Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.

    Each page of the Annotations corresponds directly with a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer. The reader can thus look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate glossaries or other listings.McHugh's richly detailed notes distill decades of scholarship, explicating foreign words, unusual English connotations and colloquial expressions, place names, historical events, song titles and quotations, parodies of other texts, and Joyce's diverse literary and popular sources. The third edition has added material reflecting fifteen years of research, including significant new insights from Joyce's compositional notebooks (the "Buffalo Notebooks"), now being edited for the first time.

    . . Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on paraphilosophical modes of discourse. The sections on Céline, for example, are indispensable reading for those interested in this writer and place him within a context that is both illuminating and of general interest." -Paul de Man

    His fascination with myth is evident in pieces on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the separate odysseys that make up Homer's Odyssey. Three intertwined essays on French utopian socialist Fourier present him as a precursor of Women's Lib, a satirist and visionary thinker whose scheme for a society in which each person's desires could be satisfied deserves to be taken seriously. In other pieces, Calvino brings a fresh, unpredictable approach to why we should reread the classics, how cinema and comic strips influence writers, and the cartoon universe of Saul Steinberg. His message is that writers need to establish erotic communion with the humdrum objects of everyday reality.

    . . . All the virtues of the author's astounding intelligence and compelling rhetoric are evident from the first sentence onward."—Anthony C. Yu, Journal of Religion

    Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.

    Against a history of relative inattention on the part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory, this first English publication is sure to have a profound effect on current cultural criticism in the West. It is both the boldest critique of modern Japanese literary history to appear in the post-war era and a major theoretical intervention, which calls into question the idea of modernity that informs Western consciousness.In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of the very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and the state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of the development of modern culture. Among these strands are: the "discovery" of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to the inwardness of individual consciousness; the similar "discovery" in Japanese drama of the naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; the challenge to the dominance of Chinese characters in writing; the emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of the repression of sexuality and the body; the conversion of the samurai class to Christianity; the mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and the "discovery" of "the child" as an independent category of human being.A work that will be important beyond the confines of literary studies, Karatani's analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs the binary opposition of the "West" to its so-called "other." Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in the development of cultural concepts and in the interrelating factors that have determined modernity.

    One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. In "Fascinating Fascism", Sontag eviscerates Leni Riefenstahl's attempts to rehabilitate her image after working for Adolf Hitler on propaganda films during World War II. "Approaching Artaud" reflects on the work and influence of French actor, director, and writer Antonin Artaud. The title essay is a study of the life and temperament of Walter Benjamin, who Sontag describes as a sad and lonesome man. The book also includes the essays "On Paul Goodman", "Syberberg's Hitler", "Remembering Barthes", and "Mind as Passion". Susan Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful. Under the Sign of Saturn manages to touch on all of these notes and more.

    Essays (in translation) by Charles Baudelaire Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, & André Breton shed light on Poe’s relevance within European literary tradition.These are the arcana of Edgar Allan Poe: writings on wit, humor, dreams, drunkenness, genius, madness, and apocalypse. Here is the mind of Poe at its most colorful, its most incisive, and its most exceptional.Edgar Allan Poe's dark, melodic poems and tales of terror and detection are known to readers everywhere, but few are familiar with his cogent literary criticism, or his speculative thinking in science, psychology or philosophy. This book is an attempt to present his lesser known, out of print, or hard to find writings in a single volume, with emphasis on the theoretical and esoteric. The second part, "The Friend View," includes seminal essays by Poe's famous admirers in France, clarifying his international literary importance.America has never seen such a personage as Edgar Allan Poe. He is a figure who appears once an epoch, before passing into myth. American critics from Henry James to T. S. Eliot have disparaged and attempted to explain away his influence to no end, save to perpetuate his fame. Even the disdainful Eliot once conceded, "and yet one cannot be sure that one's own writing has not been influence by Poe.""Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day. He both amazed and antagonized his contemporaries, who could not dismiss him from the first rank of writers, though many felt his work to be morally questionable and in dubious taste, and though he scourged them in print regularly in the course of producing a body of criticism that is sometimes flatly vindictive and often brilliant." —Marilynne Robinson, The New York Times Review of BooksEdgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. He is well known for his haunting poetry and mysterious short stories. Regarded as being a central figure of Romanticism, he is also considered the inventor of detective fiction and the growing science fiction genre. Some of his most famous works include poems such as "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "A Dream Within a Dream"; tales such as "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of Red Death," and "The Tell-Tale Heart."

    Now completely revised to correspond to the definitive new Galber edition, Hugh Kenner's ULYSSES for the first time becomes widley available in the United States.With characteristic flair, Kenner explores the ways Joyce teaches us to read his novel as Joyce taught himself to write: moving from the simple to the complex, from the familiar to the strange and new, from the norms of the nineteenth-century novel to the open forms of modernism. Kenner offers new interpretations on a wide range of topics and details, including the Homeric parrallels, the flow of episodes and style, and the enigma of Molly's final word. Joyceans, teacher, their students, and all other readers will find cause for rejoicing in ULYSSES.

    But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based on art and literature in order to subvert the very theoretical, philosophical, or semiological apparatus."Probing beyond the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson, and others, Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel, and on what she has defined as a signifying practice in poetic language and pictural works. Desire in Language fully shows what Roman Jakobson has called Kristeva's "genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms, ' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."

    For twenty years it has been hailed as not only the most reliable but the liveliest and most entertaining overview of Shakespearean theater available to students. For this third edition Professor Gurr has substantially revised the book, bringing it right up to date and incorporating many new discoveries, including those of the archaeologists at the sites of the Rose and Globe theaters. The invaluable appendix, which lists all the plays performed at a particular playhouse, the playing company and date of performance, has also been revised and rearranged.

