The Language of African Literature2. The Language of African Theatre3. The Language of African Fiction4. The Quest for RelevanceIndex

    “This volume... never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians” (Anthony Burgess). Edited and with an Introduction by Fredson Bowers; illustrations.

    . . But I think it is sometimes done—or very, very nearly done—in stories.”C.S. Lewis is widely known for his fiction, especially his stories of science fiction and fantasy, for which he was a pioneering author in an age of realistic fiction. In On Stories, he lays out his theories and philosophy on fiction over the course of nine essays, including “On Stories,” “The Death of Words,” and “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.” In addition to these essays, On Stories collects eleven pieces of Lewis’s writing that were unpublished during his lifetime. Along with discussing his own fiction, Lewis reviewed and critiqued works by many of his famous peers, including George Orwell, Charles Williams, Rider Haggard, and his good friend J.R.R. Tolkien, providing a wide-ranging look at what fiction means and how to craft it from one of the masters of his day.

    Alter takes the old yet simple step of reading the Bible as a literary creation.

    In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

    This anthology covers all of the major topics that fall within this subject and includes essays and excerpts from fifty authors, including C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Sayers, and Frederick Buechner.

    Originally published in hardcover by Philomel and then brought out a few years later in a trade paperback, this book of essays has become well identified with me. And the phrase, "Touch magic, pass it on" shows up in the oddest places. After five years out of print, the book in an expanded and revised edition has been reissued by the folklore publisher, August House. The new section is called "Touchstones" and has six new essays: "Fabling to the Near Night," "Killing the Other," "Throwing Shadows," "Literature As a Social Disease," the eponymous "Touchstones," "An Experiential Act," and an updated and revised Preface. - Jane Yolen

    Reading him now, and in this form, I feel once more the excitement of discovering Blanchot in the 1950s.

    Frye persuasively presents the Bible as a unique text distinct from all other epics and sacred writings. “No one has set forth so clearly, so subtly, or with such cogent energy as Frye the literary aspect of our biblical heritage” (New York Times Book Review). Indices.

    Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence. "No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

    In her seminal study, first published in 1981, Marjorie Perloff argues that the map of Modernist poetry needs to be redrawn to include a central tradition which cannot properly be situated within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition dominating the early twentieth century.

    By juxtaposing several translations of the same passage from Homer; an elegy from Ovid and lines from Herrick that read like an adaptation of Ovid; or a 15th-century poem about a rooster and a contemporary poem about white chickens, Louis Zukofsky has established a means for judging the values of poetic writing.A wonderful education for the fledgling poet, this handbook, first published in 1948, is the best elucidation of Zukofsky's "objectivist" premises for recognizing value in specific instances of poetry.

    Barthes replied to questions—on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism—in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.

    This new edition of Coomaraswamy's classic book, considered his most important work on the philosophy of art, includes all of the revisions Coomaraswamy had wanted to add to the original edition.

    It sends one back to the original texts with a whole host of new questions.... And it also helps us to understand the place of the 'official' writer in that peculiar mixture of ideology, collective pressure, and inspiration which is the Soviet literary process." --Times Literary Supplement"The Soviet Novel has had an enormous impact on the way Stalinist culture is studied in a range of disciplines (literature scholarship, history, cultural studies, even anthropology and political science)." --Slavic Review"Those readers who have come to realize that history is a branch of mythology will find Clark's book a stimulating and rewarding account of Soviet mythopoesis." --American Historical ReviewA dynamic account of the socialist realist novel's evolution as seen in the context of Soviet culture. A new Afterword brings the history of Socialist Realism to its end at the close of the 20th century.

    Conflating a biography and a criticism of Tolstoy, Shklovsky uses this great author to make a case for a revolutionary way of reading and appreciating literature.

    At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.

    

    He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Britain, which turned critical skills honed on textual analysis to the examination of structures and forms of resistance apparent in everyday life. Politics and Letters is a volume of interviews with Williams, conducted by New Left Review, designed to bring into clear focus the major theoretical and political issues posed by his work. Introduced by writer Geoff Dyer, Politics and Letters ranges across Williams’s biographical development, the evolution of his cultural theory and literary criticism, his work on dramatic forms and his fiction, and an exploration of British and international politics.

    One of the completely new pieces, "Freedom of Expression," was written for the campaign to try to save Ken Saro-Wiwa and seven other writers from execution in Nigeria. He has rewritten almost all of the other pieces which have been kept.Ngugi says "It seemed to me how ironic the title "Writers in Politics" had turned out to be. In re-issuing these essays I didn't want to lose that nexus between culture and power which had been captured by the title."

    He shows how Sophoclean tragedy reflects the human condition in its constant and tragic struggle for order and civilized life against the ever-present threat of savagery and chaotic violence, both within society and within the individual. For this edition Segal also provides a new preface discussing recent developments in the study of Sophocles.

    Having examined more than 300 novels by both major and minor women writers over three centuries, Annis Pratt perceives in women's fiction distinctive elements of plot, characterization, image, and tone. She argues that women's fiction should be read as a mutually illuminative or interrelated field of texts reflecting feminine archetypes that are signals of a repressed tradition in conflict with patriarchal culture. Pratt suggests that the archetypal patterns in women's fiction provide a ritual expression containing the potential for the reader's personal transformation and that women's novels constitute literary variations on preliterary folk practices that are available in the realm of imagination even when they have long been absent from day-to-day life.

