He avoids complex terminology and assumes a readership studying the text in English translation.

    As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, “Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei’s little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility.”

    His work ranges from “What Are Those Monkeys Doing?” in which he links the paintings of Rousseau to the writings of Rimbaud and Flaubert, to “Imaginary Americas,” a survey of the different roles America has filled in the imagination of Europeans. Davenport, 1 of the foremost American critics and intellectuals of the 20th century, brings his piercing intellect, encyclopedic references, and careful eye for detail to each piece in Every Force Evolves a Form.   Whether writing on the philosophy behind modernism or a study of table manners, the paintings of Henri Rousseau or the design of Shaker handicrafts, Davenport always devotes his full attention and multi-angled analysis to the subject at hand. To read this thought-provoking collection is to see the inner-workings of Davenport’s brilliant mind, with its varied fascinations and unparalleled insights.

    Advertising in Rolling Stone and other major publications.

    M. Cioran gives us portraits and evaluations - which he calls "admirations" - of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poet Paul Valery, and Micea Eliade, among others. In alternating sections of aphorisms - his "anathemas" - he delivers insights on such topics as solitude, flattery, vanity, friendship, insomnia, music, morality, God, and the lure of disillusion.

    Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order -Bruce Boone.

    -- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

    In this introduction to Scripture, Leland Ryken organizes biblical passages into literary genres including narratives, poetry, proverbs, and drama, demonstrating that knowledge of a genre's characteristics enriches one's understanding of individual passages.Ryken offers a volume brimming over with wonderful insights into Old and New Testament books and passages—insights that have escaped most traditional commentators.

    The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise.Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

    Tracing the themes of knowledge, love and physical vision ("the eyes have it") through both Shakespeare's plays and the poetry, Bottom: On Shakespeare is more than a compendious act of homage by one poet to another. In effect, it lays out Zukofsky's poetics and theory of knowledge on a grand scale, tracing his themes through the whole of Western culture, from the Classical Greeks through William Carlos Williams. The second volume of Bottom: On Shakespeare consists of Celia Thaew Zukofsky's spare operatic setting of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play in which Zukofsky saw Shakespeare rewriting the classic plots and tropes of the Odyssey. The Wesleyan edition features a new foreword by Bob Perelman.

    Until now there has been no single comprehensive history of British and American poetry throughout the half century from the mid-1920s to the recent past. This David Perkins is uniquely equipped to provide; only a critic as well informed as he in the whole range of twentieth-century poetry could offer a lucid, coherent, and structured account of so diverse a body of work.Perkins devotes major discussions to the later careers of the first Modernist poets, such as Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, and to their immediate followers in the United States, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane; to W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and the period style of the 1930s; to the emergence of the New Criticism and of a poetry reflecting its tenets in William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, and to the reaction against this style; to postwar Great Britain from Philip Larkin and the "Movement" in the 1950s to Ted Hughes, Charles Tomlinson, and Geoffrey Hill; to the theory and style of "open form" in Charles Olson and Robert Duncan; to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poetry of the 1960s; to the poetry of women's experience in Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich; to the work of Black poets from Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks to Amiri Baraka; and to Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.Perkins discusses some 160 poets, mentioning many others more briefly, and does not hesitate to explain, to criticize, to admire, to render judgments. He clarifies the complex interrelations of individuals, groups, and movements and the contexts in which the poets worked: not only the predecessors and contemporaries they responded to but the journals that published them, the expectations of the audience, changing premises about poetry, the writings of critics, developments in other arts, and the momentous events of political and social history. Readers seeking guidance through the maze of postwar poetry will find the second half of the book especially illuminating.

    At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades. From the first examples of written Latin through Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and the Venerable Bede in the seventh, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors. Including names, dates, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte.

    The people are like you and me.But when you are alone there, you see strange sights: phantom hands, dogs that will not die, vampire moths, and the vengeful ghosts of children.This book contains your worst fears . . . or your darkest fantasies.Dark Feasts presents the best of Ramsey Campbell's collected and uncollected stories. It includes 'The Chimney' (winner of the World Fantasy Award, 1978), 'In the Bag' (winner of the British Fantasy Award for best short story, 1978), 'Mackintosh Willy' (joint winner of the World Fantasy Award, 1980) and 'The Companion', of which Stephen King wrote ' . . . maybe the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years'.

    We have a postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodern fiction?In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.

    In addition to revising and adding new material which has emerged since the second edition, Gurr develops new sections about points of special interest. Fifty new entries have been added to the list of playgoers and a dozen new quotations about the experience of playgoing. Second Edition Hb (1996): 0-521-58014-5 Second Edition Pb (1996): 0-521-57449-8

    Reissued with a new preface and a new essay on Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Coriolanius, Hamlet and The Winter's Tale, this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers the plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism.

