This will be the first time The Key To Midnight will be available in hardcover.

    Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’ cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges’s works to have appeared posthumously.”Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and highly opinionated tour of English literature, weaving together countless cultural traditions of the last three thousand years. Borges’s lectures — delivered extempore by a man of extraordinary erudition — bring the canon to remarkably vivid life. Now translated into English for the first time, these lectures are accompanied by extensive and informative notes by the Borges scholars Martín Arias and Martín Hadis.

    Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

    Full of stories, yet written in a condensed, imagistic language, his essays are works of the imagination where all the facts are verifiable. As entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poems, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe or forgotten moments in human history, erudite, politically engaged, and acerbically witty, there is nothing quite like his work in contemporary writing.In Karmic Traces, Weinberger's third collection from New Directions, twenty-four essays take the reader along on the author's personal travels from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong on the verge of the handover to China, as well as on imagined voyages in a 17th-century Danish ship bound for India and among strange religious cults or even stranger small animals. One never knows what will appear next: Viking dreams, Aztec rituals, Hindu memory, laughing fish, or prophetic dogs. And, in "The Falls", the long tour-de-force that closes the book, Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history in a cascade of telling facts to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence.

    Whether he is writing of Zionism or Palestinian self-determination, Jane Austen or Yeats, music or the media, Said's uncompromising intelligence casts urgent light on every subject he undertakes. The Edward Said Reader will prove a joy to the general reader and an indispensable resource for scholars of politics, history, literature, and cultural studies: in short, of all those fields that his work has influenced and, in some cases, transformed.

    -- 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

    H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden has announced that in his course . . . he proposes to read all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order. The New York Times reported this item on September 27, 1946, giving notice of a rare opportunity to hear one of the century's great poets comment on one of the greatest poets of all time. Published here for the first time, these lectures now make Auden's thoughts on Shakespeare available widely.Painstakingly reconstructed by Arthur Kirsch from the notes of students who attended, primarily Alan Ansen, who became Auden's secretary and friend, the lectures afford remarkable insights into Shakespeare's plays as well as the sonnets.A remarkable lecturer, Auden could inspire his listeners to great feats of recall and dictation. Consequently, the poet's unique voice, often down to the precise details of his phrasing, speaks clearly and eloquently throughout this volume. In these lectures, we hear Auden alluding to authors from Homer, Dante, and St. Augustine to Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and T. S. Eliot, drawing upon the full range of European literature and opera, and referring to the day's newspapers and magazines, movies and cartoons. The result is an extended instance of the live conversation that Auden believed criticism to be. Notably a conversation between Auden's capacious thought and the work of Shakespeare, these lectures are also a prelude to many ideas developed in Auden's later prose--a prose in which, one critic has remarked, all the artists of the past are alive and talking among themselves.Reflecting the twentieth-century poet's lifelong engagement with the crowning masterpieces of English literature, these lectures add immeasurably to both our understanding of Auden and our appreciation of Shakespeare.

    Delany brings his remarkable intellectual powers to bear on a wide range of topics. Whether he is exploring the deeply felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality, untangling the intricacies of literary theory, or the writing process itself, Delany is one of the most lucid and insightful writers of our time. These essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, pornography, comics, and more. Readers new to Delany's work will find this collection of shorter pieces an especially good introduction, while those already familiar with his writing will appreciate having these essays between two covers for the first time.

    In this book, Rembrandt's pictorial intentions and the variety of materials and techniques he applied to create his fascinating effects are unraveled in depth. At the same time, this "archaeology"of Rembrandt's paintings yields information on many other levels.In art-historical research, the work of art as a material object is used increasingly as an important source of information about the painting itself, as well as about historic studio practice in general. The range from practical workshop devices to aesthetic and art-theoretical matters combined in this book offers a view of Rembrandt's daily practice and artistic considerations, while simultaneously providing a more three-dimensional image of the historical artist.

    From a first reading of Beckett and Faulkner at the feet of an inspirational high-school English teacher to a meeting of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, from an obsession with Nabokov's Lolita to the discovery of the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, these essays chronicle a lifetime of literary enjoyment.The crime of his life --The quest for Scrivener --Talismans --Maxims, etc. --Heart of the matter --Bookman's Saturday --Supplementary materials --Listening to my father --Romantic scholarship --Weekend with Wodehouse --An abecedary --Mr. Wright --Heian holiday --Childhood's end --The one and the many --Commencement advice --Four novels and a memoir --The October country --Bookish fantasies --Pages on life's way --A garland for Max --Read at whim! --Comedy tonight --Light of other days --Data daze --Four-leaf clovers --Sez who? --Lament for a maker --Clubland --The learning channels --Guy Davenport --Eros by any other name --Frank confessions --Mememormee --Tomes for tots --Three classics --Vacation reading --One more modest proposal --Shake scenes --After strange books --Awful bits --Turning 50 --Blame it on books --On the road not taken --Excursion --Millennial readings

    The exhilarating essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces - on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination.

    Formerly a culture of immersive ideals—getting lost in a good book, for example—we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.Ryan's analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role-playing games. Interspersed among the book's chapters are several "interludes" that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call "virtual reality," including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext "novel" Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I'm Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory—the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text's creation.

    In recent years commentators such as Bruno Bettelheim have, usually from a psychological perspective, pondered the underlying meaning of the stories, why children are soenthralled by them, and what effect they have on the the best-known tales (Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty) and shows that the Grimms saw them as Christian fables. Murphy examines the arguments of previous interpreters of the tales, anddemonstrates how they missed the Grimms' intention. His own readings of the five so-called magical tales reveal them as the beautiful and inspiring documents of faith that the Grimms meant them to be. Offering an entirely new perspective on these often-analyzed tales, Murphy's book will appeal to those concerned with the moral and religious education of children, to students and scholars of folk literature and children's literature, and to the many general readers who are captivated by fairytales and their meanings.

    The Melancholy of Race proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic act--asocial category that is imaginatively supported through a dynamic of loss and compensation, by which the racial other is at once rejected and retained. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasonedaccount of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressivepolitics. Her discussion ranges from Flower Drum Song to M. Butterfly, Brown v. Board of Education to Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight, and Invisible Man to The Woman Warrior, in the process demonstrating that racial melancholia permeates our fantasies of citizenship, assimilation, and socialhealth. Her investigations reveal the common interests that social, legal, and literary histories of race have always shared with psychoanalysis, and situates Asian-American and African-American identities in relation to one another within the larger process of American racialization. A provocativelook at a timely subject, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in race studies, critical theory, or psychoanalysis.

    Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished scholar of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature, has been thinking about Shakespeare's plays all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime of thinking.The finest tragedies written in English were all composed in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and it is generally accepted that the best ones were Shakespeare's. Their language is often difficult, and it must have been hard even for contemporaries to understand. How did this language develop? How did it happen that Shakespeare's audience could appreciate Hamlet at the beginning of the decade and Coriolanus near the end of it?In this long-awaited work, Kermode argues that something extraordinary started to happen to Shakespeare's language at a date close to 1600, and he sets out to explore the nature and consequences of the dynamic transformation that followed. For it is in the magnificent, suggestive power of the poetic language itself that audiences have always found meaning and value. The originality of Kermode's argument, the elegance and humor of his prose, and the intelligence of his discussion make this a landmark in Shakespearean studies.

    The book speaks about how society and the present political climate help mold the current bida sa pelikula to embody the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of a people and their country.

    It argues for the importance of multiple critical perspectives and urges teachers to expand their theoretical repertoires.Teachers will find actual lessons and strategies for teaching a variety of contemporary literary theories including reader response, feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction.

    Joining them are younger writers such as Melvin Jules Bukiet, Jacqueline Osherow, Art Speigelman, Steve Stern and Allegra Goodman, who bring the tradition up to its thriving present.Yiddish and Hebrew Writing in AmericaJewish American Literature: Traces in breadth and depth America's rich Yiddish-language culture, from the work of Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelshtadt in the 1880s through the Yunge and Introspectivist movements to the post-Holocaust writings of Kadya Molodowsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Also represented is Hebrew writing, in translations of the work of Ephraim E. Lisitzky and modernist Gabriel Preil.Special Sections: Jewish Humor offers choice selections of Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, and a cluster of perennial Jewish jokes; The Golden Age of the Broadway Song samples the unforgettable lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Stephen Sondheim, among others; Jews Translating Jews reflects on the translator's role in transmitting tradition, gathering poems translated from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish by Jewish American poets from Emma Lazarus to David Unger.Helpful and Lively Reader's Apparatus: The Reader's Apparatus includes a general introduction, period introductions, author headnotes, explanatory annotations, and selected bibliographies.

    Available for the first time in paperback, this essential resource presents a systematic introduction to Dante's life and works, his cultural context and intellectual legacy.The only such work available in English, this Encyclopedia:brings together contemporary theories on Dante, summarizing them in clear and vivid proseprovides in-depth discussions of the Divine Comedy, looking at title and form, moral structure, allegory and realism, manuscript tradition, and also taking account of the various editions of the work over the centuriescontains numerous entries on Dante's other important writings and on the major subjects covered within themaddresses connections between Dante and philosophy, theology, poetics, art, psychology, science, and music as well as critical perspective across the ages, from Dante's first critics to the present.

    Where does my sense of self come from? Does it arise spontaneously or is it created by the media or society?This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important, and what are the different ways in which we can approach an understanding of the self? Nick Mansfield explores how our notions of subjectivity have developed over the past century. Analyzing the work of key modern and postmodern theorists such as Freud, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and Haraway, he shows how subjectivity is central to debates in contemporary culture, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postmodernism, and technology.

    Chesterton. Gilbert Chesterton had the rare gift of being able to understand situations from the "inside" - that is, to see through the hidden assumptions, lapses in logic, and other follies of even his own social and occupational situations. He was a journalist, and yet an unsparing critic of journalism. He was a poet, a story-teller, a novelist, a playwright, and an illustrator. Among the most imaginative of men who ever lived, Chesterton had much of value to say about the arts, imagination, and the Christian faith.Thomas Peters takes the reader on a guided tour of Chesterton's observations and opinions regarding human imagination and its various manifestations in the arts. Using ample quotations in order to let Chesterton speak for himself, Peters explores the master's views on imagination, culture, and faith, as well as his fascinating opinions on everything from styles of painting to meter in poetry, from bohemian lifestyles to materialist philosophy, from singing at the bank to waiting for the train.

    As famous in their day as the authors whose stories they illustrated, Wyeth and his gifted colleagues added their unique talents at narrative depiction to numerous fictional works of a century ago, brought back to life in these pages.

    McClatchy.

    Phrases like "phone home" and the music score from Jaws are now part of our cultural script, appearing in commercials, comedy routines, and common conversation.Yet few scholars have devoted time to studying Spielberg's vast output of popular films despite the director's financial and aesthetic achievements. Spanning twenty-five years of Spielberg's career, Steven Spielberg: Interviews explores the issues, the themes, and the financial considerations surrounding his work. The blockbuster creator of E.T., Jaws, and Schindler's List talks about dreams and the almighty dollar."I'm not really interested in making money," he says. "That's always come as the result of success, but it's not been my goal, and I've had a tough time proving that to people."Ranging from Spielberg's twenties to his mid-fifties, the interviews chart his evolution from a brash young filmmaker trying to make his way in Hollywood, to his spectacular blockbuster triumphs, to his maturation as a director seeking to inspire the imagination with meaningful subjects.The Steven Spielberg who emerges in these talks is a complex mix of businessman and artist, of arrogance and insecurity, of shallowness and substance. Often interviewers will uncover the director's human side, noting how changes in Spielberg's personal life -- marriage, divorce, fatherhood, remarriage -- affect his movies. But always the interviewers find keys to the story-telling and filmmaking talent that have made Spielberg's characters and themes shape our times and inhabit our dreams."Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about," he says. "Whether you watch eight hours of Shoah or whether it's Ghostbusters, when the lights go down in the theater and the movie fades in, it's magic."

    The cultural phenomena that generated comment and discussion—literary works, theatrical performances, films, conferences, book launches, etc.—have been viewed within a framework spelled out by the first two sections of the book: “Culture and Politics” and “Language and Culture.” Lumbera has always made culture and nationalism the advocacy of his teaching and writing, and in this book he elaborates on these intertwining themes.

