Best of
Literary-Criticism

1978

Silences


Tillie Olsen - 1978
    In this classic work, now back in print, Olsen broke open the study of literature and discovered a lost continent—the writing of women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors’ letters and diaries we learn the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen’s heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen’s now infamous reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction and author preface.

The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939


W.H. Auden - 1978
    The reader recaptures the excitement of a young poet who struck readers first by the austere saga-like strangeness of his poetry, and then by his intoxication with disruptive, uninhibited ideas. The English Auden is the resurrection of the body of the poetry as it existed in England between 1927 and 1939.'-Stephen Spender, Sunday Telegraph

The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography


Angela Carter - 1978
    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

Joyce's Voices


Hugh Kenner - 1978
    Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities, and a brief treatise on the concept of objectivity: the idea that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses. Objectivity, Kenner claims, was a modern invention, and one that the modernists--Joyce foremost among them--found problematic. Accessible and enjoyable, Joyce's Voices is what so much criticism is not: an aid to better understanding--and enjoying more fully--the work of one of the world's greatest writers.

The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews


Eudora Welty - 1978
    In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers, including Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

The Shows of London


Richard D. Altick - 1978
    Examining hundreds of the wonderfully varied exhibitions that culminated in the Crystal Palace of 1851, this generously illustrated book sheds light on a vast and colorful expanse of English social history that has thus far remained wholly unsurveyed.Drawing on a wealth of never-before-used information, Mr. Altick traces London exhibitions as they evolved from the display of relics in pre-Reformation churches, through the collections of eighteenth-century virtuosi, to the first science museums and public art galleries. He also narrates for the first time the history of the panorama and diorama as an influential genre of nineteenth-century popular art. At every point, the London shows are linked to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere and to trends in public taste.The material is fresh and fascinating; the range--from freaks to popular science, from the funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey to Madame Tussaud's waxworks--impressive. Like the exhibitions that best served the Victorian ideal of mass culture, The Shows of London is both entertaining and informative.

The Masks of Macbeth


Marvin Rosenberg - 1978
    By what art did Shakespeare design two terrible murderers (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth) who would earn the compassion of almost four centuries of audiences of many cultures? Does the very magnitude of the criminals and their crimes stir deep layers in us of recognition and empathy? Do they kill, as well as suffer, for us? Are we mistaken in sympathizing? Are we rocked between sympathy and revulsion, as we see-saw among so many opposites that tense the play? To explore the multiplying mysteries of the play, this book examines major interpretations of distinguished actors, directors, scholars, and critics from England, the United States, France, Belgium, Holland, Japan, India, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and South America. In the differences, as well as the striking similarities, of these worldwide interpretations, Mr. Rosenberg finds many illuminations of Macbeth's beckoning complexities. He joins these to his own study and experience of the play, enriched by his opportunity to observe rehearsals and performances of the production at Stratford-upon-Avon, when Peter Hall directed Paul Scofield and Vivien Merchant in the leading roles. This method follows Mr. Rosenberg's practice of integrating critical and theatrical interpretation: for his The Masks of Othello he acted in and directed the play; and he observed a production of Lear through rehearsal and performance for The Masks of King Lear. As with the latter study, Rosenberg designed an experiment in audience response to discover afresh the effect of Shakespeare's art in arousing expectation about his characters and their action. He arranged three dramatizations of Macbeth for audiences that had never read or seen the play. The often surprisresponses of these "naive" audiences gland) were particularly enlightening for Macbeth, the only major tr

Milton and the English Revolution


Christopher Hill - 1978
    Hill uses the learning gathered in a lifetime's study of 17th-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet and, above all, religious thinker.

In The Wake Of The Wake


David Hayman - 1978
    38, Winter 1977). Available now in a permanent format, if offers both students and scholars an excellent introduction to major contemporary figures writing within the Joycean tradition.

The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought


John D. Caputo - 1978
    Avoiding the extremes of abject worship and facile refutation, it moves into the heart of the later Heideggers work. Not only is Caputo faithful to the texts, but he is reflective and critical, inviting the reader to philosophize with and against Heidegger.

Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body


Marcel Hénaff - 1978
    But this is not, Henaff maintains, the only way to see Sade. In this long-awaited translation of a book regarded by many as the best on the subject. Henaff says that Sade should be discussed less for the sensual heat of his writing and more for the larger poetic and economic model his work represents.With unabashed candor, Sade describes bodies in terms not of flesh but of production, use, exchange, and waste. In his writing, this libertine self is unleashed from its constraints, no longer bound by old conceptions of desire and traditions of courtship. Henaff's argument that Sade is a sign of his times -- exposing the courtly facade of a society unable to preserve itself -- reveals dark, disquieting secrets about the direction of civilization. The libertine body, he says, is a child of this new order.

