Highly respected and widely read author Isaac Asimov offers a fresh, easy-to-read approach to understanding the greatest writer of all time.Designed to provide the modern reader with a working knowledge of topics pertinent to Shakespeare's audience, this book explores, scene-by-scene, thirty-eight plays and two narrative poems, including their mythological, historical and geographical roots.

    Every people or nation has its own way of experiencing this psychic reality, and so a study of the world's fairy tales yields a wealth of insights into the archetypal experiences of humankind. Perhaps the foremost authority on the psychological interpretation of fairy tales is Marie-Louise von Franz. In this book—originally published as An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales —she describes the steps involved in analyzing and illustrates them with a variety of European tales, from "Beauty and the Beast" to "The Robber Bridegroom." Dr. von Franz begins with a history of the study of fairy tales and the various theories of interpretation. By way of illustration she presents a detailed examination of a simple Grimm's tale, "The Three Feathers," followed by a comprehensive discussion of motifs related to Jung's concept of the shadow, the anima, and the animus. This revised edition has been corrected and updated by the author.

    This spectacular collection of essays and other writings does justice to those efforts, offering unique appraisals of Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Duchess of Newcastle, Dorothy Richardson, Charlotte Bronte, and Katherine Mansfield, amongst many others. Gathered too, and using previously unpublished (sometimes even unsigned) journal extracts, are what will now become timeless commentaries on 'Women and Fiction', 'Professions for Women' and 'The Intellectual Status of Women'. More than half a century after the publication of A Room Of One's Own, distinguished scholar Michele Barrett cohesively brings together work which, throughout the years, has been scattered throughout many texts and many volumes. . . affording these very valuable writings the collective distinction they deserve at last.

    As in his earlier acclaimed Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Kott provides startling insights and intuitive leaps which link our world to that of the ancient Greeks. The title refers to the Bacchae of Euripides, that tragedy of lust, revenge, murder, and "the joy of eating raw flesh" which Kott finds paradigmatic in its violence and bloodshed.Jan Kott was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1914. In 1969 he left Poland for the United States. He received the 1985 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for The Theater of Essence (Northwestern University Press, 1984).

    It tells the majestic but heartbreaking tale of a genius - a novelist, playwright and painter, a man who wore "purple waistcoats and strange ties cut from curtains or scarves", and who died in 1968 of "premature senility". Maeve Gilmore is his widow.Their life together began gloriously. The early years of the two young artists' marriage were idyllic. Wherever they lived, the magnificent Merevyn Peake would write and draw and paint. Then struck a series of unpredictable blows. And then the final one. And Maeve Gilmore is left, indomitable, with the memory of a miraculously Modern Man - whose strength, for her, is eternal.A work of art - MAURICE COLLISWithout doubt one of the most moving books I have ever read. I am sure that even those not familiar with Peake's work will find this book engrossing - MICHAEL MOORCOCK

    Yet More wrote some of his best works as a prisoner, including A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and a commentary on the agony of Christ (De tristitia Christi). His last letters, too, are works of art that are both historically important and religiously significant.The Last Letters of Thomas More is a superb new edition of More's prison correspondence, introduced and fully annotated for contemporary readers by Alvaro de Silva. Based on the critical edition of More's correspondence, this volume begins with letters penned by More to Cromwell and Henry VIII in the spring of 1534 and ends with More's last words to Margaret Roper, his daughter, on the eve of his execution, July 6, 1535. More writes on a host of topics — prayer and penance, the right use of riches and power, the joys of heaven, the challenges of maintaining moral virtue, and much more. These letters also reveal much about More himself, especially his understanding of "conscience." The strength of his conscience was reinforced by the Word of God coming in all its power through Scripture, and by remembering all the faithful of the church. In his vivid imagination of that glorious "company of saints," More found the courage to follow his conscience even unto death. "It is a case," he wrote, "in which a man may lose his head and yet have none harm, but instead of harm inestimable good at the hand of God." Providing a rich complement to these letters is de Silva's commentary. In it he throws light on the literary works that More wrote in prison, and explores the religious and political conditions of Tudor England. And always he reminds us of More — of the man whose unshakable faith and shining example draw us to him today.

