She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together--that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l'oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.Like Vendler's previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry--thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural--are brought to bear on it at once.

    Author of Beginnings and the controversial Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for example, and by such influences as Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. He argues, however, that the various methods and schools have had a crippling effect through their tendency to force works of literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring the complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.The critic must maintain a distance both from critical systems and from the dogmas and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, Said contends. He advocates freedom of consciousness and responsiveness to history, to the exigencies of the text, to political, social, and human values, to the heterogeneity of human experience. These characteristics are brilliantly exemplified in his own analyses of individual authors and works.Combining the principles and practice of criticism, the book offers illuminating investigations of a number of writers--Swift, Conrad, Lukacs, Renan, and many others--and of concepts such as repetition, originality, worldliness, and the roles of audiences, authors, and speakers. It asks daring questions, investigates problems of urgent significance, and gives a subtle yet powerful new meaning to the enterprise of criticism in modern society.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    Authors include Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K. Narayan and Roland Barthes. He also writes of actresses Louise Brooks and Doris Day and golfers Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer.

    But until Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives - their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture.For this new edition, the author has revised the work throughout and added a new introduction bringing this classic title up to date.

    Caustic, slyly observant, transgressive, verbally scintillating, Barthelme's essays, stories, and novels redefined a generation of American letters and remain unparalleled for the way they capture our national pastimes and obsessions, but most of all for the way they caputure the strangeness of life. Not-Knowing amounts to the posthumous manifesto of one of our premier literary modernists. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two never previously published; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."

    "a full description of 1,775 books"

    Some Nietzsche critics (in particular, those, such as Jean Granier, indebted to Heidegger's reading), in effect translated Nietzsche's terms back into those of a philosophy of ontology. This book (which includes an appendix specifically directed against the "Heideggerian" reading) shows how such an approach fails to interrogate the precise terms, such as "Nature" or "life", that Nietzsche used in place of "being," and to ask the meaning of this substitution.The author gives not only a reading of Nietzsche's ideas, but a method for investigating his style. She shows in great detail how it influences both Nietzsche's ideas and the way in which they are to be understood. In so doing, she exemplifies how post-structuralist methods can be used to open up classical philosophical texts to new readings. She write conceptually in the knowledge that the concept has no greater value than metaphor and is itself a condensation of metaphors, rather than writing metaphorically as a way of denigrating the concept and proposing metaphor as the norm, and thus acknowledges the specificity of philosophy, its irreducibility to any other form of expression—even when this philosophy has nothing traditional about it any longer, even when it is, like Nietzsche's an unheard-of and insolent philosophy.

    A classic account of Jane Austen in the context of eighteenth-century ideas and the current of contemporary thought.Margaret Kirkham shows that Jane Austen's views on the status of women, female education, marriage, the family and the representation of women in literature were remarkably similar to those of feminists in her own day.Margaret Kirkham was formerly a lecturer at Bristol Polytechnic.

    

    In this clear-sighted and enjoyable book, Cleanth Brooks, acknowledged to be "the best critic of our best novelist," introduces the general reader to Faulkner's most important novels and stories: The Sound and the Fury; As I lay Dying; The Hamlet; Go Down, Moses; Light in August; and Absalom, Absalom!  Brooks focuses on theme, character, and plot as well as on Faulkner's world—the fictional Yoknapatawpha County that provides a unique setting for Faulkner's tragicomic vision.

    

    In "The Poetics of Myth, " he explores the mythological inheritance of specific images, myth as a form of oral literature, and the formulas and structure of myth as the basis for literature. Translated from the Russian, this version of his classic work has been edited to reinstate omissions due to political censorship.

    She defines current structures of thought and patterns of organizing reality, clearly distinguishes them from previously reigning Hellenic modes of abstract thought, and connects them with important elements of the Rabbinic interpretive tradition. Hers is the first comprehensive treatment of the undeniable, and undeniably significant, influence of Jewish religious thought on contemporary literary criticism. Dr. Handelman shows how they provide a crucial link among several of the most influential modern theories of textual interpretation, from Freud to the Deconstructionist School of Lacan and Derrida, as well as current literary theorists who revive Rabbinic hermeneutics, such as Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman.

    Clay demonstrates that an appreciation of the thematic role of Athena's anger elucidates the poem's complex narrative organization and its conception of the hierarchical relations between gods and men. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.

    It marks out lines of descent, identifies shifts in modes of narrative representation, considers literary changes in relation to the larger society, and thus offers the reader with a view of the novel not only in itself but also in history.

