His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. The book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.

    Now many of his essays have been assembled and arranged by Ripley Hugo, the poet's widow and a writer and teacher, and Lois and James Welch, writers and close friends of the poet. Together the essays constitute a compelling autobiographical narrative that takes Hugo from his lonely childhood through the war years and his working and creative life to an interview just before his death in 1982. William Matthews, also a friend of Hugo's, has written an introduction.

    Put simply, this group, which was founded in Paris in 1960, approaches creative writing in a way that still has yet to make its impact in the United States and its creative writing programs. Rather than inspiration, rather than experience, rather than self-expression, the Oulipians viewed imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by what they called "constraints." Quite commonly, they would attempt to write stories, for instance, in which strict rules had to be imposed and followed (for example, Georges Perec's notorious novel A Void, which was written without the use of the letter "e"). While a major contribution to literary theory, Oulipo is perhaps most distinguished as an indispensable guide to writers. "This reader is truly impressed by Motte's capacity to present, in a clear fashion, material that is still new and 'difficult' to most of his readership." (Jean-Jacques Thomas, South Atlantic Review 5-88)

    Works on Paper is the first collection of his writings, twenty-one pieces that juxtapose the world as it is and the world as it is imagined-by artists, poets, historical figures, and ordinary people.“Inventions of Asia”, the first section, deals primarily with how the West reinvents the East (and how the East invents itself): images of India circa 1492 (where Columbus thought he was going); Christian missionaries in sixteenth-century China; Bombay prostitutes as seen by a New York photojournalist; Tibetan theocracy transplanted to the Rockies; a Confucian bureaucrat’s address to crocodiles; the shifting iconography of the “tiger”; looking for an answer to an ancient Chinese poem of questions; how the children of Mao have reinvented Imagism; Kampuchea under Pol Pot.“Extensions of Poetry” explores the ways in which the world affects the imaginations of individual poets (George Oppen, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Octavio Paz, Clayton Eshleman) and indeed entire movements, leading at times to unexpected incarnations and transformations. Weinberger ponders such strange conjunctions as Whittaker Chambers and Objectivism, anti-Semitism among American Modernists, bourgeois poets –present-day wards of the academy and the state– confronting the issues of peace, American foreign policy, and The Bomb.An essayist and translator, Eliot Weinberger, founded and edited the literary magazine Montemora (1975-82). His published books include translations of the work of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Homero Aridjis.

    Stealing The Language represents the first comprehensive appraisal of women's poetry in America and brilliantly defines one of the most exciting and original literary movements of our time.

    Crammed with fascinating insights, this generous spree takes us through decades of treats for the imagination: escape to other dimensions, flights to other planets, lost worlds, utopias, mechanical creatures and intelligent aliens. Amusing, intelligent and authoritative, it takes us on a tour through that zone where literature and science engage in an eternal flirtation. Examining the great writers SF has produced, and the images that have become the cultural wallpaper of the present day, this comprehensive expedition is for buffs and tenderfoots alike.

    

    Provides a critical and autobiographical context for viewing Simic's poetry

    In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. He analyzes the subversive quality of black laughter, the mythic underpinnings of his masterpiece Invisible Man, and the extent to which America's national identity rests on the contributions of African Americans. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison.

    In Conversations: Volume 2, Borges and Ferrari engage in a dialogue that is both improvisational and frequently humorous as they touch on subjects as diverse as epic poetry, detective fiction, Buddhism, and the moon landing. With his signature wit, Borges offers insight into the philosophical basis of his stories and poems, his fascination with religious mysticism, and the idea of life as dream. He also dwells on more personal themes, including the influence of his mother and father on his intellectual development, his friendships, and living with blindness. These recollections are alive to the passage of history, whether in the changing landscape of Buenos Aires or a succession of political conflicts, leading Borges to contemplate what he describes as his “South American destiny.” The recurrent theme of these conversations, however, is a life lived through books. Borges draws on the resources of a mental library that embraces world literature—ancient and modern. He recalls the works that were a constant presence in his memory and maps his changing attitudes to a highly personal canon. In the prologue to the volume, Borges celebrates dialogue and the transmission of culture across time and place. These conversations are a testimony to the supple ways that Borges explored his own relation to numerous traditions.Praise for Borges “Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature.”—David Foster Wallace