    In one, we sit with the teenage Mark Strand while he reads for the first time a poem that truly amazes him: "You, Andrew Marvell" by Archibald MacLeish, in which night sweeps in an unstoppable but exhilarating circle around the earth toward the speaker standing at noon. The essay goes on to explicate the poem, but it also evokes, through its form and content, the poem's meaning -- time's circular passage -- with the young Strand first happening upon the poem, the older Strand seeing into it differently, but still amazed. Among the other subjects Strand explores: the relationship between photographs and poems, the eternal nature of the lyric, the contemporary use of old forms, four American views of Parnassus, and an alphabet of poetic influences.We visit as well Strandian parallel universes, whose absurdity illuminates the lack of a vital discussion of poetry in our culture at large: Borges drops in on a man taking a bath, perches on the edge of the tub, and discusses translation; a president explains in his farewell address why he reads Chekhov to his cabinet.Throughout The Weather of Words, Mark Strand explores the crucial job of poets and their readers, who together joyfully attempt the impossible -- to understand through language that which lies beyond words.From the Hardcover edition.

    Instead Hitchens argues that when all parties in the state were agreed on a matter, it was the individual pens that created the space for a true moral argument.

    From early 20th-century writings to present-day poetry slams, African American poetry exhibits an impressive range of style and substance. Lorenzo Thomas has written an important new history of the genre that offers a critical reassessment of its development in the 20th century within the contexts of modernism and the troubled racial history of the United States. Basing his study on literary history, cultural criticism, and close readings, Thomas revives and appraises the writings of a number of this century's most important African American poets, including Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, Askia M. Toure, Harryette Mullen, and Kalamu ya Salaam. Thomas analyzes the work of Fenton Johnson within the context of emerging race consciousness in Chicago, contributes to critical appraisals of William Stanley Braithwaite and Melvin B. Tolson, and examines the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the book, Thomas demonstrates the continuity within the Afrocentric tradition while acknowledging the wide range of stylistic approaches and ideological stances that the tradition embraces. By reassessing the African American poetry tradition, Thomas effectively reassesses the history of all 20th-century American literature by exploring avenues of debate that have not yet received sufficient attention. Written with intelligence and humor, his book is itself an extraordinary measure that reflects years of scholarship and opens up African American poetry to a wider audience.

    MacDonald offers an entirely new view of the New Testament gospel of Mark. The author of the earliest gospel was not writing history, nor was he merely recording tradition, MacDonald argues. Close reading and careful analysis show that Mark borrowed extensively from the Odyssey and the Iliad and that he wanted his readers to recognise the Homeric antecedents in Mark's story of Jesus. Mark was composing a prose anti-epic, MacDonald says, presenting Jesus as a suffering hero modeled after but far superior to traditional Greek heroes. Much like Odysseus, Mark's Jesus sails the seas with uncomprehending companions, encounters preternatural opponents, and suffers many things before confronting rivals who have made his house a den of thieves. In his death and burial, Jesus emulates Hector, although unlike Hector Jesus leaves his tomb empty. Mark's minor characters, too, recall Homeric predecessors: Bartimaeus emulates Tiresias; Joseph of Arimathea, Priam; and the women at the tomb, Helen, Hecuba, and Andromache. And, entire episodes in Mark mirror Homeric episodes, including stilling the sea, walking on water, feeding the multitudes, the Triumphal E

    Now, its 150,000 devoted readers can devour The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors -- an all-original, A-to-Z guide to 225 of the most fascinating writers of our time, penned by an international cast of talented young critics and reviewers. Here are profiles, reviews, and bibliographies of the authors that matter most now -- from Margaret Atwood to Tobias Wolff, Paul Auster to Alice Walker. Also included are essays and recommended reading lists by some of the authors themselves, such as Dorothy Allison on the books that shaped her, A. S. Byatt on her five favorite historical novels, Rick Moody on postmodern fiction, Robert Stone on the greatest war novels, and Ian McEwan on the best fiction about work.Peppered throughout with marvelously witty illustrations, The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors will be a must-have for anyone who is looking for cocktail party conversation starters, a good read, or advice on what to read next.

    Ross worries about everything from keeping track of office typewriters to the magazine's role in wartime to the exact questions to be asked for a "Talk of the Town" piece on the song "Happy Birthday." We find Ross, in Kunkel's words, "scolding Henry Luce, lecturing Orson Welles, baiting J. Edgar Hoover, inviting Noel Coward and Ginger Rogers to the circus, wheedling Ernest Hemingway— offering to sell Harpo Marx a used car and James Cagney a used tractor, and explaining to restaurateur-to-the-stars Dave Chasen, step by step, how to smoke a turkey." These letters from a supreme editor tell in his own words the story of the fierce, lively man who launched the world's most prestigious magazine.From the Hardcover edition.

    Jonathan Williams is a poet, publisher, photographer, polemicist,champion correspondent and cross-country promenader.

    The question of rehearsal is seldom confronted directly, though important textual moments - like revision - are often attributed to it. Furthermore, up until now, facts abouttheatrical rehearsal have been considered irrecoverable.In this groundbreaking new study, Tiffany Stern gathers together two centuries' worth of historical material which shows how actors received and responded to their parts, and how rehearsal affected the creation and revision of plays. This is the first history of the subject, from the sixteenthcentury to the eighteenth. It examines the nature and changing content of rehearsal, drawing on a mass of autobiographical, textual, and journalistic sources, and in so doing throws new light on textual revision and transforms accepted notions of Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-centurytheatrical practice. Plotting theatrical change over time, this book will revolutionize the fields of textual and theatre history alike.

    As D. Diane Davis traces today’s theoretical interest to those countertraditions, she also sets her sights beyond them.          Davis takes a “third sophistics” approach, one that focuses on the play of language that perpetually disrupts the “either/or” binary construction of dialectic. She concentrates on the nonsequential  third—excess—that overflows language’s dichotomies. In this work, laughter operates as a trope for disruption or breaking up, which is, from Davis’s perspective, a joyfully destructive shattering of our confining conceptual frameworks.

    It focuses upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, old wives' tales and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying and scandalous rumor-mongering. Adam Fox demonstrates the extent to which this vernacular world was fundamentally structured by written and printed sources over the course of the period.

    In an acute and often very funny critique of the critics, Acocella untangles Cather's reputation from decades of politically motivated misreadings, and proposes her own clear-headed view of Cather’s genius. At once a graceful summary of Cather's life and work, and a refreshing plea that books be read for themselves, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism will also inspire readers to return to one of America's great novelists.