Poetic Artifice: A Theory Of Twentieth Century Poetry


Veronica Forrest-Thomson - 1978
    

The World Of Biblical Literature


Robert Alter - 1978
    Increasingly, literary scholars as well as general readers have joined the ranks of the religious orthodox in reading it. Robert Alter, long in this movement's vanguard, reflects on the paradoxes inherent in considering this great religious work as literature. This book builds on, & in some cases takes issue with, the new wave of literary & bibilical studies to reexamine the elusive, endlessly fascinating texts that have nourished our culture for millenia. While most other books, including Alter's own earlier work, have been devoted to an analysis of the formal poetry & narrative properties of biblical literature, in this book Alter steps back from the analytical catagories to reflect on the general nature of biblical literature. How is one to account for the presence of an impulse as playful & as potentially subversive as literary creation in a body of texts so dedicated to religious purposes? What is the relation between literary imagination & religious values in the bible? In what ways is the bible distinctive as a body of literature. Are there lines of continuity between biblical literature & literature written later & elsewhere? In grappling with these questions, Alter draws on specific examples to make the theoretical issues concretely intelligible.

Malcolm Lowry's Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning


David Markson - 1978
    In the years between thesis and book, Markson became Lowry’s close friend (see the invaluable reminiscence at the end of the book) and an accomplished novelist in his own right. His critical reputation has only grown in the past two decades. Markson’s holds Under the Volcano to be the greatest English language novel after Ulysses—and very like it in ambition and method. While acknowledging that the novel’s primary pleasure is its literal, dramatic story, he argues here that Lowry’s book is a Joycean endeavor, both in its reliance on the mythic and in its allusive texture. Far from being incidental to the story—bits and pieces of learning merely stuffed into the text, as Lowry’s one-time mentor Conrad Aiken thought them—the dense web of reference is an intrinsic part of Lowry’s plan, and demonstrates his mastery. Working through the novel chapter by chapter, Markson conducts “an inductive investigation,” of the mythic dimension of Lowry’s great tragedy: “The guilt of the protagonist is that of Adam after the expulsion, his agony that of Christ at Golgotha, his frailty Don Quixote’s,” Markson writes. Lowry’s hero becomes, for example—through analogy, allusion, and metaphor—Faust, Dante, Prometheus, Oedipus, Judas, Hamlet, Prospero and Macbeth, as well as Scrooge and Peter Rabbit. Malcolm Lowry’sVolcano is more than just the first and most trenchant analysis of this great novel. It reveals the mind of a gifted contemporary novelist confronting the work of one of his own early masters. For, if Under the Volcano is a modern masterpiece, it has become increasingly clear that Markson is a master as well. Ten years after the appearance of this, his only non-fiction work, he published Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a novel that David Foster Wallace has called “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.” Praise for Malcolm Lowry's Volcano“A tour-de-force of literary detection.” —Sven Birkerts “An important addition to the Lowry canon.” —Chicago Tribune Book World“A major achievement in scholarly sleuthing, the sine qua non for apprehending Lowry’s great work.” —Fort-Worth Star Telegram

To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology


René Girard - 1978
    This mimetic desire, Rene Girard contends, lies at the source of all human disorder and order. In brilliant readings of Dante, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and others, Girard draws out the thesis of mimetic desire -- and ponders its suppression in the West since Plato: The historical mutilation of mimesis ...was no mere oversight, no fortuitous 'error.' Real awareness of mimetic desire threatens the flattering delusion we entertain not only about ourselves as individuals but also about the nature and origin of that collective self we call our society.

Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions: Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound


Donald Hall - 1978
    

Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story From Le Fanu To Blackwood


Jack Sullivan - 1978
    

Such As Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties


Tom E. Terrill - 1978
    Beard hailed it as "literature more powerful than anything I have read in fiction, not excluding Zola's most vehement passages." A very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of thirty-five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from over a thousand such histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. It was the Press' intention to publish several more volumes from the material that had been amassed, but World War II forced the cancellation of those plans. The editors of Such As Us have taken up the abandoned task and have produced a volume every bit as rich as its predecessor. From the perspective of forty years we can now read these stories as vivid chapters in the social history of the South, reaching as far back as slavery times and as far forward as the eve of World War II. To the modern reader the people speaking in this book may at first seem quaint, like curious from a past time and a different world. They worked on farms, in mills, oil fields, coal mines, and other people's homes. Their life histories provide a view of the world they saw, experienced, and helped to create. They tell about family life, religion, sex roles, being poor, and getting old, and they describe how major events -- the Civil War, Emancipation, World War I, the Great Depression, and the New Deal -- affected them. These accounts offer the reader the chance to experience vicariously the world these people lived in -- to know, for example, the wife of the tenant farmer who commented, "We seem to move around in circles like the mule that pulls the syrup mill. We are never still, but we never get anywhere." Such as Us is a contribution to the history of anonymous Americans. Like the former-slave narratives, which have become an important primary source for the historian, these life histories will enable the reader to reexamine traditional views and address new questions about the South. By providing an introduction and historical interchapters that place the histories in perspective, the editors set these histories within the cultural context of the 1930s and illustrate the relationship between private lives and public events. These life histories allow individuals to reach across time and share their lives with us. Although the people who speak in Such As Us are representatives of social types and classes, they are also unique individuals -- a paradoxical truth their life histories affirm.

The Composition of Four Quartets


Helen Gardner - 1978
    

The Idea of the Canterbury Tales


Donald R. Howard - 1978
    

The Right to Dream (Bachelard Translation Series)


Gaston Bachelard - 1978
    Bachelard

The True Voice Of Feeling: Studies In English Romantic Poetry


Herbert Read - 1978