Best of
Literary-Criticism

1979

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination


Sandra M. Gilbert - 1979
    An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual."Contents:The Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity --Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship --The parables of the cave --Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's Juvenilia --Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents) --Milton's bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers --Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous Eve --Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell --A secret, inward wound: The professor's pupil --A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress --The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley --The buried life of Lucy Snowe --Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision --George Eliot as the angel of destruction --The aesthetics of renunciation --A woman, white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1979
    A Nebula and Hugo Award-winning writer of science fiction presents a collection of essays that explores the various issues, concepts, challenges, and paradoxes that confront the science fiction writer.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volumes A & B


Judith Tanka - 1979
    From trickster tales of the Native American tradition to bestsellers of early women writers to postmodernism, this edition conveys the diversity of American literature from its origins to the present. Volume 2 covers the period of 1865 to the present.

I Saw the World End


Deryck Cooke - 1979
    But because of the work's rich complexity it is difficult to think sensibly about its text and music. Deryck Cooke, author of The Language of Music and completer of Mahler's Tenth Symphony, displays his masterly common sense in this study of how and why The Ring took the shape it did. It is only a portion of the enormous book he had planned: his untimely death prevented his writing an analysis of the music. But it covers the first two operas of the cycle ( Rheingold and The Valkyrie ) and even as it stands gives a fresh understanding and appreciation to every lover of Wagner's music.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature since 1945 (Volume E)


Nina Baym - 1979
    Last volume (E) of the anthology of the American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to the present.

Fiction and the Figures of Life


William H. Gass - 1979
    Twenty-four essays by the modern master of literary criticism, ranging from discussion of Gertrude Stein and Jorge Luis Borges to Henry James and "The Evil Demiurge."

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts


Umberto Eco - 1979
    not merely interesting and novel, but also exceedingly provocative and heuristically fertile." --The Review of Metaphysics... essential reading for anyone interesting in... the new reader-centered forms of criticism." --Library JournalIn this erudite and imaginative book, Umberto Eco sets forth a dialectic between 'open' and 'closed' texts.

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971


Simon Karlinsky - 1979
    Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as well as a volume of Nabokov's correspondence with other people and Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov. The additional letters and a considerable body of new annotations clarify the correspondence, tracing in greater detail the two decades of close friendship between the writers.

The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative


Frank Kermode - 1979
    He brings to the study of literature a fine and fresh critical intelligence that is always richly suggestive, never modish. He offers here an inquiry--elegant in conception and style--into the art of interpretation. His subject quite simply is meanings; how they are revealed and how they are concealed.Drawing on the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation, Mr. Kermode examines some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible--and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure. He raises questions concerning the interpretation of single texts in relation to their context in a writer's work and a tradition; considers the special interpretative problems of historical narration; and tries to relate the activities of the interpreter to interpretation more broadly conceived as a means of living in the world.While discussing the gospels, Mr. Kermode touches upon such literary works as Kafka's parables, Joyce's Ulysses, Henry James's novels, and Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. By showing the relationships between religious interpretation and literary criticism, he has enhanced both fields.

The Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson


Thomas Jefferson - 1979
    The editor has selected Jefferson's most important published texts--A Summary View of the Rights of British America, the Declaration of Independence, and Notes on the State of Virginia--along with An Appendix to the Notes on Virginia Relative to the Murder of Logan's Family and his Message to Congress on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In addition, more than one hundred of Jefferson's letters (1760-1826) have been judiciously selected from his rich body of correspondence, allowing readers to see Jefferson as a person as well as a public figure. All texts are accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. "Contexts" reprints contemporary documents that place Jefferson and his writings within the early American Republic, including works by Thomas Paine, John Adams, Fran�ois-Jean de Beauvoir, and Luther Martin. Also included are diverse and early responses to Jefferson and his writings by, among others, John Quincy Adams, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Criticism provides representative works of modern interpretation and analysis that confirm Jefferson's continuing relevance. Included are twelve thought-provoking assessments from several disciplinary perspectives by, among others, Annette Gordon Reed, Peter Onuf, and Douglas L. Wilson. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

The Shadow Scrapbook


Walter B. Gibson - 1979
    

Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry


Emily Vermeule - 1979
    Vermeule examines the facts and fictions of Greek death, including burial and mourning, visions of the underworld, souls and ghosts, the value of heroic death in battle, the quest for immortality, the linked powers of death, sleep, and love, and more.

The Architext: An Introduction


Gérard Genette - 1979
    In seeking to link these categories in a system embracing the entire field of literature, Western poetics has divided literature into three kinds: dramatic, epic, and lyric. This division, generally accepted since the eighteenth century, has been wrongly attributed to Aristotle with great detriment to the development of poetics. Here Genette disassembles this burdensome triad by retracing its gradual construction and distinguishes among the architextual categories that this division has long obscured. In so doing, Genette lays a firm foundation for future theorists of literary forms.

Great Expectations [ A Critical Study ]


Ramji Lall - 1979
    

Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?


Marvin Mudrick - 1979
    

Conrad in the Nineteenth Century


Ian P. Watt - 1979
    . . . One of the great critical works produced since the 1950s.”—New York Times

Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater


Bernard Knox - 1979
    His books, articles, reviews, and essays have educated a generation of readers, from scholars studying original texts to those who know the Oresteia only in translation.

Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre


Sharon Cameron - 1979
    "It is precisely the distance some of Dickinson's poems go toward the far end of coherence, precisely the outlandishness of their extremity, that allows us to see, magnified, the fine workings of more conventional lyrics," writes Sharon Cameron.Lyric Time is written for the literary audience at large--Dickinsonians, romanticists, theorists, anyone interested in American poetry, or in poetry at all, and especially anyone who admires a risky book that succeeds.

Preface to the Experience of Literature


Lionel Trilling - 1979
    This book is a wonderful journey through literary history, from the Greek dramatists to present day. Foreword by William Jovanovich.

Triumphs of the Imagination: Literature in Christian Perspective


Leland Ryken - 1979
    Book by Ryken, Leland

The Creation of Nikolai Gogol


Donald Fanger - 1979
    A critical analysis of Gogol's fiction and drama discusses the development of his literary style and examines his works' major themes in the context of Russian culture.

The Achieving of the Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920-1925


Robert Emmet Long - 1979