    Too many critics have domesticated Dante by separating his theology from his poetics. Freccero argues that to fail to see the convergence of the letter and the spirit, the pilgrim and the poet, is to fail to understand Dante's poetics of conversion. For Dante, body and soul go together and there is no salvation that's purely intellectual, no poetry that is simply literary.The essays that form this book were originally published between 1959 and 1984. They are arranged to follow the order of the Comedy, and they form the perfect companion for a reader of the poem. With these essays assembled for the first time, we can now see Freccero's stature: he is the best contemporary critic of Dante. Freccero is that rare article, a critic of eclectic and not dogmatic persuasion. Throughout Freccero operates on the fundamental premise that there is always an intricate and crucial dialectic at work between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim, and that it is this dialectic that makes the work so profoundly dramatic, one of the great novels of the self.Thanks to Freccero we readers have the Comedy whole again. Freccero calls upon medieval philosophy, cosmology, science, theology, and poetics to enable us to traverse Dante's moral landscape without losing our way in the confusions of minute exegeses. In a secular age Freccero enables us to see this poem as what it is, something wholly other than what we might believe or write. In doing so he shows us the most that language can achieve in any age, secular or not.

    In his analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action—a principle that turned, most violently during the twentieth century, into a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself. This thoroughly universal, abstract, and finally suicidal subject eradicates all experience, save the singularity of this experience of voiding. But what is left, as Paul Celan insisted, is a remainder to the lyric voice alone: Singbarer Rest.Lacoue-Labarthe's detailed analyses of two decisive poems by Celan, "Tübingen, Jänner" and "Todtnauberg"—the one a response to Hölderlin, the other to Heidegger—and his sustained reading of "The Meridian" present Celan's verse of singularity as the movement at and beyond the border of generalizable experience, i.e., as an experience, a traversing of a dangerous field, in which language no longer dominates anything, but rather commemorates the voiding of concepts and the collapse of the constitutive powers of the subject. For Lacoue-Labarthe, poetry after the Shoah, the poetry of bared singularity, is no longer a poetry that would correspond to the concept of the subject—or, for that matter, to the concept of poetry—but is rather the language of the decept. Only by being disappointed of the heroic language of idealistic poetry, and of the mytho-ontological tendencies of philosophy, can Celan's poetry keep open the possibility of another history, another future.

    the golden age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth—“strange” characters, as their own creators often say—arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to “read”, and to accept, as if it were a novel.The Way of the World, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments), and a new preface in which the author looks back at The Way of the World in the light of his more recent work.

    The philosopher-man of letters brilliantly reflects on some 16 fellow poets and writers, including Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Carols Williams.

    The brief, radiant essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, “basic documents in the history of the imagination.” Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth’s plain, wide-awake style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple language, energized by the author’s air of talking eye-to-eye with his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. “Life may not be optimistic,” Rexroth maintains in his introduction, “but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind the mask? Just a human face––yours or mine. That is the irony of it all––the irony that distinguishes great literature––it is all so ordinary.”

    Received opinion says that there are two Tolstoys, the pre-conversion artist and the post-conversion religious thinker and prophet, but Professor Gustafson argues convincingly that the man is not two, but one.Originally published in 1986.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.