    With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. Navigating through accrued layers of cultural, economic, and personal history, Rotella shows how stories of city life can be found in a boxing match, a guitar solo, a chase scene in a movie, or a landscape. The stories he tells dramatize the coming of the postindustrial era in places once defined by their factories, a sweeping set of changes that has remade the form and meaning of American urbanism.A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates with these stories, Rotella has gone to the home turfs of his characters, hanging out in boxing gyms and blues clubs, riding along with cops and moviemakers, discussing the future of Brockton with a visionary artist and a pitbull-fancying janitor who both plan to save the city's soul. These people make culture with their hands, and hands become an expressive metaphor for Rotella as he traces the links between their individual talents and the urban scenes in which they flourish. His writing elegantly connects what happens on the street to the larger story of urban transformation, especially the shift from a way of life that demanded individuals be "good with their hands" to one that depends on the intellectual and social skills fostered by formal education and service work.Strong feelings emerge in this book about what has been lost and gained in the long, slow aging-out of the industrial city. But Rotella's journey through the streets has its ultimate reward in discovering deep-rooted instances of what he calls "truth and beauty in the Rust Belt."

    Step into a World is a kaleidoscope into the world not bound by artificial constructs like nation. John Coltrane recorded 'Giant Steps, ' which is a riff on the sight and sounds in his muse. Powell plays the computer with equal astuteness." -Nikki Giovanni "Those of us who pay attention were aware that the younger generation of black writers was being smothered by the anointment of talented tenth Divas and Divuses, and their commercial accommodationist 'Fourth Renaissance. 'This anthology is indeed a breakthrough! It combines the boldness and daring of hip-hop with the intellectual keenness of a Michele Wallace or a Clyde Taylor." -Ishmael Reed "In a culture where videos, the Internet, and other high-tech communication is being consumed like the latest mind-altering drug, how does great literature grow and survive? These writers will answer that all-important question. This anthology provides a clue, a hint, as to where we might be going. They are resisting all this vacant, empty-minded nothingness. Read them. Listen to them. If you don't, you do so at your peril." -Quincy Troupe

    The language in which we speak about art has become steadily more abstruse, a jargon that only art critics and con-artists can understand, though for thousands of years this was not the case. Today, we live in a kaleidoscopic new world of images: Is there a vocabulary we can learn in order to read these images? Is there something we can do so as not to remain passive when we flip through an illustrated book, or download images on a screen? Are there ways in which we can "read" the stories within paintings, monuments, buildings and sculptures? We say "every picture tells a story" - but does it?Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photographed, painted, built, sculpted - Alberto Manguel explores how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent. A History of Love and Hate is not about art history or theory - it is about the astonishing pleasures and surprises of stories.

    In this readable commentary, Ellen Davis points out that the writers of these books considered wisdom--and the fruits of wisdom, a well-ordered life and a peaceful mind--to be within the grasp of anyone wholeheartedly desiring it.Books in the Westminster Bible Companion series assist laity in their study of the Bible as a guide to Christian faith and practice. Each volume explains the biblical book in its original historical context and explores its significance for faithful living today. These books are ideal for individual study and for Bible study classes and groups.

    H. Auden in England before the war. Edward Mendelson writes with unrivaled knowledge of published texts, manuscripts, private papers, and essays in this most illuminating of critical works.

    The book explains the conditions under which the early playwrights and players worked, their preparation of the plays for the stage, and their rehearsal practices. It looks at the quality of evidence supplied by the surviving play-texts, and the extant to which audiences of the time differed from modern audiences; and it gives vivid examples of how Elizabethan actors made use of gestures, costumes, props, and the theater's specific design features. Stage movement is analyzed through a careful study of how exits and entrances worked on such stages. The final chapter offers a thorough examination of Hamlet as a text for performance, excitingly returning the play to its original staging at the Globe.

    His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as the rhetorical history of cannibalism, the political and cultural uses of translation, and the current state of American poetry. Along the way, he calls on past poets like Ovid, Baudelaire, and Phyllis Wheatley, on twentieth-century poets like Wallace Stevens, H. D., and Rainer Maria Rilke, and on writers and thinkers like Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, and Paul de Man.These essays explore facets of poetry known best to one who has practiced the art for years. From the methods of poetic attention to the processes by which perception is transformed into language and from the illusive relationship between poetry and “meaning” to the integral relationship between poetry and memory, this collection delves into what it means to be a poet and how being a poet is intimately tied to one’s social and cultural moment.With Santos’s trademark flair for seeking out the overlooked and unforeseeable, A Poetry of Two Minds is an extraordinary collection that testifies to its author’s far-reaching intellectual curiosity. Readers who have delighted in his insights over the years can now have the satisfaction of having them caught between the covers of this provocative book.

    In Ehud’s Dagger, James Holstun reconstructs their radical projects and calls for a return to and development of marxist history from below.He begins with a powerful critique of those anti-communist historians and literary critics who have tried to ignore or deny the role of working people in shaping the English Revolution. Then, drawing on Ernst Bloch’s utopian marxism, Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of practical ensembles, and the political marxism of the British marxist historians, he begins his reconstruction of five seventeenth-century radical projects.In a Caroline prologue, he examines the political and poetic furor surrounding John Felton, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, enabling anonymous writers, readers and circulators of verse libels to contemplate a republican alternative to Charles’s attempted absolutism. He then turns to the Revolution proper, focusing on the common soldiers of the Puritan New Model Army, who formed a military soviet in the summer of 1647 and bested their capitalist officers in debate; the Fifth Monarchist visionary Anna Trapnel, who wrote, preached, and prophesied publicly against the Protectorate on behalf of sectarian small producers; the Leveller theorist and desperado Edward Sexby, who wrote the brilliant republican treatise Killing Noe Murder and attempted to assassinate Oliver Cromwell; and the agrarian communist Diggers of Surrey, whose comrade and leader Gerrard Winstanley was the foremost social theorist of seventeenth-century England.Richly detailed and rigorously argued, Ehud’s Dagger will spark renewed historical and literary critical interest in the prophetic writing, political struggle, and creative practical consciousness of working people in the early modern world.

    This lively and richly varied collection offers more than two dozen essays that are uniformly original, challenging, playful, and ruthlessly individualistic.

    He considers areas such as images of childhood, our awkwardness at speaking about community, our unwillingness to think seriously about remorse, and our devastating lack of vocabulary for the growth and nurture of the self through time. This timely book by a master of contemporary Christian thought sketches out a renewed language for the soul.

