Overnight sensation and oft-times pariah, Tsvetaeva was a poet of extraordinary intensity whose work continues to be discovered by new readers. Yet, while she is considered to be one of the major influences on modern Soviet poetry, few know of her consummate gifts as a writer of prose. These select essays, most of which have never been available in translation before, display the dazzlingly original prose style and the powerful, dialogic voice of a poet who would like to make art's mystery accessible without diminishing it. The essays provide incomparable insight on poetry, the poetic process, and what it means to be a poet. The volume offers, among many fascinating topics, a celebration of the poetry of Pasternak and reflections on the lives and works of other Russian poets, such as Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Zhukovsky. Included in this richly diverse collection are the essays The Poet on the Critic, which earned Tsvetaeva the enmity of many, Art in the Light of Conscience, a spirited defense of poetry, and The Poet and Time, seen by many scholars as providing the key to understanding Tsvetaeva's work. The immense power and originality of Tsvetaeva's language, captured by Angela Livingstone's superb translation of the essays along with twelve of Tsvetaeva's poems on related themes, is testimony to why the Tsvetaev revival in the Soviet Union and interest in the West continue to gain momentum as the centenary of her birth approaches. The volume is made complete by the addition of an elegantintroduction by the translator, a chronology of Tsvetaeva's life, and an index of contemporary poets and writers mentioned in the essays.

    From the 1972 Olympics to the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest, here is a decade of the most trenchant, witty and thought-provoking criticism of any kind, with a foreword from Clive James himself, described as 'the funniest man in Britain'.Includes Visions Before Midnight; The Crystal Bucket; and Glued to the Box.

    Anthony Burgess hailed him as "our best literary critic". Now, at last, all of Pritchett's best literary essays are collected here in a single volume--203 brilliant, witty, and insightful essays.

    In this book, one of the foremost Arab poets reinterprets a rich and ancient heritage.He examines the oral tradition of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, as well as the relationship between Arabic poetry and the Qur’an, and between poetry and thought. Adonis also assesses the challenges of modernism and the impact of western culture on the Arab poetic tradition.Stimulating in their originality, eloquent in their treatment of a wide range of poetry and criticism, these reflections open up fresh perspectives on one of the world’s greatest – and least explored – literatures.Adonis is widely considered among the greatest living Arab poets. Born in Syria in 1930, he settled in Lebanon in the 1950s, where he became a central figure in the Arab world’s new poetic movement. In 1956 he helped establish the literary magazine Shi‘r, and in 1968 founded its successor, the equally prestigious Mawakif. Both played a seminal role in the revival of the Arabic literary tradition. Adonis is the author of several classic works that have led to a rigorous reassessment of the Arab cultural heritage.

    Based on a functional approach to translation and endebted to pragmatic text linguistics, it suggests a model for translation-oriented source-text analysis applicable to all text types and genres independent of the language and culture pairs involved.Part 1 of the study presents the theoretical framework on which the model is based, and surveys the various concepts of translation theory and text linguistics. Part 2 describes the role and scope of source-text analysis in the translation process and explains why the model is relevant to translation. Part 3 presents a detailed study of the extratextual and intratextual factors and their interaction in the text, using numerous examples from all areas of professional translation. Part 4 discusses the applications of the model to translator training, placing particular emphasis on the selection of material for translation classes, grading the difficulty of translation tasks, and translation quality assessment. The book concludes with the practical analysis of a number of texts and their translations, taking into account various text types and several languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch).

    Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Essays consider political, moral and technological issues raised by the film, as well as literary, filmic, technical and aesthetic questions. Contributors discuss the film's psychological and mythic patterns, importance political issues and the roots of the film in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, detective fiction, and previous science fiction cinema.

    The book is a journey into the imagination through the English landscape. Each chapter has a theme - such as music - and explores its significance for one or more artists.

