronology, and lists of winners of major literary awards - have been updated, as have many of the entries. Informed by the latest scholarly thinking, and comprehensively cross-referenced to guide the reader to topics of related interest, the Companion retains its position as the best guide to English literature available.

    This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.

    Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most influential texts in gender studies, men's studies and gay studies," this book uncovers the homosocial desire between men, from Restoration comedies to Tennyson's Princess.

    Using Freudian concepts, he compares the art of writing to the art of becoming civilized: writing parallels the transformation of raw instinct into shared expression. . . . Gass writes with impassioned concern."--Publishers Weekly "[These] essays [are] meant to enliven the form as Montaigne, Emerson, and Woolf enlivened it. This is an ambitious task, but no contemporary American has better credentials than Gass. . . . He announces a topic, then descants with impressive erudition and unbuttoned ardor for the surprising phrase. The results often dazzle, and they're unfailingly original, in the root sense of the word--they work back toward some point of origin, generally a point where literature departs from the external world to invent a world of its own."--Sam Tanenhaus, Village Voice "William H. Gass is not alone among . . . American fiction writers in giving some of his time and talent to nonfiction, but nobody does it more energetically."--Frank Kermode, New York Times Book Review

    An anthology devoted entirely to its writings, in English translation, is long overdue.The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts rocked the world of film criticism with their provocative views on international cinema--American, Italian, and French in particular. They challenged long-established Anglo-Saxon attitudes by championing American popular movies, addressing genres such as the Western and the thriller and the aesthetics of technological developments like CinemaScope, emphasizing mise en scene as much as thematic content, and assessing the work of individual filmmakers such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray in terms of a new theory of the director as author, auteur, a revolutionary concept at the time. Italian film, especially the work of Rossellini, prompted sharp debates about realism that helped shift the focus of critical discussion from content toward style. The critiques of French cinema have special interest because many of the journal's major contributors and theorists--Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol--were to become some of France's most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave.Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, the selections have for the most part never appeared in English until now. Jim Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whole. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film.

    Consciously or not, history has become a form of thought applied to every facet of human experience; every field of human action can be studied, described, or understood through its history. In this extraordinary analysis of the meaning of the remembered past, John Lukacs discusses the evolution of historical consciousness since its first emergence about three centuries ago.

    This "stunning," "magnificent" first book by "the great man of Nabokov studies," which "provides not only the best commentary on Ada, but also a brilliant overview of Nabokov's metaphysics," has now been updated with a new preface, four additional chapters and two comprehensive new indexes.

    It is an extension of notes on the theater and theatergoing that have been accumulating for some time. It does not have an argument, or set out to prove a thesis, and it will not be one of those useful books one reads for the fruits of its research. Rather, it is a form of critical description that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses on the activity of theater making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc. Like most phenomenological description, it will succeed to the extent that it awakens the reader's memory of his own perceptual encounters with theater. If the book fails in this it will be about as interesting to read as an anthology of someone else's dreams. In any case, this book is less concerned with the scientific purity of my perspective and method than with retrieving something from the theater experience that seems to me worthy of our critical admiration.

    Explores the historical and cultural evolution of the theoretical language of the stage

    In this book, thought seeks a new form, a new "prose". To this end, it brings into play the strategies of the apology, the aphorism, the short story, the fable, the riddle, and all those "simple forms" that are today no longer used, but whose task it has always been to bring about in the reader an experience, an awakening--rather than attempting to put forth a theory. It is only in this sense--insofar as thought contends with the exposition of an Idea--that the problem of "thought" becomes, in these "treatises," a poetic problem. These are little ideas or forms that, in their brevity, compress that which cannot in any way be forgotten, since according to the platonic admonition, it would be put in "the shortest possible measure".

    Fishbane explores the rich tradition of exegesis prior to the development of biblical interpretation in early classical Judaism and the earliest Christiancommunities, and analyzes four main categories of exegesis: scribal, legal, aggadic, and mantological. The paperback edition has been expanded with new material and appendices.

    This edition includes updated material in the light of recent work in Romanticism and Romantic poetry. The book discusses the concerns that linked the Romantic poets, from their responses to the political and social upheavals around them to their interest in the poet's visionary and prophetic role. It includes helpful and authoritative discussions of figures such as Blake, Clare, Coleridge, Crabbe, Keats, Scott, Shelley and Wordsworth.

    In an attempt to place these thinkers within the wider context of the crisis-oriented modernism and postmodernism that have been the source of much of what is most original and creative in twentieth-century art and thought.

    In tracing the history of the village, the author analyzes transformations in its moral order as revealed in the external and internal changes of the village theater tradition, the tradition of the linambay, or komedya.In three main parts, the book sketches the processes of integration and dissolution in the structure of the village from the 1500s to 1940, analyzes the dynamics of the linambay tradition, and explores the social and economic conditions in the barrio in the early twentieth century to show how, indeed, theater is embedded in society, and society in theater.In its combination of the methods of literary criticism, cultural anthropology, and history, the work is an important contribution to Philippine studies.

    - A complex critical portrait of one of the most influential writers in the world- Bibliographic information that directs readers to additional resources for further study- A useful chronology of the writer's life- An introductory essay by Harold Bloom.

    Superbly illustrated, the Guide is a comprehensive tour of every aspect of the musical world, expertly edited by Stanley Sadie, editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The guide explains all the elements of musical notation, of pitch and harmony, of different musical genres. The development of musical instruments and the modern orchestra is charted through the ages, and the roots of music itself are traced--from Medieval chant to modern jazz solos and the electric wizardry of today's composers. With individual studies of all major composers and a unique series of listening guides to important works through the ages, The Cambridge Music Guide serves as a comprehensive introduction for all those studying, playing or simply seeking more enjoyment from the world of music.