    Taking us on a tour of the countless myths and legends which have arisen to explain the great dramatist's life and work, S. Schoenbaum presents a wealth of material from collections scattered all over the world which yield fresh and often dramatic information about a host of controversial characters and incidents. Beginning with the Shakespeare of documentary record--poet of the London stage and burgher of Stratford--Schoenbaum proceeds to the legends of Shakespeare as deer-poacher, ale-toper, and valiant lover. Other Shakespeares follow: the playwright as protagonist in a host of popular and scholarly biographies, which often reveal more about the biographer than the subject. The Shakespeare for whom imaginary history was invented through forged documents--first by Ireland in the eighteenth century, and later by the clever and more seasoned J. Payne Collier. And lastly the Shakespeare who never was: anti-hero of a vast and frequently eccentric literature crediting his works to luminaries such as Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, and Christopher Marlowe. Enlivened with such notable personages as Johnson, Keats, Hawthorn, Wilde, Joyce, and Freud, Shakespeare's Lives is a book of many lives--both described and lived--during the course of four centuries. From the mists of ignorance and misconception Schoenbaum allows the figure of Shakespeare to emerge, seen through a succession of different eyes and from constantly shifting vantage-points. This new edition makes the latest lives of Shakespeare available to whole new generation of the Bard's devotees.

    

    Jackson Bate presents a thoughtful and informed investigation of the responses of English writers to the perennial dilemma of modern literature. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet concentrates especially on the period between 1660 and 1830—the first period to face the burden of the past on a large scale—but making continual applications to the present day.

    The proceedings of this event—which proved epoch-making on both sides of the Atlantic—were first published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1970 and are now available once again, with a reflective new preface by editor and symposium convener Richard Macksey.

    

    . . I am a spiteful man," the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. "Notes From Underground," published in 1864, marks a turning point in Dostoevsky's writing: it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in "Crime And Punishment," "The Idiot," and "The Brothers Karamazov.

    After a discussion 'On Words and The Word,' he analysess verbal action in St. Augustine's Confessions. He then discusses the first three chapters of Genesis, and ends with a brilliant and profound 'Prologue in Heaven,' an imaginary dialogue between the Lord and Satan in which he proposes that we begin our study of human motives with complex theories of transcendence,' rather than with terminologies developed in the use of simplified laboratory equipment. . . . Burke now feels, after some forty years of search, that he has created a model of the symbolic act which breaks through the rigidities of the 'sacred-secular' dichotomy, and at the same time shows us how we get from secular and sacred realms of action over the bridge of language. . . . Religious systems are systems of action based on communication in society. They are great social dramas which are played out on earth before an ultimate audience, God. But where theology confronts the developed cosmological drama in the 'grand style,' that is, as a fully developed cosmological drama for its religious content, the 'logologer' can be further studied not directly as knowledge but as anecdotes that help reveal for us the quandaries of human governance." --Hugh Dalziel Duncan from Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924 - 1966, edited by William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969).

    Covering two world wars and exile in Europe and America, Mann's letters offer the reader insight into the concerns and values of one of the great writers of our time.

    This book offers a breakdown of the elements of plays and playwriting in concise and straightforward terms: “Though academic, th[is] book is by no means dogmatic or theoretical. Quite the contrary. Its spirit is broadly scientific and its method is inductive.” --New York Times

    An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work.Each volume features:-- A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works-- A brief biography of the author-- An accessible chronology outlining the life, the work, and relevant historical context-- Aids for further study: complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography and an index-- A readable style presented in a manageable length

    

    

    Lectures delivered in 1914 on the Percy Turnbull Memorial Foundation in the Johns Hopkins University by Kittredge Gurney Professor of English Literature in Harvard University. Contents: The Man and His Times; The Book of the Duchess; The House of Fame; Troilus; The Canterbury Tales-I; and The Canterbury Tales-II. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

    In this volume ten noted authors and critics-including R. B. Heilman, Dennis Donoghue, and David Lodge-probe the works of the Brontes to show the influences that shaped the mystical worlds of their novels and poems and contributed to their distinctive styles.Their novels, points out Richard Chase, are not rebellions against Victorian socialstandards, as it is commonly belived, but rather are Charlotte and Emily's way of transmuting Victorian ideals into symbolic form. In studying such aspects of the Bronte's literature as imagery, ideas of love, and Gothic style, other contributors show, in Gregor's words, "how most interpretations invariably retuen to the question of Charlotte and Emily's personal involvement in their novels."

    First delivered as lectures in the 1960s, when Booth was a professor at Earlham College and the University of Chicago, Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me still resounds with anyone struggling for consensus in a world of us versus them. “Professor Booth’s earnestness is graced by wit, irony, and generous humor.”—Louis Coxe, New Republic