    In this book, Wah demonstrates how writing poetry is writing critically. This scrapbook of Wah's work -- collected from fifteen years of his writing -- contains essays, reviews, journals, notes and, most importantly, poetic improvisations on contemporary poetry and identity. Faking It was written between 1984 and 1999 -- during major shifts in critical thinking and cultural production -- and the hybrid style of the book is an apt reflection of these changing times, as well as a reflection and study of Wah's own hybrid identity.

    To think transnationally about literature, history, and culture requires a study of the evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic identities across national boundaries.Studies addressing issues of race, ethnicity, and empire in U.S. culture have provided some of the most innova-tive and controversial contributions to recent scholarship. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature represents a new chapter in the emerging dialogues about the importance of borders on a global scale.This book collects nineteen essays written in the 1990s in this emergent field by both well established and up-and-coming scholars. Almost all the essays have been either especially written for this volume or revised for inclusion here.These essays are accessible, well-focused resources for college and university students and their teachers, displaying both historical depth and theoretical finesse as they attempt close and lively readings. The anthology includes more than one discussion of each literary tradition associated with major racial or ethnic communities. Such a gathering of diverse, complementary, and often competing viewpoints provides a good introduction to the cultural differences and commonalities that comprise the United States today.The volume opens with two essays by the editors: first, a survey of the ideas in the individual pieces, and, second, a long essay that places current debates in U.S. ethnicity and race studies within both the history of American studies as a whole and recent developments in postcolonial theory.Amritjit Singh, a professor of English and African American studies at Rhode Island College, is coeditor of Conversations with Ralph Ellison and Conversations with Ishmael Reed (both from University Press of Mississippi). Peter Schmidt, a professor of English at Swarthmore College, is the author of The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction (University Press of Mississippi).

    Drawing on the scholarship and children's literature of many cultures and languages, she outlines the constituent areas that structure the field, including contact and transfer studies, intertextuality studies, intermediality studies and image studies. In doing so, she provides the first comprehensive overview of this exciting new research area. Comparative Children's Literature also links the fields of narratology and translation studies, to develop an original and highly valuable communicative model of translation.Taking in issues of children's 'classics', the canon and world literature for children, Comparative Children's Literature reveals that this branch of literature is not as genuinely international as it is often fondly assumed to be and is essential reading for those interested in the consequences of globalization on children's literature and culture.

    From Beckett and Bowen, through Joyce, MacNeice, Swift, and Yeats, To Ireland, I is a provocative re-reading of the major Irish authors, with a particular emphasis on the continuity of the tradition.

    The Poetics of Spice includes discussion of a wide range of related topics--exoticism, orientalism, colonialism, the slave trade, race and gender issues, and, above all, capitalism. The book surveys literary, political, medical, travel, trade and philosophical texts, and includes new readings of Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith and Southey among many others.

    Steering a course through literary, historical, and ethical concerns, authors must find ways to engage young readers with the serious truths of genocide, brutality, and human suffering at its most extreme. How can these writers capture a child's attention without exploiting the subject, the victims, or the reader? The last two decades have seen an upsurge in attempts to make the Holocaust comprehensible to young people through novels, biographies, and picture books. This unique study examines genres of Holocaust literature for children and young adults in order to explore the ways in which material that has been called "unrepresentable" can be portrayed. Drawing upon a large corpus of texts that address Nazi persecution of Jewish, Gypsy, Mischling, Catholic, Slavic, and gay populations, Lydia Kokkola outlines various narrative approaches to the representation of horror. She provides stirring analyses of selected works by David Adler, Erich Hackl, Louis Begley, Maurice Sendak, Art Spiegelman, and Carol Matas, among others. Specific topics of discussion include the rhetoric and power of silence, the reliability of life writing, and the attraction/revulsion of Holocaust literature. In its probing search for answers, this book invites readers to consider the challenge of sustaining appreciation for the horrors of history among adults and children alike.

    For example, while DuBois' thoughts about Africa may be familiar to contemporary academics, those of his important precursors and contemporaries are not widely known. Similarly, although contemporary figures such as Martin Bernal, Molefi Assante, and other "Afrocentrists" are the subject of heated debate, such debates are rarely illuminated by an awareness of the traditions that preceded them. Race and The Writing of History redresses this imbalance, using Bernal's Black Athena and its critics as an introduction to the historical inquiries of African-American intellectuals and many of their African counterparts. Keita examines the controversial legacy of writing history in America and offers a new perspective on the challenge of building new historiographies and epistemologies. As a result, this book sheds new light on how ideas about race and racism have shaped the stories we tell about ourselves.

    When a context is dominant within a culture, the effects of that context upon an author may be taken for granted and thus overlooked. Race is a powerful factor in shaping literary works. Literature by black writers, for example, often reflects the experiences of African Americans. At the same time, though perhaps less obviously, literature by white writers may similarly reflect the experience of being white. This book argues that H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath wrote from an unproclaimed dominant white perspective that becomes evident in their poetry.Loosely delineated, writing white constitutes writing authored from an acknowledged or unacknowledged white perspective; writing that implies or explicitly delivers the concept of whiteness to a text; writing that remains unconcerned with white racial politics internal and external to the text; and writing that uses the word white to maintain ideological systems of mastery and dichotomy. This book examines numerous poems in terms of whiteness. Each chapter places one poet in the larger context of historical and cultural racial events prevalent during the time of her writing and explores the particular poems created and published during that period.

    Feminizing Chaucer investigates Chaucer's thinking about women, and re-assesses it in the light of developments in feminist criticism. It explores Chaucer's handling of gender issues, of power roles, of misogynist stereotypes and the writer's responsibility for perpetuating them, and the complex meshing of activity and passivityin human experience. Mann argues that the traditionally 'female' virtues of patience and pity are central to Chaucer's moral ethos, and that this necessitates a reformulation of ideal masculinity.First published [as Geoffrey Chaucer] in the series 'Feminist Readings', this new edition includes a new chapter, 'Wife-Swapping in Medieval Literature'. The references and bibliography have been updated, and a new preface surveys publications in the field over the last decade. JILL MANN is currently Notre Dame Professor of English, University of Notre Dame.

    These essays, some never before published, others difficult to find, span four decades of his work and document its impressive range. Benardete's philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground that makes this collection a whole. The key, suggested by his reflections on Leo Strauss in the last piece, lies in the question of how to read Plato. Benardete's way is characterized not just by careful attention to the literary form that separates doctrine from dialogue, and speeches from deed; rather, by following the dynamic of these differences, he uncovers the argument that belongs to the dialogue as a whole. The "turnaround" such an argument undergoes bears consequences for understanding the dialogue as radical as the conversion of the philosopher in Plato's image of the cave.Benardete's original interpretations are the fruits of this discovery of the "argument of the action."