    However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our contemporary notion of literature that sometimes hinders our ability to understand them. Franco Moretti applies himself to this problem by drawing skilfully on structuralist, sociological and psycho-analytic modes of enquity in order to read these texts as literary systems which are tokens of wider cultural and political realities. In the process, Moretti offers us compelling accounts of various literary genres, explores the relationships between high and mass culture in this century, and considers the relevance of tragic, Romantic and Darwinian views of the world.

    Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures — metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture. Marjorie Garber, one of the most eminent Shakespearean theorists writing today, asks what is at stake in the imputation that "Shakespeare" did not write the plays, and shows that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy.This Routledge Classics edition contains a new preface and new chapter by the author.

    In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gérard Genette offers a global view of these liminal mediations and their relation to the reading public. With precision, clarity and through wide reference, he shows how paratexts interact with general questions of literature as a cultural institution. Richard Macksey's foreword situates Genette in contemporary literary theory.

    In a new foreword, Robert B. Pippin argues that the book has rightfully achieved the status of a classic. Rosen illuminates the underpinnings of post-modernist thought, providing valuable insight as he pursues two arguments: first, that post-modernism, which regards itself as an attack upon the Enlightenment, is in fact merely a continuation of Enlightenment thought; and second, that the extraordinary contemporary emphasis upon hermeneutics is the latest consequence of the triumph of history over mathematics and science.“Perhaps the most original and philosophically important critical account of hermeneutics—of its philosophical status and historical development—to appear since Gadamer’s Truth and Method.”—Choice “A philosophical polemic of the highest order written in a language of unfailing verve and precision. . . . It will repay manyfold the labour of a slow and considered reading.”—J. M. Coetzee, Upstream

    In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form, " in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded.

    Already highly influential in Blake studies, Ault's book is a line-by-line guide to the poem and an inquiry into a core issue of contemporary poetics: how do altered processes of reading restructure consciousness?

    Using that critical history as a starting point, this volume recaptures the overwhelming sense of strangeness felt by the work's first readers and thereby illuminates Tolstoy's theoretical and narratological concerns.The author demonstrates that the formal peculiarities of War and Peace were deliberate, designed to elude what Tolstoy regarded as the falsifying constraints of all narratives, both novelistic and historical. Developing and challenging the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Morson explores Tolstoy's account of the work's composition in light of various myths of the creative process. He proposes a theory of "creation by potential" that incorporates Tolstoy's main concerns: the "openness" of each historical moment; the role of chance in history and within narrative patterns; and the efficacy of ordinary events, "hidden in plain view," in shaping history and individual psychology. In his reading of Tolstoy, he demonstrates how we read literary works within the "penumbral text" of associated theories of creativity.

    Laurence Lampert’s chapter-by-chapter commentary on Nietzsche’s magnum opus clarifies not only Zarathustra’s narrative structure but also the development of Nietzsche’s thinking as a whole.“An impressive piece of scholarship. Insofar as it solves the riddle of Zarathustra in an unprecedented fashion, this study serves as an invaluable resource for all serious students of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Lampert’s persuasive and thorough interpretation is bound to spark a revival of interest in Zarathustra and raise the standards of Nietzsche scholarship in general.”—Daniel W. Conway, Review of Metaphysics“A book of scholarship, filled with passion and concern for its text.”—Tracy B. Strong, Review of Politics“This is the first genuine textual commentary on Zarathustra in English, and therewith a genuine reader’s guide. It makes a significant and original contribution to its field.”—Werner J. Dannhauser, Cornell University“This is a very valuable and carefully wrought study of a very complex and subtle poetic-philosophical work that provides access to Nietzsche’s style of presenting his thought, as well as to his passionately affirmed values. Lampert’s commentary and analysis of Zarathustra is so thorough and detailed. . . that it is the most useful English-language companion to Nietzsche’s ‘edifying’ and intriguing work.”—ChoiceSelected as one of Choice’s outstanding academic books for 1988

    A challenge to modernist and post-modernist literary criticism. Chapters on The Question of Genius, Modernism and its Difficulties, Resistance in Itself, and Writing Off the Self, or How Would You Like to Disappear?

    He separates much fact from fiction and takes into account the ever-growing body of Cather criticism. The author of My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop was in love with life: here are her passions, prejudices, and quirks of personality. Thoroughly grounded in Cather's writings, which were autobiographical to an uncommon degree, Willa Cather: A Literary Life is likely to stand as the definitive biography of her for years to come.

    The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With The Function of Criticism, a subsequent collection, In Defense of Reason provides an incomparable body of critical writing.The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the writer—as it is of very man—to approximate these truths insofar as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also by definite example—the technique of the “whole critic” who effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.

    

    Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work.The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns—political, social, and religious—are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another.Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition.The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters.