    The core of his argument in this essay (and in those that follow) lies in the old opposition between theoria and aesthesis - terms that embody, on the one hand, a linguistic, specifically rhetorical approach to literature and, on the other, a phenomenological, aesthetic, or hermeneutic approach - and all the implications those two modes carry with them. The resistance to theory, says de Man, is a resistance to the use of language about language; it is a resistance to reading, and a resistance to the rhetorical or figurative dimensions of language. The six related essays in The Resistance to Theory were written by de Man in the few years that preceded his death in December 1983. Undertaken to find out why the theoretical enterprise is blind to, or "resists," the radical nature of reading, the essays share not only a theme but also the pedagogical intent that is central to most of his work. These concerns, implicit in the title essay, are openly argued in "The Return to Philology." Each of the remaining essays is devoted to a specific theorist: Michael Riffaterre, Hans Robert Jauss, Walter Benjamin, and Mikhail Bakhtin. The Resistance to Theory also includes a 1983 interview with de Man conducted for Italian radio, and a complete bibliography of his work. Wlad Godzich's foreword tells how de Man's late work was conceived and organized for publication, and discusses some of the basic terms in his discourse."Indispensable. . . . There is resistance to 'theory' and also confusion about its status with reference to both philosophy and criticism. De Man's defense of theory is subtle but uncompromising, and highly personal in its 'aporetic' conclusion."- Frank Kermode, Columbia UniversityPaul de Man was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His books include Blindness and Insight (1971; revised edition, Minnesota, 1983), Allegories of Reading ( 1980), and The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984).

    This is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties and it is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade.

    What remains is a body of work and a large collection of letters that shed light on Kees’s complex personality. Robert E. Knoll traces the odyssey of a Nebraska boy who made his way in a fiercely competitive national scene, befriending the movers and shakers of the art worlds on both coasts. Kees’s letters—satirical, witty, poetic, gossipy, intensely individual—provide the feel of lives being lived, of a career going forth, and finally, of the darkness that engulfed him when, in Knoll's phrase, he was "ten minutes from triumph."

    . . . Taken together they have a weight and amplitude of a very high order. . . . What is most impressive about these essays (apart from their range and erudition) is the way that literature and life are so subtly intertwined with each other. The passion for the one is the passion for the other. As it ought to be in criticism, but seldom is."—Mark Le Fanu, The Times (London)"If a critic's job is to puncture pomposity, deflate over-hyped reputations and ferret out true value, then Vizinczey is master of the art."—Publishers Weekly"Stephen Vizinczey comes on like a pistol-packing stranger here to root out corruption and remind us of our ideals. He carries the role off with inspired gusto. His boldness and pugnacity are bracing and can be very funny."—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek "Every piece in the book is good, and many are so good that, after dipping into the middle, I stayed up half of the night, reading with growing amazement and admiration."—Bruce Bebb, Los Angeles Reader

    His detailed study reveals how the great narrative poem explores the relationship that Dante believed to exist between God as creator of the universe and the human being as a creation of God. First Edition Hb (1986): 0-521-32809-8 First Edition Pb (1986): 0-521-30533-0

    But the intensity of his interest in the self, as a focus of exuberant joy as well as sometimes of anguish, both in his poetry and his prose, marks him out as unique even among his contemporaries. In these studies Professor Ong explores some previously unexamined reasons for Hopkins' uniqueness, including unsuspected connections between nineteenth-century sensibility and certain substructures of Christian belief.Hopkins was less interested in self-discovery or self-concept than in what might be called the confrontational or obtrusive self - the 'I, ' ultimately nameless, that each person wakes up to in the morning to find simply there, directly or indirectly present in every moment of consciousness. Hopkins' concern with the self grew out of a nineteenth-century sensibility which was to give birth to modernity and postmodernity, and which in his case as a Jesuit was especially nourished by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, concerned at root with the self, free choice, and free self-giving. It was also nourished by the Christian belief in the Three Persons in One God, central to Hopkins' theology courses and personal speculation, and very notable in the Special Exercises. Hopkins appropriated and intensified his Christian beliefs with new nineteenth-century awareness: he writes of the 'selving' in God of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Hopkins' pastoral work, particularly in the confessional, dealing directly with other selves in terms of their free decisions, also gave further force to his preoccupation with the self and freedom. 'What I do, ' he writes, 'is me.'Besides being concerned with the self, the most particular of particulars and the paradigm of all sense of 'presence, ' the Spiritual Exercises in many ways attend to other particularities with an insistence that has drawn lengthy and rather impassioned commentary from the postmodern literary theorist Roland Barthes.Hopkins' distinctive and often precocious attention to the self and freedom puts him theologically far ahead of many of his fellow Catholics and other fellow Victorians, and gives him his permanent relevance to the modern and postmodern world.

