Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.

    With dazzling intelligence and wit, Gass sifts through cultural issues of our time and contemplates how written language, whether a sentence or an entire book, is a container of consciousness, the gateway to another's mind that we enter for a while and make our own.

    Coming almost entirely from Davies? own files of unpublished material, these twenty-four essays and lectures range over themes from "The Novelist and Magic" to "Literature and Technology," from "Painting, Fiction, and Faking," to "Can a Doctor Be a Humanist?" and "Creativity in Old Age." For devotees of Davies and all lovers of literature and language, here is the "urbanity, wit, and high seriousness mixed by a master chef" (Cleveland Plain Dealer)?vintage delights from an exquisite literary menu. Davies himself says merely: "Lucky writers. . .like wine, die rich in fruitiness and delicious aftertaste, so that their works survive them." Viking will publish Robertson Davies? Happy Alchemy in July 1998Many fine works by Robertson Davies are available from Penguin including The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy, and The Salterton Trilogy

    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

    Contains the official biograpy of the Crypt Keeper, a history of EC Horror Comics, 105 covers, and other stories, facts, and features relating to Tale from the Crypt.

    . . .  Jazz aficionados . . . should be grateful to have so much good writing on the subject in one place."--The New York Times Book Review"Alluring. . . . Capture[s] much of the breadth of the music, as well as the passionate debates it has stirred, more vividly than any other jazz anthology to date."--Chicago TribuneNo musical idiom has inspired more fine writing than jazz, and nowhere has that writing been presented with greater comprehensiveness and taste than in this glorious collection. In Reading Jazz, editor Robert Gottlieb combs through eighty years of autobiography, reportage, and criticism by the music's greatest players, commentators, and fans to create what is at once a monumental tapestry of jazz history and testimony to the elegance, vigor, and variety of jazz writing.          Here are Jelly Roll Morton, recalling the whorehouse piano players of New Orleans in 1902; Whitney Balliett, profiling clarinetist Pee Wee Russell; poet Philip Larkin, with an eloquently dyspeptic jeremiad against bop. Here, too, are the voices of Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, Albert Murray and Leonard Bernstein, Stanley Crouch and LeRoi Jones, reminiscing, analyzing, celebrating, and settling scores. For anyone who loves the music--or the music of great prose--Reading Jazz is indispensable.  "The ideal gift for jazzniks and boppers everywhere. . . . It gathers the best and most varied jazz writing of more than a century."--Sunday Times (London)

    He understood how politics is shaped by the clash of men with various colorings of self-interest and idealism, how violence breeds violence, how fragile human beings create masks and disguises for protection, how schemers do the same for advancement, how love can grow out of hate and hate out of love.Dare anyone say that these insights are irrelevant to living in the real world? For many in an older generation, the Bible and the Collected Shakespeare were the two indispensable books, and thus their sense of life and history was shaped by the best and best-told stories. And they were the wiser for it.Literature abstracts from the complex events of life (just as we all do in everyday life) and can reveal patterns that are like the patterns of events in the real world. Studying literature can give us sensitivity to those patterns. This sensitivity to the rhythm of life is closely connected with what the Bible calls wisdom.

    An eclectic stylist who crafts sentences like no one else, Davenport will fascinate "people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things".

    Through essays on memory and metaphor, pacing, and the intricacies of voice and tone, and thoughtful appreciations of Chekhov, Ritsos, Mandelstam, and Rilke, Dobyns guides readers and writers through poetry's mysterious twilight communiques. For this new second edition, Dobyns has added two new essays, one dealing with the idea of "beauty" in poetry and another dealing with the almost mystical way poets connect seemingly disparate elements in a single work.

    No matter what the topic, however, he always drew on firsthand experience, arriving at his insights from direct observation.This book brings together eight of Evans's most significant essays. Written over a period of twenty years, from 1970, when he graduated from the Architectural Association, to 1990, they represent the diverse interests of an agile and skeptical mind. The book includes an introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi, a chronological account of the development of Evans's writing by Robin Middleton, and a bibliography by Richard Difford.

    Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s; Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real; to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites; If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation; and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

    Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal."This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature"[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review"Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review"Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance

    Burroughs has been practising a postmodern voodoo alchemy, via his cut-up and fold-in collage techniques, that accurately reflect our fragmented, postmodern society and experience. His novels, once banned and condemned, have over the years earned him membership in the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters and the title Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

    During the past ten years Harold Pinter has written a new play, three film scripts, sheaves of poems, several sketches and created, with composer James Clarke, a pioneering work for radio, Voices. He has acted on stage, screen and radio, he has appeared on countless political platforms, and his work has been extensively celebrated in festivals at Dublin's Gate Theatre and New York's Lincoln Center. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 2006, the European Theatre Prize. As if this were not enough, he has in the last five years twice come close to death. But he has faced hospitalisation with stoic resilience and his spirit remains as fiercely combative as ever. As he wrote in 2005 to Professor Avraham Oz, one of Israel's leading internal opponents of authoritarianism: "Let's keep fighting."

    In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative abhuman identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.

    Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy."Over the course of his career," Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.

    Iroquois Indians visit London in the early part of the eighteenth century and give birth to the "feathered people" in the British popular imagination.What do these seemingly disparate strands of culture share over three hundred years and several thousand miles of ocean? Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Cities of the Dead takes a look at a rich continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, recreates, and restores history.Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of the famed Mardi Gras Indians, this fascinating work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region, Cities of the Dead explores broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past.

    Highly public literary controversies, such as the Pound affair of 1949, or the anthology wars of the early 1960s, are chronicled in a precise, detailed, and theoretically inflected account that redefines the project of literary history. Rasula's analysis moves from the rise of New Criticism, through the ascendancy of Robert Lowell and confessional poetics, into the current period of multiculturalism and the avant-garde provocations of the language poets. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources - ranging from the history of museum display to the institutional and cultural processes by which American poets have been canonized - Rasula combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and social history in an analysis that works to disrupt prevailing myths about poets and poetry in the public sphere and in the academy. This innovative and irreverent book, second in NCTE's Prefiguring English Studies series, will be an important resource not only for scholars of the period but for writers and teachers of poetry as well. It stands as an invitation for all of us to consider what it means to assemble and police a national canon of poetry.

    In this work, Joseph Gallagher brings the power and prestige of this medieval classic to a new generation of readers--taking them on a guided tour through heaven, purgatory, and hell.(Formerly titled To Hell and Back with Dante)Paperback

    Collectively, the interviews provide rewarding perspectives on Kael's aesthetics, her politics, and her perceptions about what it is she does as a critic. They also contain discussions of films that Kael did not have the chance to review or that were released after her retirement in 1991.This collection of her interviews will provide new and renewed pleasures for readers who have valued Kael's critical voice and her challenges to consensus during the second half of the twentieth century.

    This fascinating, definitive biography by the premier world authority on Proust redefines the way we look at both the artist and the man. A bestseller in France, where it was originally published to great critical acclaim, Jean-Yves Tadie's monumental life of Proust makes use of a wealth of primary material only recently made available, Marcel Proust: A Life provides a scrupulously researched and engaging picture of the intellectual and social universe that fed Proust's art, along with an indispensable critical reading of the work itself. The result is authoritative, magisterial, and a beautiful example of the art of biography.

    Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is widely regarded as the most important feminist film of that decade. In Nothing Happens, Ivone Margulies presents the first comprehensive study of this influential avant-garde Belgian filmmaker.Margulies grounds her critical analysis in detailed discussions of Akerman’s work—from Saute ma ville, a 13-minute black-and-white film made in 1968, through Jeanne Dielman and Je tu il elle to the present. Focusing on the real-time representation of a woman’s everyday experience in Jeanne Dielman, Margulies brings the history of social and progressive realism and the filmmaker’s work into perspective. Pursuing two different but related lines of inquiry, she investigates an interest in the everyday that stretches from postwar neorealist cinema to the feminist rewriting of women’s history in the seventies. She then shows how Akerman’s “corporeal cinema” is informed by both American experiments with performance and duration and the layerings present in works by European modernists Bresson, Rohmer, and Dreyer. This analysis revises the tired opposition between realism and modernism in the cinema, defines Akerman’s minimal-hyperrealist aesthetics in contrast to Godard’s anti-illusionism, and reveals the inadequacies of popular characterizations of Akerman’s films as either simply modernist or feminist. An essential book for students of Chantal Akerman’s work, Nothing Happens will also interest international film critics and scholars, filmmakers, art historians, and all readers concerned with feminist film theory.