    This is a fine, and unusual, collection of literary Americana."--Atlantic"Fine comic moments of truth."--New York Times Book Review"An invaluable source of literary history."--Publishers Weekly This is the story of one of the most famous literary "sets" of the twentieth century. Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the center of a group including Ernest Hemingway and his wives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Phillip Barry, and many others.  They personified the jazz age and the lost generation. The Murphys have been viewed primarily as cult/pop figures. In this book Miller shows, through a sequential interweaving of letters from several correspondents, that they actually were the nucleus without which the group as we know it would not have stayed together. Miller allows the individual correspondents to tell their own stories, providing  new insights into their lives and this era.  It is the best sort of eavesdropping. Gerald and Sara Murphy married on December 30, 1915.  Both families were moneyed and cosmopolitan.  Their attraction to each other was in part based on their desire to escape the routine and predictable social rounds in which their families were immersed.  Against their families' wishes, they and their three children left for Europe in 1921.  They remained in France for over a decade, and quite naturally socialized with the expatriate set.  They were, in part, models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. MacLeish wrote poems about them, their friends paid tribute to them and relied on them day to day and in correspondence, and their own letters are worth reading for their liveliness and because they so well preserve a record of the twenties and thirties.Miller provides nearly every extant letter between the Murphys and their friends during those decades.  Most of them have not been published previously, and of course, they have never been presented collectively.  Together, they constitute an epistolary "novel" of peculiar power and authenticity about a remarkable era.

    The author, a noted literary critic, presents a selection of his thought on Balzac, Valery, Dickens, Goethe, Heine, Hoelderlin, lyric poetry, realism, the essay and the contemporary novel.

    Praised for his eloquence, he was also reviled by conservatives for his radical politics. This edition, thematically organized for ease of access, contains some of his best-known essays, such as The Indian Jugglers and The Fight, as well as more obscure pieces on politics, philosophy, and culture.

    . . .Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.

    This is the first serious study tracing La Malinche in texts from the conquest period to the present day.

    The years have brought to him an increasing number of odd jobs, to which he has wittily responded. Here he contemplates our national monuments, the female body, the Fourth of July, the Gospel of Matthew, other writers, moralists, aspects of science, and more.

    . . superb and highly recommended." -The Midwest Book Review

    It also illuminates epic style, Homer's methods of composition, the structure of work, and his characterization. The introduction describes the features of oral poetry and looks at the history of the text of the Odyssey.The commentary based on Richard Lattimore’s translation, since it is both widely read and technically accurate, but it will be equally relevant to other translations.This series of Companions is designed for readers who approach the authors of the ancient world with little or no knowledge of Latin or Greek, or of the classical world. The commentaries accompany readily available translations, and the series should be of value to students of classical civilization studies, and history, for GCSE and A Level and at university. Each volume in the series includes the following: an introduction to the author and his work, with reference to scholarly views; a commentary providing explanation of detail, historical background, and a discussion of difficult or key passages; and periodic summaries of situation or content.

    These lieder have always found admiring audiences, but the poetry he chose to set them to has been widely regarded as weak and trivial. In Retracing a Winter's Journey, Susan Youens looks not only at Schubert's music but at the poetry, drawn from the works of Wilhelm M�ller, who once wrote in his diary, perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me!Youens maintains that M�ller, in depicting the wanderings of the alienated lover, produced poetry that was simple but not simple-minded, poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its meaning. In her view, M�ller used the ruder folk forms to give his verse greater immediacy, to convey more powerfully the wanderer's complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of Winterreise: the cultural milieu to which it belonged, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.

    Includes: a critical introduction, "On Approaching the Essay"; headnotes that situate each essay in an illuminating context;Resources for Readers and Writers, as follows--"Montaigne and the Essay"; "Essayists on their Art"; "Talking about Style."An Instructors Resource Manual to accompany this book is also available.

    As Dante ascends the Mount of Purgatory toward the Earthly Paradise and his beloved Beatrice, through "that second kingdom in which the human soul is cleansed of sin, " all the passion and suffering, poetry and philosophy are rendered with the immediacy of a poet of our own age. With extensive notes and commentary prepared especially for this edition."The English Dante of choice."--Hugh Kenner."Exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths."--Robert Fagles, Princeton University."Tough and supple, tender and violent . . . vigorous, vernacular . . . Mandelbaum's Dante will stand high among modern translations."-- "The Christian Science Monitor"

    Jacqueline Rose stands back from the debates and looks instead at the swirl of controversy, recognizing it as a phenomenon in itself--one with much to tell us about how a culture selects and judges writers; how we hear women's voices; and how we receive messages from, to, and about our unconscious selves.