    An outstanding array of scholars—literary critics, art critics, and historians—reexamines the role of women and their relations with men during the Renaissance. In the process, the contributors enrich the emerging languages of and about women, gender, and sexual difference. Throughout, the essays focus on the structures of Renaissance patriarchy that organized power relations both in the state and in the family. They explore the major conequences of patriarchy for women—their marginalization and lack of identity and power—and the ways in which individual women or groups of women broke, or in some cases deliberately circumvented, the rules that defined them as a secondary sex. Topics covered include representations of women in literature and art, the actual work done by women both inside and outside of the home, and the writings of women themselves. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies that "marginalized" historical and fictional women, these essays counter scholarly and critical traditions that continue to exhibit patriarchal biases.

    It is a vivid portrait of the poet and her times as well as a fascinating interpretive study of the poems that will enable every reader to approach them with new understanding and delight.

    Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a classic in the African-American canon, depicts a woman's struggle for self-empowerment. This work takes a critical look at Hurston's work and its influence on contemporary themes, such as race and gender in American society.

    Classic works such as Kubla Khan have taken their place among the most accomplished poems written in the English language. This title offers a selection of contemporary critical commentary on the author.

    . . imposed their language of desire on the least-known part of the world and have called it 'Africa.' There are excellent readings here of writers ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sade, and Céline to Conrad and Yambo Ouologuem, but even more impressive and important than these individual readings is Mr. Miller's wide-ranging, incisive, and exact analysis of 'Africanist' discourse, what it has been and what it has meant in the literature of the Western world."—James Olney, Louisiana State University

    

    The book includes pieces on major works such as Lord Weary's Castle, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Skunk Hour, Notebook, the sonnets of 1969-73 as well as four essays devoted to Lowell's last complete and often neglected work, Day by Day. Essential reading for those interested in the writer who dominated post World War II poetry, the book will appeal to students of American literature and to more general readers as well. The divergent and controversial voices in these essays testify to radical disparities among Lowell's endless experiments and to the complexity and endurance of his work.

    Ernest Sturm is Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    A collection of eight critical essays on Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" arranged in chronological order of publication from 1951 to the present.

    The author has included a selection of the prose and poetry of all the sisters, which reflect their own experiences to give a vivid picture of their lives. This book is a fascinating introduction to the family and is well illustrated throughout, with paintings, drawings, memorabilia of Haworth and photographs of the surrounding landscape.

    It is written specifically for the reader who does not know Greek and who may be unfamiliar with the context of the Athenian drama festival but who nevertheless wants to appreciate the plays in all their complexity. Simon Goldhill aims to combine the best contemporary scholarly criticism in classics with a wide knowledge of modern literary studies in other fields. He discusses the masterpieces of Athenian drama in the light of contemporary critical controversies in such a way as to enable the student or scholar not only to understand and appreciate the texts of the most commonly read plays, but also to evaluate and utilize the range of approaches to the problems of ancient drama.

    Emphasizing individual works and artists over theory and method, and with an authoritativeness characteristic of all his writing, Roger Shattuck embraces a wide range of themes, including politics, theatricality, the dynamics of artistic movements and the nature of consciousness. The essays here range from his celebrated analyses of Dada and the 1935 International Writers' Congress, to fresh considerations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, to groundbreaking studies of Monet, Magritte and the art writings of Meyer Shapiro. A tour-de-force of aesthetic philosophy and criticism, "The Innocent Eye" is, says "The New York Times," "a fast-paced, interesting book spun out of a wealth of intimately assimilated culture."