    

    (A transatlantic furor raged over whether the books were fact or fiction.) His most famous character was Fayaway—not Captain Ahab, not the White Whale, not Bartleby, and definitely not Billy Budd, whose story remained unpublished until 1924.Herman Melville, 1819-1851 is the first of a two-volume project constituting the fullest biography of Melville ever published. Hershel Parker, co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, reveals with extraordinary precision the twisted turmoil of Melville's life, beginning with his Manhattan boyhood where, surrounded by tokens of heroic ancestors, he witnessed his father's dissipation of two family fortunes. Having attended the best Manhattan boys' schools, Herman was withdrawn from classes at the Albany Academy at age 12, shortly after his father's death. Outwardly docile, inwardly rebellious, he worked where his family put him—in a bank, in his brother's fur store—until, at age 21, he escaped his responsibilities to his impoverished mother and his six siblings and sailed to the Pacific as a whaleman.A year and a half after his return, Melville was a famous author, thanks to the efforts of his older brother in finding publishers. Three years later he was married, the man of the family, a New Yorker—and still not equipped to do the responsible thing: write more books in the vein that had proven so popular. After the disappointing failure of Mardi, which he had hoped would prove him a literary genius, Melville wrote two more saleable books in four months—Redburn and White-Jacket. Early in 1850 he began work on Moby-Dick. Moving to a farmhouse in the Berkshires, he finished the book with majestic companions—Hawthorne a few miles to the south, and Mount Greylock looming to the north. Before he completed the book he made the most reckless gamble of his life, borrowing left and right (like his wastrel patrician father), sure that a book so great would outsell even Typee.Melville lovers have known Hershel Parker as a newsbringer—from the shocking false report headlined "Herman Melville Crazy" to the tantalizing title of Melville's lost novel, The Isle of the Cross. Carrying on the late Jay Leyda's The Melville Log, Parker in the last decade has transcribed thousands of new documents into what will be published as the multi-volume Leyda-Parker The New Melville Log. Now, exploring the psychological narrative implicit in that mass of documents, Parker recreates episode after episode that will prove stunningly new, even to Melvilleans.

    An introduction places The Master and Margarita and Bulgakov within Russian history and literature, and essays by scholars offer opinion and analysis of the novel's structure, its place in current criticism, its connection to Goethe, and its symbolism and motifs. There is also an abundance of primary source material, including an excerpt from an earlier version of the novel, and related correspondence and diary entries.Northwestern University Press and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) are pleased to announce the establishment of a new series of critical companions to Russian literature. Under the direction of the AATSEEL Publications Committee, leading scholars will edit volumes intended to introduce classics of Russian literature to both teachers and students at the high school and undergraduate levels. Each volume will open with the volume editor's general introduction discussing the work in the context of the writer's oeuvre as well as its place within the literary tradition. The introductory section will also include considerations of existing translations and of textual problems in the original Russian. The following sections will contain several informative and wide-ranging articles by other scholars; primary sources and other background material - letters, memoirs, early reviews, maps; and annotated bibliographies. Combining the highest order of scholarship with accessibility, these critical companions will illuminate the great works of Russian literature and enhance their appreciation by both teachers and students.