    The most comprehensive, in-depth encyclopedia of North and South American writings and writers available in a single volume.

    Fired in 1877 for his brief marriage to a black woman, he wandered from New Orleans to New York to the Caribbean before finally settling in Japan where, in a unique act of self-transformation, he became a Japanese patriot and patriarch. Full of excerpts from Hearn's writing, Jonathan Cott's insightful portrayal of an extraordinary life recovers for a Western audience a unique figure of the nineteenth century.

    Though Suzanne Jill Levine is the translator of some of the most inventive Latin American authors of the twentieth century—including Julio Cortázar, G. Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy—each of whom were revolutionaries not only on the page, but in confronting the sexual and cultural taboos of their respective countries, she considers the act of translation itself to be a form of subversion. Rather than regret translation’s shortcomings, Levine stresses how translation is itself a creative act, unearthing a version lying dormant beneath an original text, and animating it, like some mad scientist, in order to create a text illuminated and motivated by the original. In The Subversive Scribe, one of our most versatile and creative translators gives us an intimate and entertaining overview of the tricky relationships lying behind the art of literary translation.

    This widely admired epistle was her poems, which were never conventionally published in book form during her lifetime. Since the posthumous discovery of her work, general readers and literary scholars alike have puzzled over this paradox of wanting to communicate widely and yet apparently refusing to publish. In this pathbreaking study, Martha Nell Smith unravels the paradox by boldly recasting two of the oldest and still most frequently asked questions about Emily Dickinson: Why didn't she publish more poems while she was alive? and Who was her most important contemporary audience? Regarding the question of publication, Smith urges a reconception of the act of publication itself. She argues that Dickinson did publish her work in letters and in forty manuscript books that circulated among a cultured network of correspondents, most important of whom was her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Rather than considering this material unpublished because unprinted, Smith views its alternative publication as a conscious strategy on the poet's part, a daring poetic experiment that also included Dickinson's unusual punctuation, line breaks, stanza divisions, calligraphic orthography, and bookmaking--all the characteristics that later editors tried to standardize or eliminate in preparing the poems for printing. Dickinson's relationship with her most important reader, Sue Dickinson, has also been lost or distorted by multiple levels of censorship, Smith finds. Emphasizing the poet-sustaining aspects of the passionate bonds between the two women, Smith shows that theirrelationship was both textual and sexual. Based on study of the actual holograph poems, Smith reveals the extent of Sue Dickinson's collaboration in the production of poems, most notably Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers. This finding will surely challenge the popular conception of the isolated, withdrawn Emily Dickinson. Well-versed in poststructuralist, feminist, and new textual criticism, Rowing in Eden uncovers the process by which the conventional portrait of Emily Dickinson was drawn and offers readers a chance to go back to original letters and poems and look at the poet and her work through new eyes. It will be of great interest to a wide audience in literary and feminist studies.

    Hughes and Michael Lund provide a new approach to the study of installment literature by showing how it embodied a view of life intrinsic to Victorian culture. They examine how the serial format affected the ways Victorian audiences interpreted sixteen major works of poetry and fiction. Their findings show that Victorian interpretations were different from those of twentieth century single-volume readings.Hughes and Lund conclude that in order to understand Victorian literature, we must understand serialization, since it was the vehicle for the best literature of the age. Further, they assert we must understand serialization as a literary form attuned to the fundamental spirit of the age.