    - Presents the most important 20th century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index- Introductory essay by Harold Bloom

    Mark Edwards combines the advantages of a general intorduction and a detailed commentary to make the insights of recent Homeric scholarship accessible to students and general readers as well as to classicists.Since interpretation of the epic requires an understanding of the ancient oral traidtion and its conventions, Edwards offers a comprehensive analysis of the poetics of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He also discusses essential elements of Homeric society--its religion, history, and social values--to clarify the style and substance of the poetry. In the second half of the book, Edwardfs's scene-by-scene explication of ten major books of the Iliad leads the reader to a greater perception of Homer's mastery and manipulation of convention.

    

    - Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world--from the English medievalists to contemporary writers- Introductory essay by Harold Bloom

    The donkey played a prominent role as a symbol in sixteenth-century literature, and the ass and human asininity became a recurring motif in Bruno's writings. Ordine offers the first analysis of Bruno's use of this complex symbol, which encompasses contradictory characteristics ranging from humble and hardworking to ignorant and idle. The result is a deeper understanding of Bruno the philosopher, along with a stronger appreciation of Bruno the literary artist. Ordine looks especially closely at Bruno's use of the figure of the donkey in his attacks on the theologies of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and in issues that have become modernist concerns. Ordine's analysis sheds light on each of the major themes of Bruno's philosophy: science and knowledge, myth and religion, language and literature.

    The distinguished speakers have included novelists, poets, illustrators, critics, publishers, librarians, educators - many of the outstanding figures in the field of children's literature.To celebrate a decade of excellence, lectures, panel presentations, and informal remarks by more than seventy contributors have been brought together in a wide-ranging volume that illuminates every aspect of children's books. This collection provides a unique overview of ten year's definitive commentary and discussion - an indispensable resource for those who share a commitment to literature for children.

    S. Eliot's allusions to Indic philosophy in several poems - from the Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land to the 'What Krishna meant' section of Four Quartets - have puzzled and intrigued readers since the poems first appeared. In T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions, Professor Cleo McNelly Kearns places Eliot's lifelong interest in Indic philosophy and religion in the context of his concomitant studies in Western philosophy and his views on literary theory and poetic practice. The author establishes the depth and extent of his knowledge not only of Sanskrit and Pali texts but also of the scholarly tradition through which they were interpreted in the West. She explores as well Eliot's keen sense of the important distinctions between specific schools of thought. Kearns concludes that Eliot was less interested in synthesizing various traditions than in comparing texts and traditions for what he called 'the difference they can make to one another'.

    He renders an especially important service by establishing the relationship among three fictionists whose work has been substantially neglected. . . . Readers will find this volume useful as a starting point for the investigation of recent Afro-American fiction and as an example of the application of poststructuralist criticism to Afro-American fiction. ChoiceThis book is a provocative and enlightening study of the fiction of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany, three black American writers who are among the most gifted literary artists of the past twenty-five years. These authors, who emerged in the tumultuous period of the 1960s, when the complacencies of the previous decade were being challenged throughout the country, are examined here within the context of Afro-American literature.

    - History's greatest playwrights are covered in one set- Expert analyses by Harold Bloom and other notable critics- Ideal for class use- A must for all serious students of literature- Edited by an award-winning writer/educatorEach Volume, Covering Three To Five Plays, Includes: - User's guide- Editor's note and introduction by Harold Bloom- A comprehensive biography of the playwright- Detailed plot summaries of each play- Extracts from important critical essays that examine important aspects of each work- A complete bibliography of the writer's plays- A list of critical works about the playwright and his works- An index of themes and ideas covered in the plays

    As a result of years of rereading and teaching Aristophanes, he realized that the Clouds could not be defended in an analysis of that play in isolation. A better approach, he decided, would be to define a comic perspective within which Aristophanes' comedies in general as well as the Clouds in particular could be appreciated.This first volume of Reckford's defense examines the comedies as a whole in a series of defining essays, each with its own dominant concern and method of approach. The author begins by exploring not the usual questions of Aristophanes' political attitudes and his place in the development of comedy, but rather the festive, celebratory, and Dionysian nature of Old Comedy. Here and throughout the book Reckford illustrates Aristophanes' form of comedy with analogies to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.In the remaining essays Reckford goes beyond the usual Freudian approaches, reinterpreting the comic catharsis as a clarification of wishing and hoping. He also explores the growth of plays from comic idea to comic performance, in ways reflected in Tom Stoppard's plays today. Only then are Aristophanes' basic political loyalties described, as well as the place of his old- and-new comedy within the history of the genre.In a book that is as much about comedy generally as it is about Aristophanes specifically, some plays are treated more fully than others. Reckford discusses the Wasps at length, comparing the symbolic transformations and comic recognitions in the play with dream experience and dream interpretation. He also analyzes the Peace, the Acharians, the Birds, and the Frogs. Reckford's vindication of the Clouds will appear in the second volume of his defense, Clouds of Glory.Reckford's playful translations preserve the puns and anachronisms of Aristophanes, maintaining the playwright's comic feeling and tone. Combining traditional classical scholarship with a variety of literary, psychological, and anthropological approaches, he has written a study that will appeal to both the academic audience and the general reader who cares about comedy.Originally published in 1987.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.