    It would be a darkly humorous understatement to say that this collection is not intended for the squeamish. Peter Sotos is the world's foremost practitioner of verbal brutality. His words achieve a nearly inconceivable level of intensity while offering the most cohesive, insightful commentary on pornography currently available. And he serves it up without detached, hypocritical hand-wringing or the sticky postmodern safety net of camp humor. Devotees of blandly moralistic “true crime” writing and pockmarked collectors of “horror” fiction won't find much to suit their tastes here. Total Abuse features nearly all of Sotos's written output since 1984... PURE. The world's first self-published true-crime fanzine, PURE was so convincingly written that it led to police surveillance of the author and his subsequent arrest. The first two issues of PURE have been endlessly photocopied on the bootleg circuit; their complete text is reprinted herein. The text to both volumes of PURE III, written in 1985, is being published here for the first time anywhere. Included are the author's essays on child pornography; anal rape; Nazi fetishes; Prostitutes' crushed skulls; homosexual slaughter; and a close-up lens on the bawling faces of victims' family members. TOOL. A brief collection of fictionalized psycho sexual narratives, the first chapter of which caused seismic levels of uneasiness when printed in ANSWER Me! #4. Sotos regales the reader with thoughts on his arrest; child abuse; gay-bashing; race-baiting; project-dwelling crack whores; peep-show dancers; murdered male hookers; and the inexorable pain of surviving friends 'n' family. PARASITE. Pornography examined, prodded, deconstructed, and understood as never before. Originally published as twenty issues of a monthly newsletter, PARASITE is literary criticism seamlessly woven with personal psychodrama. Sotos scrutinizes gay glory-hole porn; true-crime untruths; gang-bang videos; and his favorite philosophical ghetto, radical feminism. He delivers surprisingly witty one-liners regarding the current glut of empowerment-theory, sexual-healing, self-help gibberish. He ruminates about the “money shot” and its degrading potential. More abused kids. More crying mothers. More bad feelings on all sides. Total Abuse contains a brief introduction by Jim Goad and an extensive interview with Peter Sotos. WARNING: TOTAL ABUSE is not for the squeamish!!!

    While straight plays struggle to survive on Broadway, musicals play to near capacity houses. They are also a favorite of school and community groups. In this smart and practical guide, New Line Theatre artistic director Scott Miller looks at twenty musicals from a director's point of view, with solid suggestions for anyone thinking of embarking on such a production. Includes discussions of Gypsy, Assassins, Into the Woods, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story, as well as many others.Visit Scott's website at http: //www.geocities.com/Broadway/3164/

    Using texts ranging from local newspapers to medical tomes belonging to the Brontes, Sally Shuttleworth explores Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality and insanity, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Bronte's texts operate in relation to this complex framework. Shuttleworth offers a reading of Bronte's fiction informed by a new understanding of the psychological debates of her time.

    Useful for students, but written with the general reader in mind, they are clear, concise, accessible, and supply the basic cultural, historical, biographical and critical information so crucial to an appreciation and enjoyment of the primary works. Each is arranged in an A-Z fashion and presents and explains the terms, people, places, and concepts encountered in the literary worlds of James Joyce, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf. As a keen explorer of the mundane material of everyday life, James Joyce ranks high in the canon of modernist writers. He is arguably the most influential writer of the twentieth-century, and may be the most read, studied, and taught of all modern writers. The James Joyce A-Z is the ideal companion to Joyce's life and work. Over 800 concise entries relating to all aspects of Joyce are gathered here in one easy-to-use volume of impressive scope.

    Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.

    Immediately banned by the authorities, it passed almost unnoticed at the time. Yet it began a remarkable series of debates between surrealism and Caribbean intellectuals that had a profound impact on the struggle for cultural identity. In the next two decades these exchanges greatly influenced the evolution of the concept of negritude, initiated revolution in Haiti in 1946, and crucially affected the development of surrealism itself.This fascinating book presents a series of key texts—most of them never before translated into English—which reveal the complexity of this relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the most radical of the European avant-gardes. Included are René Ménil’s subtle philosophical essays and the fierce polemics of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, appreciations of surrealism by Haitian writers, lyrical evocations of the Caribbean by André Breton and André Masson, and rich explorations of Haiti and voodoo religion by Pierre Mabille and Michel Leiris.