    This collection demonstrates the variety of critical approaches through which one may discuss the complexities of racial "otherness" in various modes of discourse. Now, fifteen years after their first publication, these essays have managed to escape the cliches associated with the race-class-gender trinity of '80s criticism, and remain a provocative overview of the complex interplay between race, writing, and difference.

    The texts the author examines are viewed not as works of art embodying enduring themes, but as attempts to redefine the social order.

    Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Roman Jakobson, one of the most important thinkers of our century, was bet known for his role in the rise and spread of the structural approach to linguistics and literature. His formative structuralism approach to linguistics and literature. His formative years with the Russian Futurists and subsequent involvement in the Moscow and Prague Linguistic Circles (which he co-founded) resulted in a lifelong devotion to fundamental change in both literary theory and linguistics. In bringing each to bear upon the other, he enlivened both disciplines; if a literary work was to a him a linguistic fact, it was also a semiotic phenomenon - part of the entire universe of signs; and above all, for both language and literature, time was an integral factor, one that produced momentum and change. Jakobson's books and articles, written in many languages and published around the world, were collected in a monumental seven-volume work, Selected Writings (1962 -1984), which has been available only to a limited readership. Not long before his death in 1982, Jakobson brought together this group of eleven essays—Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time — to serve as an introduction to some of his linguistic theories and especially, to his work in poetics.Jakobson's introductory article and the editor's preface together suggest the range of his work and provide a context for the essays in this book, which fall into three groups. Those in the first section reflect his preoccupation with the dynamic role of time in language and society. Jakobson challenges Saussure's rigid distinction between language as a static (synchronic) system and its historical (diachronic) development - a false opposition, in his view, since it ignores the role of time in the present moment of language. The essays on time counter the notion that structuralism itself, as heir to Saussure's work, has discarded history; in Jakabson's hands, we see a struggle to integrate the two modes. In central group essays, on poetic theory, he shows how the grammatical categories of everyday speech become the expressive, highly charged language of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns in poetry—areas that are problematic in structural analysis—and provide exemplary readings of Pushkin and Yeats. The last essays, on Mayakovsky and Holderlin, make clear that Jakobson was aware of the essential (and in these instances, tragic) bond between a poet's life and art. The book closes with essays by Linda Waugh, Krystyna Pomorska, and Igor Melchuk that provide a thoughtful perspective on Jakobson's work as a whole.

    This is a study of the specific religious experiences and beliefs that Herbert writes about, both in his poetry and in his prose. As such, it also examines the spiritual landscape of seventeenth-century England, a period, for all of its controversies, still dominated by the understanding of God and the human condition articulated by Martin Luther and systematized by John Calvin. Reformation spirituality, which was different both from medieval Catholicism and late Protestantism, is itself little understood by literary historians, who have tended to look to medieval or Counter-Reformation ideas and practices or to a simplistic distinction between ""Anglicans"" and ""Puritans"" as ways of understanding the religion of the time. This study presents Reformation spirituality phenomenologically, from the inside. Just as Reformation spirituality reflects Herbert's poetry, Herbert's poetry illuminates Reformation spirituality, showing the experiential and mystical dimensions of an important religious tradition. Endorsements: For the reader who wants to understand George Herbert's unique Protestant aesthetic, Gene Veith's Reformation Spirituality is indispensible reading. Theologically alert, historically aware, and artistically generous, Veith's book helped to dispel many foggy and anachronistic notions about Tudor-Stuart religion when it first appeared a generation ago, and its strong, steady light still shines. ""Is there in truth no beauty?"" Herbert provocatively asks in ""Jordan I."" Veith's emphatic answer is, Very much indeed. -Christopher Hodgkins, University of North Carolina at Greensboro -Co-Founder, The George Herbert Society -Author, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way Veith's book is a scrupulous and sensitive reading of the protestant spirituality underlying much of Herbert's poetry - particularly helpfully identifying parallels with Calvin's theology - and constitutes an important contribution to scholarship on the early modern English devotional lyric. -Helen Wilcox, Professor of English, Bangor University, Wales -editor, The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007) About the Contributor(s): Dr. Gene Edward Veith is Provost and Professor of Literature at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of 18 books on topics involving literature, Christianity and culture, classical education, theology, and the arts. They include Reading Between the Lines, Painters of Faith, Postmodern Times, Classical Education, Loving God With All Your Mind, and The Spirituality of the Cross.

    He offers an extended, systematic critical discussion of the work itself and a historical survey of its critical reception, including an account of the principal lines of approach and areas of controversy.

    Drawing upon his deep knowledge of Ezra Pound's life and work, William Cookson provides introductory background material to each canto and a detailed, page-by-page commentary identifying quotations, explaining allusions and cross references, and translating foreign phrases. Expanded to include previously unavailable cantos, this book is an invaluable reference tool for Pound scholars and any interested reader. Foreword, introduction, preface, appendices.

    Theoharis, Christian Science Monitor“A vast and informative compilation…. The magnificent panorama of Russian literature accumulatively unfolds, from its ancient folklore and earliest written texts… to our present century’s structuralism, modernism, and socialist realism.”—Gordon McVay, Times Higher Education Supplement“For anyone interested in Russian literature, this new Handbook is the single most useful book to own.”—J. Thomas Shaw, Slavic and East European Journal“An indispensable source of concise information for all students of literature for years to come.”—Ray Parrott, Philological Quarterly

    Explores the nature, morality, and aesthetics of gossip; examines gossip in history and the psychology of gossip; and analyzes gossip--as subject and literary technique--in plays, letters, biographies, and novels.