    

    Pope Joan was not betrayed by a lover or discovered by an enemy; her downfall came when she went into labor during a papal procession through the streets of Rome. From the myth of Joan to the experiences of saints, nuns, and ordinary women, The Oldest Vocation brings to life both the richness and the troubling contradictions of Christian motherhood in medieval Europe.After tracing the roots of medieval ideologies of motherhood in early Christianity, Clarissa W. Atkinson reconstructs the physiological assumptions underlying medieval notions about women's bodies and reproduction; inherited from Greek science and popularized through the practice of midwifery, these assumptions helped shape common beliefs about what mothers were. She then describes the development of "spiritual motherhood" both as a concept emerging out of monastic ideologies in the early Middle Ages and as a reality in the lives of certain remarkable women. Atkinson explores the theological dimensions of medieval motherhood by discussing the cult of the Virgin Mary in twelfth-century art, story, and religious expression. She also offers a fascinating new perspective on the women saints of the later Middle Ages, many of whom were mothers; their lives and cults forged new relationships between maternity and holiness. The Oldest Vocation concludes where most histories of motherhood begin-in early modern Europe, when the family was institutionalized as a center of religious and social organization.

    When African American writers began to trust the literary possibilities of their own verbal and musical creations, writes Gayl Jones, they began to transform the European and European American models, and to gain greater artistic sovereignty. The vitality of African American literature derives from its incorporation of traditional oral forms: folktales, riddles, idiom, jazz rhythms, spirituals, and blues. Jones traces the development of this literature as African American writers, celebrating their oral heritage, developed distinctive literary forms. The twentieth century saw a new confidence and deliberateness in African American work: the move from surface use of dialect to articulation of a genuine black voice; the move from blacks portrayed for a white audience to characterization relieved of the need to justify. Innovative writing such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt s depiction of black folk culture, Langston Hughes s poetic use of blues, and Amiri Baraka s recreation of the short story as a jazz piece redefined Western literary tradition. For Jones, literary technique is never far removed from its social and political implications. She documents how literary form is inherently and intensely national, and shows how the European monopoly on acceptable forms for literary art stifled American writers both black and white. Jones is especially eloquent in describing the dilemma of the African American writers: to write from their roots yet retain a universal voice; to merge the power and fluidity of oral tradition with the structure needed for written presentation. With this work Gayl Jones has added a new dimension to African American literary history.

    Richards, Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye. This book aims to open another field of study: how thought - the act, the experience of thinking - is represented in literature.

    

    Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce on one side, and those of Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein on the other. Dr. Perl examines this early 20th-century schism in Western thought that led to vastly different conceptions of art, philosophy, and Europe's place in the world.

    In this companion to the poetry, Bonnie Costello gives a sense of Bishop and her ways of seeing and writing.

    Susan Willis, an American scholar in Shakespeare studies and performance, observed the making of a number of these television plays. Here she presents not only a full-scale history and analysis of the BBC series but an unprecedented eyewitness account of the productions, from planning and rehearsal to taping and editing.Willis shows how the technical elements of television distinguish these productions from stage and film, and she explains how differences in transmission, tastes, educational efforts, and critical responses made the productions a different experience on each side of the Atlantic. She assesses the diversity of styles used by such directors as Jonathan Miller, Elijah Moshinsky, and Jane Howell, for after the early filmic bias toward the productions, directors experimented with unit or stylized sets, Renaissance space and lighting effects, and varieties of scenic realism as methods of embodying Shakespeare's plays for television.The BBC Shakespeare Plays will give readers an accurate sense of television production, take Shakespeare buffs behind the scenes, and serve as an interpretive guide for teachers, thousands of whom have found the BBC productions to be vital classroom adjuncts in teaching Shakespeare.

    Gikandi places Achebe's writing in a wider context than former books by integrating his critical and theoretical writings.

    Challenging canonical images of both brothers, Posnock is the first to place them in a rich web of cultural and intellectual affiliations comprised of a host of American and European theorists of modernity. A startlingly new Henry James emerges from a cross-disciplinary dialogue, which features Veblen, Santayana, Bourne, and Dewey, as well as Weber, Simmel, Benjamin, and Adorno.While contributing to current debates about the responsibility of the intellectual, Posnock's work will fascinate the general reader as well as literary and cultural critics and historians."This is a major work of criticism, a brilliant reconfiguration of literary culture and of literary modernism at the turn into the 20th century, and it offers some of the best interpretations I have ever read of Henry and William James, and of many attendant figures." - Richard Poirier"A brilliant study - a remarkable synthesis of cultural history, close reading, and theoretical speculation. It will make an important contribution to James studies, and an equally significant contribution to our understanding of American culture, to debates on modernity, and to discussions of the possibilities and problems of cultural criticism itself." - Jonathan Freedman