    The texts collected here were written or delivered as lectures during the last years of de Man's life, between 1977 and 1983. Many of them have never been available previously in any form.

    Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings.The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system.Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.

    The original Counter Reformation myths saw the individualism of Don Juan, Don Quixote, and Faust as a problem to be quelled by death or mockery. However, the Romantic period, a time more favorably disposed toward myth, saw their dissension not as unacceptable disorder, but rather as admirable and heroic behavior. This incisive study traces attitudes toward these figures and the Romantic product Robinson Crusoe from disapproval to awe to skepticism, examining them as icons of such problems as solitude, narcissism, and the claims of the self versus the claims of the community. Pointedly, none of these figures marries or has a lasting relationship, save for the selfless devotion of a single male servant. Watt argues that the myths of Don Juan, Don Quixote, Faust, and Robinson Crusoe remain the distinctive products of Western society, embodying the most basic values of modern culture.

    This book teases out the effects of the Production Code, and the contributions of director Joseph H Lewis, writers MacKinlay Kantor and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and stars, Peggy Cummins and John Dall.

    From then until Mahler's death in 1911—the year of the first performance of Der Rosenkavalier—they kept in touch. Mahler himself described their relationship as that of two miners tunneling from opposite directions with the hope of eventually meeting.This first publication of their correspondence, which includes twenty-five previously unknown Strauss letters, offers a portrait of two men who were as antithetical in their musical means and goals as in their temperaments and personalities, but who exercised a strong fascination for one another. These sixty-three letters show both composers advancing in their careers as they battled against adverse conditions in the musical world at the turn of the century. They present Mahler's energetic support of Strauss's Symphonia Domestica, which Mahler conducted in 1904 and, in turn, Strauss's championing of Mahler's music, especially the Second and Third Symphonies.The correspondence is fully annotated and is supplemented with a major essay by Herta Blaukopf."Unfailingly absorbing. . . . An indispensable addition to the literature on these composers."—Norman Del Mar, Times Literary Supplement

    His work appeared indefatigably in The Nation, The New Republic, The London Observer, The New York Times, Harper's, Esquire, New York Magazine, and more. The Collected Works of Harold Clurman captures over six hundred of Clurman's encounters with the most significant events in American theatre - as well as his regular passionate embraces of dance, music, art and film. This chronological epic offers the most comprehensive view of American theatre seen through the eyes of our most extraordinary critic. 1102 pages, hardcover.

    Perhaps the most well-known Companion of all has been The Oxford Companion to English Literature, now in its revised fifth edition. But theliterary canon isn't static, and modern literature in all of its richness demands a more comprehensive Companion to cover the wealth of contemporary writing crafted in our language: The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English. This unique new reference book to English-languagewriters and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world, covers the gamut from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, and James Joyce to Amy Tan. The survivors of the Victorian age featured in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English--writers such as Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Rabindranath Tagore, and Henry James--could hardly have imagined how richly diverse Literature in English would become by the end of thecentury. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are celebrated in this informative, readable, and catholic reference book, which includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,300 authors. All the great literary figures are included, whether American or Australian, British, Irish, or Indian, African or Canadian or Caribbean--among them Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Patrick White, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, D. H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Wole Soyinka, SylviaPlath--as well as a wealth of less obviously canonical writers, from Ana�s Nin to L. M. Montgomery, Bob Dylan to Terry Pratchett. The book comes right up to date with contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Carol Shields, Tim Winton, Nadine Gordimer, Vikram Seth, DonDelillo, and many others. Title entries range from Aaron's Rod to The Zoo Story; topics from Angry Young Men, Bestsellers, and Concrete Poetry to Soap Opera, Vietnam Writing, and Westerns. A lively introduction by John Sutherland highlights the various and sometimes contradictory canons that have emerged over the century, and the increasingly international sources of writing in English which the Companion records. Catering for all literary tastes, this is the most comprehensivesingle-volume guide to modern (and postmodern) literature.