    Imagining an encounter between Molière’s Don Juan and J. L. Austin, between a mythical figure of the French classical theater and a twentieth-century philosopher, she explores the relation between speech and the erotic, using a literary text as the ground for a telling encounter between philosophy, linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In the years since the publication of this book (which the author today calls “the boldest, the most provocative, but also the most playful” she has written), speech act theory has continued to play a central and defining role in the theories of sexuality, gender, performance studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. This book remains topical as readers increasingly discover how multiply relevant the speaking body is.Moving beyond the domain of formal linguistic analysis to address these questions, the author has written a daring and seductive book.

    Those covered by this volume include: Michel de Montaigne; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Jospeh Conrad; Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Robert Lowell; Edmund Wilson; Elizabeth Bishop; Ambrose Bierce; and Philip Larkin.

    Looking at eleven plays, Strauss shows that this confrontation is essentially one between poetry and philosophy, and that poetry emerges as an autonomous wisdom capable of rivaling philosophy."Strauss gives us an impressive addition to his life's work—the recovery of the Great Tradition in political philosophy. The problem the book proposes centers formally upon Socrates. As is typical of Strauss, he raises profound issues with great courage. . . . [He addresses] a problem that has been inherent in Western life ever since [Socrates'] execution: the tension between reason and religion. . . . Thus, we come to Aristophanes, the great comic poet, and his attack on Socrates in the play The Clouds. . . [Strauss] translates it into the basic problem of the relation between poetry and philosophy, and resolves this by an analysis of the function of comedy in the life of the city." —Stanley Parry, National Review

    

    The Epistle, which ironically purports to be a defence of the practices of singing-girls and their masters, is a vivid account, touched with humor, of this aspect of the social habits of the richer classes at that time.

    It attempts to characterize the poetic art of the Iliad and the Odyssey and to analyse in a simple way the reasons for its effectiveness.

    New Critical Essays serves to remind us what a book can be--elegant and simple in production, serious and delightful in content, a binding-together of reflections we have learned to call 'ludic, ' a demonstration of the mind's play and a reexcitation of our joy in the world.' --John Updike, The New Yorker

    

    The fourth and final volume of Jarrell's criticism contains three essays on Kipling, his Princeton lectures on Auden, a survey of nearly one hundred contemporary poets, and pieces on Kafka, Frost, Yeats, and Eliot

    This second edition includes a new preface by the author as well as a foreword by Hayden White.“A key text for understanding ‘the fate of reading’ in the Anglophone world over the last fifty years.”—Hayden White, from the Foreword“Criticism in the Wilderness may be the best, most brilliant, most broadly useful book yet written by an American about the sudden swerve from the safety of established decorum toward bravely theoretical, mainly European forms of literary criticism.”—Terrence Des Pres, Nation“A polemical survey that reaffirms the value of the Continental tradition of philosophical literary criticism.”—Notable Books of the Year, New York Times Book Review

    In the process, he reveals a Faulkner who is powerful, vulnerable, real—every bit as fascinating as the characters he created. Anyone who has ever tarried in Yoknapatawpha County will find this a sensitive and readable account of the novelist's struggles in art and life. In his new preface, Minter locates his biography in relation to the changes in the literary critical landscape during the 1980s and discusses its departures from New Critical tenets about the relationship between authors' lives and their works.

    S. Prawer in his concise and penetrating study of the horror film--from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Frankenstein, to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Omen. After a brief history of the horror genre in film, Prawer offers detailed analyses of specific sequences from various films, such as Murnau's Nosferatu. He discusses continuities between literary and cinematic tales, and shows what happens when one is transformed into the other. Unpatronizing and scholarly, Prawer draws on a wide range of sources in order to better situate a genre that is both enormously popular with contemporary audiences and of increasing critical importance.

    Women In Shakespeare

    Gwynne Edwards, by placing Lorca in his literary and historical contexts and elaborating upon his bold attempt to revolutionize Spanish theatre, gives the reader an understanding of the man, his time, and his work which is invaluable to the student, afficionados and the uninitiated alike.

    

    Since its beginnings in the 1950s the nouveau roman has posed a major challenge to the theory of the novel because its practitioners claimed to have jettisoned the mainstays of nineteenth-century fiction: plot, character and the representation of reality. Consequently the nouveau roman has tended to generate radical or even subversive theories of the novel which have little to contribute to our understanding of the main stream of the genre. In this study, Ann Jefferson reassesses the theoretical implications of the nouveau roman and the terms in which fiction is generally defined, in order to demonstrate that the nouveau roman, far from being anti-fiction, is both profoundly novelistic and extremely instructive about the nature of fiction in general.

    Eliot is generally recognized as one of the very few first-rate critical studies of our finest living poet. Based on a series of lectures delivered at Oxford University, this study begins where Dr. F. O. Matthiessen left off in his Achievement of T.S. Eliot and brings the evaluation of Eliot almost to the present time. With the Four Quartets as the central focus of her analysis, Miss Gardner examines Eliot's work up to The Cocktail Party, tracing the changes in style and tracking down sources, ideas, basic symbols and ultimate meanings. Not only is she attentive to the smallest details of diction, rhythm and phrasing, but also to the broad sweeps of thought and philosophy.

    

    Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury Group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illlustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams‘s identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism.

    Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt's most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of "bright mulatto" caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage.Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation's moral progress. Andrews argues that "along with Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history." Although Chesnutt's career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America's race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will.William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author's times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt's works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.