    Eliot, W.H. Auden, and C.S. Lewis, for example, were among his great admirers. But those books - which include 'The Place of the Lion', 'Descent into Hell', and 'All Hallows' Eve' - are also dense and perplexing, and even the writer's fondest devotees have found the meanings of his fiction elusive. Here at last is a clear and informed guide to the complexities and rich rewards of Charles Williams' novels. As Thomas Howard notes, Williams' tales might best be described as metaphysical thrillers, in which Williams used occult machinery in much the same way that Conrad used exotic locales and Joyce used the subconscious: to vivify human experience and awaken readers to its range and possibilities. One tale might feature a chase for the Holy Grail across Hertfordshire fields, while in another the picture may switch with no apology at all from a policeman at a crossroad to the Byzantine Emperor. As Howard lucidly demonstrates, the controlling factor behind Williams' work is an essentially Christian worldview in which heaven and hell seem to lurk under every bush and the constant theme is order versus disintegration. Concentrating on Williams' novels, Howard brilliantly illuminates the major concerns that informed all of Williams' thinking. Howard also considers Williams' work in the context of modern fictional practice and assesses its place in the tradition of the English language novel.

    Those just discovering Bishop's wise and humane poetry--an oeuvre, as Merrill says, 'on the scale of a human life'--have been saved innumerable hours of library research and can browse, delighted, in this responsible and appealing collection." --Contemporary Literature

    This book not only clarifies some of the more complex issues in the study of narrative but also provides a vivid tableau of the development of narratology over the decade between the two works.

    A companion to British literature explores the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history and background of English poetry, fiction, prose, and drama and analyzes the changing conditions of literary activity.

    Mythology remains alive today because it is so close to human reality. Thus Greek and Roman gods are not abstract entities, but beings imbued with qualities and faults all too similar to those of humans. LAROUSSE GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY presents the lives of these heroes, their journeys, loves, hates, the dangers that they encountered and their often bizarre yet poetic transformations. Other entries explain inventions (Talos and the saw), early cultivation (Triptolemus and Demeter for wheat, Dionysus for wine), and first discoveries. Such concepts as friendship, birth, death, and deluge are included as well. These relationships and themes in mythology have been explored and developed in art, music, literature, morality, the humanities, and even the sciences. Meanings and associations are drawn with major countries, seas, cities, rivers, and mountains emerging from myths into modern reality in the arts and atlases of the world.Arranged alphabetically, each entry includes the fundamentals about each subject. In addition, an extensive special index gives all entries in which major subjects are treated as well as depicted in illustration. The numerous illustrations with accompanying captions extend the text even further.General readers and students alike will find this work useful as a reference and absorbing reading in its own right.

    

    One of the most accessible critical studies of Paradise Lost—and one frequently recommended by those teaching Milton—is Anne Ferry's Milton's Epic Voice.

    

    Fantasy Press, Gnome, Shasta, Prime, Grant, FPCI, Arkham House -- those were the kingpins of science fiction publishing three or four decades ago. From its details emerges a picture of a handful of men who accomplished things as fantastic in their own way as the fiction they published. With a 16-page photo supplement, index, and checklist of published books.

    Both plays were written during the Nazi occupation of France in WWII and deal with the central of theme of freedom, which is a hallmark of Sartre's existential philosophy.In this study guide, you'll find Life of the Author, as well as detailed Summaries and Commentaries of both plays. You'll also find critical essays on the following topics: Sartrean existentialism: Principles and philosophies, existentialism before Sartre, an overview of existentialism, and Sartre's specific principles of existentialismSartre's political ideasSartre's dramatic formulaPlus suggested essay topics and a selected bibliographyClassic literature or modern-day treasure -- you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.

    We may have a general sense that women poets are more likely than men, at the present time, to write in detail about their bodies; to take power relationships as a theme; to want to speak with a strong rather than a subdued voice; are less likely to seek distance, more likely to seek intimacy, in poetic tone. But generalization would be foolish here. 'Woman poet,' like 'American poet' or 'French poet' or 'Russian poet,' allows--even insists on--diversity, while implying something valuable in common, some shared language and life, of tremendous importance to the poet and the poet's readers." --Alicia Ostriker

    He argues that the literary works we call tragedies have their value as enabling actions: dramatic tragedies can render us capable, temporarily, of enduring practical, personal experience of the fact of infinity.

    This book makes available the entire range of Ezra Pounds studies and translations of the technically complex philosophical poems of the thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's first friend" and artistic rival.

    

    Entertaining and informative, this rich and diverse collection of over 6000 proverbs (and their origins) is a delight to browse and the perfect addition to any home reference shelf.

    

    

    This work not only affected history directly but offered people of all generations a new ideal to which they should aspire. Dante invented modern literature by making contemporary characters and events the subject of art: he changed the future by his reinterpretation of the past. William Anderson's exciting and original biography (winner of the Silver Pen International PEN Club) makes extensive use, for the first time, of Dante's own descriptions of his creative process, his inspirations and the ways in which he interpreted them. Though likely to be invaluable to the student of Italian literature and to the innumerable lovers of Dante, the book will also, by its emphasis on the creative act, fascinate everyone who is interested in the sources of art.