    He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings. In light of this possibility, Bernardete works back and forth from Homer to Plato to examine the relation between wisdom and justice and tries to recover an original understanding of philosophy that Plato, too, recovered by reflecting on the wisdom of the poet. At stake in his argument is no less than the history of philosophy and the ancient understanding of poetry. The Bow and the Lyre is a book that every classicist and historian of philosophy should have.

    In Postcards from the Trenches, Allyson Booth traces the complex relationship between British Great War culture and modernist writings. She shows that, through the experience of the Great War, both civilian and combatant modernist writers found that language could no longer represent experience. She goes on to identify and contextualize several of the resulting modernist tropes: she links the dissolving modernist self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses, the modernist mistrust of factuality to the apparent inaccessibility of facts regarding the rape of Belgium, and the modernist interest in multiple viewpoints to the singularity of perspective with which generals studied battlefield maps. Though her emphasis is on literary works by Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, and Vera Brittain, among others, Booth's analysis extends to memorials, posters, and architecture of the Great War. This interdisciplinary quality of Booth's study results in a much deeper understanding of how the Great War affected cultural representations and how that culture represented the War.

    Particularly in Black communities in the rural south, these women served vital social, cultural and political functions. It was believed that they possessed magical powers: they negotiated the barrier between life and death and were often regarded as the "knower" in a community. Today even as medical science has discredited or superseded their power, granny midwives have resurfaced as pivotal characters in the narratives of contemporary African American literature. Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers examines the lives of real granny midwives and other healers--through oral narratives, ethnographic research and documentation--and considers them in tandem with their fictional counterparts in the work of Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and others.

    Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

    A handbook for interpreting Faulkner's great novel

    It explains the techniques of the manufacture of Greek sculpture, and traces its production from the 8th century BC to the Hellenistic period. The author explores the effects the culture of heroes had on sculpture and the faith in deities in human form. Also examined are the causes of the "Greek Revolution", when sculptors discovered how to portray the human form more naturally.

    R. Ammons, one of our most important and enduring contemporary poets. Hailed as a major force in American poetry by such redoubtable critics as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, Ammons has reflected upon the influences of luminaries like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, and Williams while creating a compelling style and an artistic vision uniquely his own.Set in Motion includes essays, reviews, and interviews as well as a selection of Ammons's poems, with commentary from the author about their inspiration and effects. He takes up the questions that have been central to American poetry over the last forty years and connects them to the larger enterprise of living in a difficult, changing world. At a moment when the arts are under attack, Ammons reminds us of the crucial role poetry plays in teaching us to recognize and use sources of understanding that are irreducible to statement.A. R. Ammons is the author of Sphere, A Coast of Trees, and Garbage and was recently the editor of The Best American Poetry 1994. His awards include the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, the Bollingen Prize, two National Book Awards, and prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle. He is Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry, Cornell University.

    Gibbons's aim throughout is to work towards non-exclusivist and open-ended forms of identity which allow a critical engagement with both past and present, and open up new possibilities for the future.

    Robert Frost has long dominated the public's image of New England poetry, but who are the poets who follow him in time and how have they expressed their visions of the landscape, the individual, and the community? This volume brings together the work of thirty distinguished poets to convey the vitality and variety of the region's poetic creation during much of the twentieth century.After Frost is published in association with the New England Foundation for the Humanities, which has sponsored a program of reading and discussion groups with poets across the region using this anthology.

    Johns's work has earned a prominent place for itself in art history since it was first exhibited in 1958. Yau's brilliant analysis of two of Johns's best-known early works, Flag (1955), and Map (1963), provides us with unique insights into his latest paintings, two of which are reproduced here for the first time. Johns is considered both the founder of Pop Art and Minimalism, as well as a hermetic figure whose work has confounded critics for nearly forty years. Yau's view of Johns's paintings not only makes many aspects of the artist's work accessible for the first time, but also reveals the profoundly emotional tenor of this supposedly aloof figure. Yau's descriptions and meditations are united with Johns's own thoughts, culled from conversations between poet and artist over the past ten years. The result is fresh insight into an artist whose work has beguiled viewers for nearly forty years.