    Arguing that the ceremony of public burial began circa 508-460 BCE, Loraux demonstrates that the institution of the funeral oration developed under Athenian democracy. A secular, not a religious phenomenon, a literary genre with fixed rhetoric effects, the funeral oration was inextricably linked to the epainos--praise of the city--rather than to a ritualized lament for the dead as is commonly assumed. Above all, the funeral oration celebrated the city of Athens and the Athenian citizen.Loraux interprets the speeches from literary, anthropological, and political perspectives. She explains how these acts of secular speech invented an image of Athens often at odds with the presumed ideals of democracy. To die in battle for the city was presented as an act of civic choice--the -fine- death that defined the citizen-soldier's noble, aristocratic ethos. At the same time, the funeral oration cultivated an image of democracy at a time when there was, for example, no formal theory of a respect for law and liberty, the supremacy of the collective and public over the individual and the private, or freedom of speech.This new edition of The Invention of Athens includes significant revisions made by Nicole Loraux in 1993. Her aim in editing the original text was to render this groundbreaking work accessible to nonspecialists. Loraux's introduction to this revised volume, as well as important revisions to the 1986 English translation, make this publication an important addition to scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences.

    Victor Terras’s companion work provides readers with a richer understanding of the Dostoevsky novel as the expression of a philosophy and a work of art.     In his introduction, Terras outlines the genesis, main ideas, and structural peculiarities of the novel as well as Dostoevsky’s political, philosophical, and aesthetic stance. The detailed commentary takes the reader through the novel, clarifying aspects of Russian life, the novel’s sociopolitical background, and a number of polemic issues. Terras identifies and explains hundreds of literary and biblical quotations and allusions. He discusses symbols, recurrent images, and structural stylistic patterns, including those lost in English translation.

    One of the most important and far-reaching investigations of the roots of intellectual history to be published in decades, a book to be read and reread,… to be annotated, argued with, and debated on specific issues for years to come.  It is a truly monumental achievement.”—Peter Green, Times Literary Supplement“[This book], which makes major contributions to our understanding of the intellectual life of the last century, will be of great interest to students of Victorian art, literature, and ideas in both England and America.”—George p. Landow, American Historical Review“Readable, intelligent, though, witty, and magisterial… It is the book on its subject…. Turner’s study has changed, changed utterly, the Victorian landscape.”—Richard Tobias, Victorian Poetry“Turner’s is an intelligent critical study of great value.”—Hugh Lloyd-Jones, London Review of Books

    Focusing on Wordsworth and Coleridge, Professor McFarland shows how this was true not only for each of these Romantics in particular but also for Romanticism in general.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

    It is a contribution to genre theory. But most of all it is a book that finally puts science fiction into a context achieved enough in its individual readings and broad enough in its allusions to non-science fiction works to recoup this vital literature for serious scholarly study." (Michael Holquist)

    The book earned the American Theater Association's Barnard Hewitt Award for outstanding research in theater history

    Literary essays

    

    

    Consistent recognition of these hidden significances in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would require an encyclopedic knowledge of life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dublin such as few readers possess. Now this substantially revised and expanded edition of Don Gifford's Notes to Joyce: "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" puts the requisite knowledge at the disposal of scholars, students, and general readers. An ample introductory essay supplies the historical, biographical, and geographical background for Dubliners and Portrait. The annotations that follow gloss place names, define slang terms, recount relevant gossip, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, and illuminate cryptic allusions to literature, theology, philosophy, science and the arts. Professor Gifford's labors in gathering these data into a single volume have resulted in an invaluable source-book for all students of Joyce's art.

    Jane Marcus here collects twelve provocative new essays by women scholars, all of them taking feminist critical approaches to yield fresh readings of Woolf's work. Ellen Hawke's "The Magical Garden of Women" and Jane Marcus's "Thinking Back through Our Mothers" explore Woolf's relationships with women and offer a historical approach to her identification with other women writers. Marcus points out Woolf's technical achievement in the creation of a demotic chorus, the "collective sublime," in direct opposition to the "egotistical sublime" of male writers.Sara Ruddick's "Private Brothers/Public World" compares Woolf's relations with real and fictional brothers. Judy Little revises all previous readings of Jacob's Room by treating it as parody. J. J. Wilson's "Why Is Orlando Difficult?" broaches the central problem of Woolf's most notorious novel. Jane Lilienfeld's investigation of To the Lighthouse provides new insight into the Ramsays' marriage. Suzette Henke's reading of Mrs. Dalloway detects an interlacing of feminism and Christian mysticism in the novel. Madeline Moore's essay on The Voyage Out explains that puzzling novel in terms of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, again a mother-daughter relationship. Susan Squier, overturning established opinion, argues that They Years is one of Woolf's most important novels. Louise DeSalvo's "Shakespeare's Other Sister" analyzes an unpublished Woolf story. Nora Eisenberg uses "Anon," an unpublished manuscript in the Berg Collections, to elucidate Between the Acts.

    

    This bibliography was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies.

    

    The description for this book, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, will be forthcoming.