    McNay argues that recent thought on the formation of the modern subject offers a one-sided or negative account of agency, which underplays the creative dimension present in the responses of individuals to changing social relations. An understanding of this creative element is central to a theory of autonomous agency, and also to an explanation of the ways in which women and men negotiate changes within gender relations. In exploring the implications of this idea of agency for a theory of gender identity, McNay brings together the work of leading feminist theorists - such as Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser - with the work of key continental social theorists. In particular, she examines the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, each of whom has explored different aspects of the idea of the creativity of action. McNay argues that their thought has interesting implications for feminist ideas of gender, but these have been relatively neglected partly because of the huge influence of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan in this area. She argues that, despite its suggestive nature, feminist theory must move away from the ideas of Foucault and Lacan if a more substantive account of agency is to be introduced into ideas of gender identity. This book will appeal to students and scholars in the areas of social theory, gender studies and feminist theory.

    It has taken several different forms: as magazine, mailart campaign, series of booklets and audio tapes, coffee-table album, etc, culminating with a trilogy of deluxe editions inaugurating the final decade of the 20th Century. The last supper.The project's original aim: To put Art and Magick onto the street, where they belong, in order to facilitate the process of understanding and civilisation in a wilfully ignorant and manifestly, uncivilised society.Rapid Eye Movement contains the best of Simon Dwyer's writing, and is published as his last testament to our troubled but stimulating times.With a brand new foreword by Genesis P-Orridge.

    His emphasis is on the work involved in the critical evaluation of a given portion of text. His explanations of critical principles are illustrated with carefully selected examples of the textual phenomena discussed-in Hebrew, with English translations. The book concludes with unique appendices on several kinds of essential but hard-to-find information.

    Drawing on diverse disciplines including classics, anthropology, psychology, and literary studies, this product of twenty years' scholarship provides a detailed typology of the hero in Western myth: birth, parentage, familial ties, sexuality, character, deeds, death, and afterlife. Dean A. Miller examines the place of the hero in the physical world (wilderness, castle, prison cell) and in society (among monarchs, fools, shamans, rivals, and gods). He looks at the hero in battle and quest; at his political status; and at his relationship to established religion. The book spans Western epic traditions, including Greek, Roman, Nordic, and Celtic, as well as the Indian and Persian legacies. A large section of the book also examines the figures who modify or accompany the hero: partners, helpers (animals and sometimes monsters), foes, foils, and even antitypes. The Epic Hero provides a comprehensive and provocative guide to epic heroes, and to the richly imaginative tales they inhabit.

    This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often neglected or misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the center of England's literary world during the country's profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras.The essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of Mary Shelley's neglected novels, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, and Falkner. Other topics include Mary Shelley's work in various literary genres, her editing of her husband's poetry and prose, her politics, and her trajectory as a female writer. This volume advances Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raises important issues for English Romanticism and women's studies.

    For each entry, there's a basic definition, grammatical status, and the term's history proper--when it first appeared in English, its origins, and the history of its development. Trace such words as cathedral and syllable back to the original Latin and Greek; see direct borrowings from foreign languages such as zeitgeist and incubus; explore the scientific birth of coinages like agoraphobia and titanium; and enjoy some nonsense inventions, including frabjous and runcible. It's a goldmine of entertainment and enlightenment into the shifting meanings and usages of English.

    It highlights 25 of the most widely translated Japanese authors, such as Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, Junichiro Tanizaki and Fumiko Enchi.

    In The Domestic Revolution, Eve Tavor Bannet explores how eighteenth-century women writers of novels, conduct books, and tracts addressed key social, political, and economic issues, revising public thinking about the family and refashioning women's sexual and domestic conduct.Bannet examines the works of women writers who fell into two distinct camps: "Matriarchs" such as Eliza Haywood, Maria Edgeworth, and Hannah More argued that women had a superiority of sense and virtue over men and needed to take control of the family. "Egalitarians" such as Fanny Burney, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft sought to level hierarchies both in the family and in the state, believing that a family should be based on consensual relations between spouses and between parents and children. Bannet shows how Matriarch and Egalitarian writers, in their different ways, sought to raise women from their inferior standing relative to men in the household, in cultural representations, and in prescriptive social norms. Both groups promoted an idealized division of labor between women and men, later to be dubbed the doctrine of "separate spheres."The Domestic Revolution focuses on women's debates with each other and with male ideologues, alternating between discursive and fictional arguments to show how women translated their feminist positions into fictional exemplars. Bannet demonstrates which issues joined and separated different camps of eighteenth-century women, tracing the origins of debates that continue to shape contemporary feminist thought.

    His works continue to be read today and have been adapted many times into films. Chandler's writings have also been receiving growing amounts of scholarly attention, and while most of this attention has focused on his use of language, critics are now studying the fictitious world he created and the milieu in which he wrote. This reference is a detailed guide to his writings.A chronology and brief biography overview the chief events in his life and career, with the biography discussing thematic patterns in his life and writings. The major section of the book, Chandler's World, describes the characters and places in his 7 novels and 25 short stories. Alphabetically arranged entries also provide summaries of his works, along with discussions of key topics. The entries are concise and informative and thus readily guide the reader through Chandler's complex universe. Appendices provide information about adaptations of his works, along with extensive listings of primary and secondary sources for additional consultation.

    Many of today's students lack the grammatical and linguistic skills to enable them to study Shakespearean and other Renaissance texts as closely as their courses require. This practical guide will help them to understand and use the structures and strategies of written and dramatic language. Eleven short essays on aspects of literary criticism and performance by an eminent team of contributors are followed by a more detailed exploration of the history of language use, grammar and spelling, plus a glossary of terms offering definitions, contexts and examples. Together these provide an informed and engaging historical understanding of dramatic language in the early modern period.

    Feminist literary theories are pluralist, borrowing from other types of theory, such as marxism or postmodernism, but they always remain woman-centered. Courses in women's writing, literature and gender, and philosophy and literature proliferate--requiring readers to reconsider many of the basic assumptions on which the study of literature was originally founded.