    Professor Buell explores the foundations, growth and literary results of the professionalization of the writing vocation. He pays particular attention to the major writers - Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe and Dickinson - but surveys them with a number of lesser-known authors, and explores the conventions, values and institutions which affected them all. Some of the main topics covered include the distinctive features of the Early National and Antebellum periods in New England writing; the importance of certain literary genres (poetry, oratory and religious narrative; etc.); the impact of Puritanism and its values; and the invention of acceptable conventions for portraying the New England landscape and institutions in literature.

    It reflects on some of the dominant themes of the period, arguing against such labels as 'Augustan Age', 'Age of Enlightenment' and 'Age of Reason', which have been attached to the eighteenth-century by critics and historians.

    518-438 B.C.), one of ancient Greece's most famous lyric poets, is perhaps best known for his victory (epinicean) odes, written to honor the winners at various sets of games, such as the Olympiad. In Crown of Song, Deborah Steiner's study of these odes, she writes If Pindar isremote from us in genre, his style strikes the reader as vivid and immediate. And in my reading of the epinicean odes, it is the poet's use of metaphor that accounts for the dynamic quality of his verse. Steiner begins her analysis by exploring both ancient and modern theories of metaphor, andthen turns to specific imagery employed by the poet--plant life, athletics, minerals and numerous others--as a way of understanding how these metaphoric complexes function in the poet's praise of the victor, his assertion of his own place as perpetuator of the victor's immortal fame, and in hisvision of human achievement and glory in the context of mortal life and immortal gods. Written in a lively, readable style, Crown of Song opens up the sometimes difficult verse of this celebrated ancient poet to modern readers.

    Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests.Stephen Melville's aim in Philosophy Beside Itself is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline.Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement.Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.

    

    In the early decades of the twentieth century, Hugh Kenner, observes, technology tended to engulf people gradually, coercing behavior they were not aware of. The Modernist writers were sensitive to technological change, however, and throughout their works are reflections of this fact. Kenner shows, for example, how Eliot's lines One thinks of all the hands/Thatare raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms suggest the advent of the alarm clock and, beyond that, what the clocks enabled: the new world of the commuter, in which a principal event was waking up in the morning under the obligation to get yourself somewhere else, and arrive there ontime. In fascinating examinations of Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, in addition to Eliot, Kenner looks at how inventions as various as the linotype, the typewriter, the subway, and the computer altered the way the world was viewed and depicted. Whether discussing Joyce's acute awareness of the nuancesof typesetting or Beckett's experiments with a proto-computer-language, Kenner consistently illuminates in fresh new ways the works of these authors and offers, almost incidentally, a wealth of anecdotes and asides that will delight the general reader and the literary specialist alike

    Through a set of tenaciously detailed readings, the book illuminates a number of persistent problems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama - in particular a contradiction between words and things, body and language, which is also explored in terms of law, sexuality and Nature. Language and desire, Terry Eagleton argues, are seen by Shakespeare as a kind of 'surplus' over and above the body, stable and social roles and a fixed human nature. But the attitude of the plays to such a 'surplus' is profoundly ambivalent; if they admire it as the very source of human creativity, they also fear its anarchic, trangressive force. Underlying such ambiguities, the book convincingly shows, is a deeper ideological struggle, between feudalist traditionalism on the one hand, and the emergence of new forms of bourgeois individualism on the other. This book revels how, in the light of our own contemporary theories of language, sexuality and society, we can understand the issues present in Shakespeare's drama which previously have remained obscure.

    Bible passages are followed by full-color paintings and a description of the plants and their use in biblical times. A Horn Book Fanfare book originally published in 1986, Consider the Lilies is now reissued in paperback format as a companion book to Images of God, also by John and Katherine Paterson, and published in hardcover this spring by Clarion. A dove bearing a sprig of olive in her beak, a vine loaded with sweet purple grapes . . .