    Three of our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologies that surround Robert Frost.

    The goal of this book is to simply convey what Bernanos wanted to say as the devout Christian that he was. Bernanos was a deeply prayerful, practicing sacramental Catholic whose profound love for the Church made everything he created or wrote an "ecclesial existence that has been given form: existence derived not merely from an abstract, individual faith but from the faith of the Church." With judicious quoting of the primary source and careful juxtaposing of texts and commentary, Balthasar provides a unique forum from which Bernanos can speak to the reader in a way that he can be clearly heard and genuinely understood.

    From a collection of 500 plot summaries of world-famous novels, plays, poems and works of non-fiction, Masterplots has grown to cover plot synopses, critical commentary, character profiles, literary settings and biographical profiles in more than 12,000 reference articles. Masterplots articles are designed to be efficient reference sources, providing available facts about a work at a glance. Each article opens with ready-reference information: Type of work, author, first publication date, and English translation date where applicable. Narrative works also receive type of plot, time of plot, locale, and principal characters.

    The vampire started life as a sexual fantasy, and Bram Stoker's tale became a metaphor for dominance and dependence in sexual relationships. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, perhaps the most psychological of all horror stories, examines the beast in man and the dark side of human nature. And The Hound of the Baskervilles is a tale of conflict between rationalism and folklore, and the skills of Sherlock Holmes.

    Lynn Enterline analyzes what happens when Renaissance authors revisit Ovid's stories of violence and desire, paying close attention to the ways in which his subversive representations of gender, sexuality and the body influence later conceptions of the self and erotic life. This vividly original book makes a profound contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature.

    Essays on Conrad is a collection of Watt's most characteristic essays on Conrad's work. Watt's own philosophy, as well as his insight into Conrad's work, was shaped by his experiences as a prisoner of war on the River Kwai. His moving account of these experiences completes this essential collection of Watt essays.

    Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature.Each volume:-- Illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text-- Uses clear, conversational language-- Is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages-- Includes a chronology of the author's life and era-- Provides an overview of the historical context-- Offers a summary of its critical reception-- Lists primary and secondary sources and index

    In the process, he offers profound insights into their practice of art. Focusing on the spectator's instinctive emotional and physical response to paintings by such artists as Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, Newman, and Warhol, Sylvester brings an inspiring sense of the relevance and importance of art to life. Added to this updated edition are essays on Pollock, Twombly, and Serra, among others.

    B. Yeats. His early essays and Golden Dawn transcripts demonstrate that for the poet, the alchemist was both artist and initiate. Gorski considers the themes of transformation, apocalypse, and futurity in relation to Yeats' alchemical representations of the 1890s. He uncovers Yeats' postmodern trajectory--to reconstitute the body, history, and material contingency which Yeats' original Symbolist aesthetic sought to transcend for a world made wholly of essences.Yeats and Alchemy bridges the resistant discourses of hermeticism and poststructuralism in alchemy's reclaiming of the culturally discarded value, in its theorizing of construction and deconstruction, and in its siting of the Other within the subject. Discussions of previously unpublished Yeats journals theorize on the Body's place and potential in spiritual transformation. Gorski also highlights the role Yeats assigned to alchemy in marriage and in his turbulent partnership with Maud Gonne.

    In this study, T. G. Bishop examines ways in which wonder has been used by playwrights as an integral part of theater in classical and medieval drama and explores wonder in Shakespeare's work through extended readings of The Comedy of Errors, Pericles and The Winter's Tale. By focusing on how characters feel, and how the story of these feelings is told and evaluated, this study offers a new approach to understanding plays.