    This gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth century.Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative, and language, and through questions of affect and reader response, the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary research in the black English oral tradition, The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking similarity to "Afro-American communal structures."At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts, establishing the African American and female voices that are essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is nearly 2,500 years old.These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's writing and between the artistic production and its role in the world at large. These relations show the rich political implications that aesthetic analysis engenders.By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain. The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.

    Instantly accessible on a global scale, these revolutionary videos have reflected and influenced popular culture, fashion, sports, advertising, art, cinema, television, and new media -- as well as music itself.Thirty Frames Per Second is the first book to showcase the artistic vision of the music video director. What began two decades ago as little more than a marketing tool showing a band's stage performance has now become a director's medium of expression and experimentation. Spike Jonze, Peter Care, Kevin Kerslake, Mark Romanek, and David Fincher are among the 55 top directors featured -- many of whom have come from backgrounds in film, advertising, photography, fine art, or architecture, and some of whom have gone on to make feature films. Nearly 400 stills, culled from the most compelling and influential videos, make this visually stimulating survey of the genre a powerful testament to a brashly innovative contemporary art form.

    Best known for 'The Berlin Stories' - the inspiration for the "Tony and Academy Award-winning" musical 'Cabaret' - Christopher Isherwood has always been considered both a literary and a gay pioneer. Through twenty-four essays and interviews, 'The Isherwood Century' offers a fresh, in-depth view of the author, his literary legacy, and his continuing influence."'The Isherwood Century' allows us to see [Isherwood's] long and colorful life as an expression of the freedom to reinvent oneself." - Los Angeles Times Author Biography - James J. Berg is the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. - Chris Freeman is assistant professor of English at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

    Over 50 years later he has over 80 volumes of short stories and novels to his credit. Though his writing has appeared in a variety of genres, his work eludes easy categorization.

    Stephen King's horror novels are among the most widely-read fiction of our time. At the cinema, horror films are popular box office hits and they are always in demand as home videos. What is it then that makes us voluntarily expose ourselves to fictional accounts of horror and violence? Is there some element in the representational form of the horror story that transforms the normally unpleasant horror sensation into enjoyable entertainment?In this study, Yvonne Leffler examines why we find fictional horror stories entertaining. She analyses the nature and narrative technique of the horror genre, dealing with both novels and films. In order to explain the popularity of horror, Leffler shows how the aesthetic premises of the horror story transform normally unpleasant feelings into pleasurable horror and aesthetic enjoyment.

     Asian American resistance to Orientalism-the Western tradition dealing with the subject and subjugation of the East-is usually assumed. And yet, as this provocative work demonstrates, in order to refute racist stereotypes they must first be evoked, and in the process the two often become entangled. Sheng-mei Ma shows how the distinguished careers of post-1960s Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Frank Chin, and David Henry Hwang reveal that while Asian American identity is constructed in reaction to Orientalism, the two cultural forces are not necessarily at odds. The vigor with which these Asian Americans revolt against Orientalism in fact tacitly acknowledges the family lineage of the two. To identify the multitude of historical forms appropriated by the deathly embrace of Orientalism and Asian American ethnicity, Ma highlights four types of cultural encounters, embodied in four metaphors of physical states: the "clutch of rape" in imperialist adventure narratives of the 1930s and 1940s, as seen in comic strips of Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates and in the Disney film Swiss Family Robinson; the "clash of arms" or martial metaphors in the 1970s and beyond, embodied in Bruce Lee, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and the video game Mortal Kombat; U.S. multicultural "flaunting" of ethnicity in the work of Amy Tan and in Disney's Mulan; and global postcolonial "masquerading" of ethnicity in the Anglo-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Broad in scope, penetrating in insight, Ma's work exposes themyriad ways in which Orientalism, an integral part of American culture, speaks through the texts of Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike. The result is a startling lesson in the construction of cultural identity. Sheng-mei Ma is associate professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University and the author of Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

    Taking Shakespeare as her case study, she boldly demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive theory--a theory which argues that language is produced by a reciprocal interaction of body and environment, brain and culture, and which refocuses attention on the role of the author in the making of meaning. Crane reveals in Shakespeare's texts a web of structures and categories through which meaning is created. The approach yields fresh insights into a wide range of his plays, including The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. ?Crane's cognitive reading traces the complex interactions of cultural and cognitive determinants of meaning as they play themselves out in Shakespeare's texts. She shows how each play centers on a word or words conveying multiple meanings (such as act, pinch, pregnant, villain and clown), and how each cluster has been shaped by early modern ideological formations. The book also chronicles the playwright's developing response to the material conditions of subject formation in early modern England. Crane reveals that Shakespeare in his comedies first explored the social spaces within which the subject is formed, such as the home, class hierarchy, and romantic courtship. His later plays reveal a greater preoccupation with how the self is formed within the body, as the embodied mind seeks to make sense of and negotiate its physical and social environment.

    The fourth volume in this series of anthologies covers the vibrant and turbulent period from 1973-78, in which the editorial make-up and policy of the journal changed radically, and issues of theory, history and politics dominated critical debate. The anthology combines essays by critics such as Gilles Deleuze, Serge Daney and Therese Giraud; round-table discussions; reviews of contemporary films from Star Wars and King Kong to Padre Padrone and The Passion of Joan of Arc, and interviews with leading theorists including Marc Ferro and Michel Foucault, presenting a richer sampler of Cahiers provocative and indispensable contribution to debates in film and cultural politics.translated

    Nesbit, Hugh Lofting, A.A. Milne, and Arthur Ransome for the ways these writers consciously and unconsciously used the metaphors of empire in their writing for children.

    With a foreword by Edward Said and an introduction by Ian Bell, which place Tanner's work in the larger context of critical approaches to American literature and culture, this book brings together Tanner's essays on a wide range of key American authors. Exploring writers as diverse as Melville, Emerson, Henry James, DeLillo and Pynchon, it offers an introduction to the major figures and themes in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature.

    D. MacCann..".probably the most profound and highly respected film theoretician and historian in France." -- The Macmillan International Film EncyclopaediaFirst published in France, this study is a classic analysis of the value of semiotics in film analysis.