    The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables are cited among his major achievements, along with a number of haunting short stories, such as The Minister's Black Veil. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne was influenced by his Puritan heritage; his great-grandfather was a judge at the 1692 witch trials. Here, Harold Bloom draws on full-length essays from leading literary publications to present an in-depth understanding of the Romantic and Gothic master. This completely updated study in the acclaimed Bloom's Modern Critical Views series also includes an editor's note and introduction by Professor Bloom, offering his own insights on the author and on the critical analyses included. A listing of major works covered in the book, a helpful chronology tracing the events in Hawthorne's life, and information on the critics whose essays have been selected add further depth. Students will find this comprehensive volume makes the most of study time and serves as an excellent resource for compare-and-contrast essay assignments.

    An original critical essay looks at the writer's work as a whole and examines specific works. Chronology of the author's life provides the facts at a glance. Bibliographies of works by and works about the author direct the student to additional resources.Presents major events in the life of the English writer and critical essays on her most influential works, including "Mrs. Dalloway," "Orlando," and "To the Lighthouse."Contents:- The Work in the Writer / Harold Bloom- Introduction / Harold Bloom- Biography of Virginia Woolf / Camille-Yvette Welsch- Recomposing Reality: An Introduction to the Work of Virginia Woolf / Neil Heims- Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Body / George Ella Lyon- Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf's Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics / Christopher Reed- Chronology- Works by Virginia Woolf- Works about Virginia Woolf- Contributors- Index

    This book by John Herington is designed to introduce all aspects of his majestic achievement to the general reader.Herington begins by sketching the background to Aeschylus’ plays.  He first explains the very ancient mythical conception of our universe in which Aeschylus was brought up and which continued to shape his dramaturgy and poetic expression throughout his career.  Herington next discusses Athens and the momentous transition that it was experiencing during Aeschylus’ later years: the transition from age-old traditional ways of life and thought to the Periclean Enlightenment.  The background material concludes with a description of the contemporary Athenian theater, which also was undergoing a crucial transition from a primarily choral performance toward an art that could be described as drama.In the second half of the book, Herington focuses on the plays of Aeschylus, providing many illustrative quotations that he himself has translated.  There is a chapter on the poetry of the lost plays as they are revealed in ancient quotations and descriptions.  There are then expositions of the seven extant tragedies, all of which were produced in the period between 472 B.C. and Aeschylus’ death in 456.  Each play is presented to the reader not so much in summary as in vivid scenario, with concentration on the climactic points at which Aeschylus orchestrated all his poetic, histrionic, musical, and choreographic resources.  Herington suggests that the sequence of the extant plays as a whole constitutes a commentary by this very great poet on the intellectual, political, and religious upheaval taking place in Athens during his last years, and that therein lies part of the endless fascination of the plays.

    

    This invaluable new edition of the study guide contains a selection of the finest contemporary criticism on this great American author, plus an introduction by literary scholar Harold Bloom, a helpful chronology of Ellison's life, a bibliography for further study, and a handy index for quick reference.

    The author's concern is to reveal within the profound philosophic and psychic themes of these poems a range of formative contradictions - social, economic and political. Professor Levinson traces these binds to the determining of conflicts of the age. It is not to be categorised as an illustrative contextual study. The book articulates the relations binding textual truths to social, historical and political truths and through a materialist attention to verbal detail, to disclose the mechanisms whereby one set of meanings is used to suppress of displace the other. Wordsworth's Great Period Poems is an important contribution to Romantic scholarship insofar as it situates the poetry as richly and concretely as possible within its historical and ideological moment.

    The elements of poetry, both formal and structural aspects, are presented in a simple, highly available language. The text incorporates the latest developments in criticism such as the feminist perspective in an unobtrusive way.