    Topics range from the greatness of SCTV to the rise of Trivial Pursuit to the glorious careers of William Shatner, Stompin' Tom Connors, and many other noble Canadians. This may be the one book whose scope is wide enough to encompass both the Guess Who and the Galloping Gourmet.Though the subjects are wildly diverse, Pevere and Dymond believe that the purest manifestations of Canuck junk-culture have much in common. For instance, they write that the "blithe indifference to trend and fashion" of fabled power-trio Rush makes it distinctly Canadian. Furthermore, the band's "refusal to pack up and go away even though it's constantly criticized for not being 'Canadian' enough" is evidence of "the same sheer Northern stubbornness" possessed by figures like filmmaker David Cronenberg and television innovator Moses Znaimer. Mondo Canuck also ridicules the most inane varieties of Canada's cultural output (e.g., the countless ice-skating spectaculars, the Rene Simard specials, the Celine Dion ballads). The authors describe the disastrous movies spawned by the tax-shelter film boom of the late '70s as what happens "when Canadians attempt to be just like the Americans, except without the history, money, population, promotional savvy or market base." Rigorously researched and frequently hilarious, Mondo Canuck illustrates that Canadians are no slouches when it comes to schlock. But at least it's our schlock.

    The contributors articulate how the works of diverse American writers of African, Mexican, Irish, Chinese, South Asian, Jewish, and Native American descent reclaim suppressed pasts, facilitating the emergence of newly empowering ethnic identities.

    This is an insider's tour, touching on the network's dizzying decision-making process, and the artists who have revolutionized the medium.

    He considers the role of the professional theater and theatricality in the cultural transformation that was concurrent with religious and socio-political change, and then concentrates upon the formal means by which Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays called into question the absolutist assertions of the Elizabethan state. Drawing dramatic examples from the genres of tragedy and history, Montrose finally focuses his cultural-historical perspective on A Midsummer Night's Dream.The Purpose of Playing elegantly demonstrates how language and literary imagination shape cultural value, belief, and understanding; social distinction and interaction; and political control and contestation.

    Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War, he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jünger in English, Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writer’s first fifty years, from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jünger, a man who has been extolled, despised, denounced, and admired throughout his lifetime, Ernst Jünger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is, if uncomfortably, represented by him.Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany’s conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler’s assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger’s untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger’s profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism.Winner of Germany’s highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.

    The history of American political cartoons.

    According to Freud, perversions are the necessary obstacles in a heroic plot of normal heterosexual development; and homosexuality is the nineteenth century's classic case of perversion. Roof builds on Freud to illustrate that a structural understanding of narrative enforces a heterosexual paradigm, a sense of meaning that provides psychological stability for the reader. Looking at film, television, and lesbian novels, Roof explores how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform, determine, and reproduce one another. She identifies the paradigmatic lesbian story, its unvarying repetition, and how it might be recast. Understanding identification as a narrative practice, and narrative as typically heterosexual and reproductive, Roof shows how sexuality and narrative must be disentangled to alter oppressive social practices.Come As You Are marks a significant contribution to lesbian and gay studies, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism.

    The emergence of this stereotype in American culture and literature during and after Reconstruction was related to the growth of white-on-black violence, as white lynch mobs acted in defense of white womanhood, the white family, and white nationalism.In Writing a Red Record Sandra Gunning investigates American literary encounters with the conditions, processes, and consequences of such violence through the representation of not just the black rapist stereotype, but of other crucial stereotypes in mediating moments of white social crisis: lascivious black womanhood; avenging white masculinity; and passive white femininity. Gunning argues that these figures together signify the tangle of race and gender representation emerging from turn-of-the-century American literature. The book brings together Charles W. Chestnutt, Kate Chopin, Thomas Dixon, David Bryant Fulton, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, and Ida B. Wells: famous, infamous, or long-neglected figures who produced novels, essays, stories, and pamphlets in the volatile period of the 1890s through the early 1900s, and who contributed to the continual renegotiation and redefinition of the terms and boundaries of a national dialogue on racial violence.

    Rachel Bowlby's acclaimed book on Virginia Woolf now appears with five new essays which look at Woolf in a number of new frames - as a woman essayist; as a city writer and critic of modern culture; and as a writer on love.