    Modern Art Despite Modernism explores the anti-Modernist impulse in painting and sculpture through socio-cultural conflicts of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Texts by Robert Storr advocate the strengths of this impulse in paintings and drawings by Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente and even Pablo Picasso--and note the enduring popularity of such artists as Pavel Tchelitchew, whose "Hide and Seek," along with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," remain among the public's favorite pictures. Storr also discusses taste and its implications, both part and present, for institutions like The Museum of Modern Art. This book was published as the second in a series of three titles, in conjunction with the millennial exhibitions schedule of MoMA2000 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

    Drawing on medicine, literature, political economy, sociology, anthropology, and popular advertising, Erin O’Connor explores “the industrial logic of disease,” the dynamic that coupled pathology and production in Victorian thinking about cultural processes in general, and about disease in particular. O’Connor focuses on how four particularly troubling physical conditions were represented in a variety of literature. She begins by exploring how Asiatic cholera, which reached epidemic proportions on four separate occasions between 1832 and 1865, was thought to represent the dangers of cultural contamination and dissolution. The next two chapters concentrate on the problems breast cancer and amputation posed for understanding gender. After discussing how breast cancer was believed to be caused by the female body’s intolerance to urban life, O'Connor turns to men’s bodies, examining how new prosthetic technology allowed dismembered soldiers and industrial workers to reconstruct themselves as productive members of society. The final chapter explores how freak shows displayed gross deformity as the stuff of a new and improved individuality. Complicating an understanding of the Victorian body as both a stable and stabilizing structure, she elaborates how Victorians used disease as a messy, often strategically unintelligible way of articulating the uncertainties of chaotic change. Over the course of the century, O’Connor shows, the disfiguring process of disease became a way of symbolically transfiguring the self. While cholera, cancer, limb loss, and deformity incapacitated and even killed people, their dramatic symptoms provided opportunities for imaginatively adapting to a world where it was increasingly difficult to determine not only what it meant to be human but also what it meant to be alive. Raw Material will interest an audience of students and scholars of Victorian literature, cultural history, and the history of medicine.

    A comprehensive, user-friendly introduction to Alexander Pope's life and works, outlining the major critical issues and offering guides to further reading.

    They examine relationships between modernist poetry and place, and foreground issues of region and space, nation and location in the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. The book brings the work of major canonical writers into juxtaposition with more neglected modernists such as Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas, writers whose investment in the concepts of region and nation, it is argued, contributed to their relative marginalization.

    Reading through a feminist psychoanalytic lens, Zhong argues that understanding the nature of male subjectivities as portrayed in literature and film is crucial to understanding China’s ongoing quest for modernity. Before the 1990s onslaught of popular culture decentered the role of intellectuals within the nation, they had come to embody Chinese masculinity during the previous decade. The focus on masculinity in literature had become unprecedented in scale and the desire for “real men” began to permeate Chinese popular culture, making icons out of Rambo and Takakura Ken. Stories by Zhang Xianliang and Liu Heng portraying male anxiety about masculine sexuality are employed by Zhong to show how “marginal” males negotiate their sexual identities in relation to both women and the state. Looking at writers popular among not only the well-educated but also the working and middle classes, she discusses works by Han Shaogong, Yu Hua, and Wang Shuo and examines instances of self-loathing male voices, particularly as they are articulated in Mo Yan’s well-known work Red Sorghum. In her last chapter Zhong examines “roots literature,” which speaks of the desire to create strong men as a part of the effort to create a geopolitically strong Chinese nation. In an afterword, Zhong situates her study in the context of the 1990s. This book will be welcomed by scholars of Chinese cultural studies, as well as in literary and gender studies.

    -- 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

    Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a homogenized society. Gumshoe America traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crimefiction from the1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum on the KKK in the pulp magazine Black Mask to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genre’s conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett’s career, McCann shows how Hammett’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler’s fiction, unlike Hammett’s, idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback—Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford—are examined next in juxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the growing vision of America as a meritocracy. Before concluding, McCann turns to the work of Chester Himes, who, in producing revolutionary hard-boiled novels, used the genre to explore the changing political significance of race that accompanied the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Combining a striking reinterpretation of the hard-boiled crime story with a fresh view of the political complications and cultural legacies of the New Deal, Gumshoe America will interest students and fans of the genre, and scholars of American history, culture, and government.

    In contrast, another tradition, represented by Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Ernest Gellner, defends modern values and civil society. The Culture Cult discusses both sides of this divide between "culture" and "civilization," and between "closed" and "open" societies. The romantic insistence on the superiority of the primitive is increasingly grounded in a fictionalized picture of the past-a picture often created with the aid of well-meaning but misguided anthropologists. Such idealizations work to the detriment of the very people they are meant to help, for they isolate minorities from such undeniable benefits of modern society as literacy and health care, and discourage them from participating in modern life. Few will find comfort in The Culture Cult, but many will recognize a valuable criticism of currently popular social politics.

    Displaying scant interest in native scenes or materials, Edgar Allan Poe seems the most un-American of American writers during the era of literary nationalism; yet he was at the same time a pragmatic magazinist, fully engaged in popular culture and intensely concerned with the republic of letters in the United States. This Historical Guide contains an introduction that considers the tensions between Poe's otherworldly settings and his historically marked representations of violence, as well as a capsule biography situating Poe in his historical context. The subsequent essays in this book cover such topics as Poe and the American Publishing Industry, Poe's Sensationalism, his relationships to gender constructions, and Poe and American Privacy. The volume also includes a bibliographic essay, a chronology of Poe's life, a bibliography, illustrations, and an index.

    It draws on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as pre-Raphaelite and realist painters including Millais, Burne-Jones, William Powell Frith and Whistler, and a host of Victorian scientists, cultural commentators and art critics. Topics discussed include blindness, memory, hallucination, dust, and the importance of the horizon--a dazzling array of subjects linked together by the operations of the eye and brain. This richly illustrated book will appeal to anyone studying Victorian culture.

    Since the publication of his first novel Americana in 1971, DeLillo has explored modern American culture through a series of acclaimed novels, including White Noise (1985; winner of the American Book Award), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997).For Mark Osteen, the most bracing and unsettling feature of DeLillo's work is that, although his fiction may satirize cultural forms, it never does so from a privileged position outside the culture. His work brilliantly mimics the argots of the very phenomena it dissects: violent thrillers and conspiracy theories, pop music, advertising, science fiction, film, and television. As a result, DeLillo has been read both as a denouncer and as a defender of contemporary culture; in fact, Osteen argues, neither description is adequate. DeLillo's dialogue with modern institutions, such as chemical companies, the CIA, and the media, respects their power and ingenuity while criticizing their dangerous consequences. Even as DeLillo borrows from their discourses, he maintains a tenaciously opposing stance toward the sources of collective power.