The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

    In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

    In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenologyand processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the Babel problem in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. Withthis provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions. For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantiallyupdated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in theacademy today.

    "Barthes par Barthes is a genuinely post-modern autobiography, an innovation in the art of autobiography comparable in its theoretical implications for our understanding of autobiography to Sartre's The Words."--Hayden White, University of California

    Vargas Llosa's first work of non-fiction will send the reader back to Flaubert's masterpiece with renewed interest.

    In The Rule of Metaphor he seeks 'to show how language can extend itself to its very limits, forever discovering new resonances within itself'. Recognizing the fundamental power of language in constructing the world we perceive, it is a fruitful and insightful study of how language affects how we understand the world, and is also an indispensable work for all those seeking to retrieve some kind of meaning in uncertain times.

    Collected after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, here are more than two decades' worth of Franz Kafka's letters to the men and women with whom he maintained his closest personal relationships, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924.Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, they include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.

    The "book as book" has been removed from the oral tradition by such features as prefaces, footnotes, and indexes. Books have become voiceless in some sense - they are to be read silently, not recited aloud. How this mechanical change affected the possibilities of fiction is Kenner's subject.

    When it was first published, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge proved to be a seminal work in the psychoanalytic study of Faulkner's fiction, especially of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This softcover reissue of John Irwin's masterful exposition unwinds the mystery of unconscious desire and doubling that inform the novels.

    

    

    Explores five women poets, ranging from Sappho to Emily Dickinson, through brief biographies and selections of their poetry.

    Softcover Trade Paperback

    Although there is little specific biographical data in support of the author's thesis, he argues compellingly for it in his analysis of the texts themselves. After discussing Hegel's dramatic method of exposition and Ibsen's philosophy, Johnston examines each of the twelve plays in considerable detail. Provocative and sophisticated in its approach, this volume should be widely available to scholars and advanced students of modern drama. ---Library Journal

    In this study of Ted Hughes, Dr Sagar gives most of his attention to individual poems, their meaning and coherence, their relation to each other and to the poetic tradition, their sources and background (often in mythology and folklore), and their relevance to living in our time. He began reading Hughes in 1957 when The Hawk in the Ruin appeared, and has followed his development closely ever since: here, with benefit of hindsight, he attempts to retrace that journey. A chapter is devoted to each major work.

    The idea of the true freedom which comes to the man who lives as much as possible in the invisible world of culture and accepts as a kind of fate his social, political and material circumstances was indeed at the heart of the German idealism of Goethe's day, and unworldliness went along with very great achievements in literature, scholarship and philosophy. Bildung, self-cultivation, came to be as natural a requirement of educated, middle-class life as sport was in England. In this book, originally published in 1975, Professor Bruford provides a sequel to Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775-1806 and shows how the ideal of self-cultivation entered into the thought of a number of highly individual German philosophers, theologians, poets and novelists, each in his own corner of the rapidly changing world of the nineteenth century.

    

    Luthi shows that fairytales are more than just a pleasing form; they present a particular way of looking at the world and at human existence. Thus, they must be evaluated in terms of what they say about man and the human condition.This exemplary study will be read with enjoyment and profit not only by the literary scholar and folklore professional but by any reader who has ever delighted in fairytales.