    In advancing his argument Jenkyns turns our accepted notions of the Victorians upside down, presenting Ruskin as an admirer of Greek statuary, the Houses of Parliament as a classical rather than a Gothic composition, and Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor among the original Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, as a neo-Hellenic carver and poet. Jenkyns moves effortlessly between the general and the particular and is refreshingly unafraid to make judgments. Here are some of the best descriptions of Victorian painting, sculpture, and architecture to have appeared in recent years. From the very gradual changes throughout the paintings of Leighton and Alma-Tadema, to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, the 'aesthetic scripture' of Pater, and even the advertisements for Beecham's pills, Jenkyns shows how what had been merely eclectic became a distinctive fin-de-siecle style and eventually began to point the way for Modernism. These are grand themes, presented by a masterly guide. Above all Jenkyns is entertaining: Dignity and Decadence is one of the most illuminating and enjoyable books about the Victorians yet to appear.

    The work of the ancient critics provides some access to the interpretative conventions of the original reading community, whiletheir theories of fiction and genre may also shed light on the problems of the truth-value of epic fiction and the kind of belief that poetry generates. Focusing on the poets themselves, Feeney explores the themes associated with each poet, including the fiction of Apollonius, allegory in the workof Statius, and anthropomorphism in Ovid's work.

    Spacks hailed it in The New York Times Book Review as provocative....thoughtfully argued, and certain to generate fresh social and literary understanding. Now Showalter--who also edited the influential New Feminist Criticism (for which the New York Times Book Review found cause to celebrate)--turns her critical insight to a wide range of American women authors in order to explore the diversity of our culture and question the concept of a single national literature or identity. After a lucid discussion of recent African-American, feminist, and post-colonial scholarship, Showalter provides provocative readings of classic and lesser-known women's writings. The focal points of this study are the delightful chapters on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Not only are Showalter's interpretations full of wit and subtlety--as when she compares Chopin's novel to a piece of music by the composer Chopin--but her imaginative invocation of these popular works makes us curious to rediscover them. The range of Sister's Choice is spectacular--from Alice Walker's The Color Purple (Celie's quilt provides Showalter's title--an allusion to the multiple destinies of American women) to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (which is compared to the popular Log Cabin pattern quilt of the 19th century). Along the way we find chapters on rewritings of Shakespeare's Tempest by American women, on the Female Gothic (from Anne Radcliffe to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Joyce Carol Oates), on Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neal Hurston (who died in a welfare home, only to have her work rediscovered decades later), even on the history of the patchwork quilt in literature and in women's lives, which ends with a moving description of the Names Project, the quilt which memorializes people who have died of AIDS. The broad scope of Sister's Choice (which is based on the prestigious Clarendon lectures from 1989) testifies to the multiplicity of cultures which make up the United States. In her approach to literary works, Elaine Showalter helps to envision a new map of America--one which charts the struggles, suffering, and enduring creativity of women's writing.

    The result is an extended meditation, in a highly personal idiom, on the creative act and its relation to modern theoretical writing and thinking. Like her fiction, Professor Brooke-Rose's criticism is self-consciously experimental, trying out and discarding ideas, adopting others. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognized writer of fiction and theory, and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other modern movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays. Christine Brooke-Rose, formerly a professor at the Universit� de Paris, and now retired, lives in France. She is the author of several works of literary criticism and a number of novels, including Amalgamemnon and Xorander.

    It tells of his involvement with the exciting and influential reforms of Adler and Hutchins at the University of Chicago, his training as mediaevalist under the renowned Etienne Gilson at the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, and his founding of the Great Books Program at the University of Notre Dame. Then, in describing a personal philosophical search, Bird shows how, by pursuing the methods introduced by Gilson and Adler, he was able to make sense out of the confusion of philosophers and provides an example in an analysis of the controversy concerning the idea of justice. The center that he sought was found in the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and in the Roman Catholic church to which he became a convert. Bird's story provides unique insights into the development of the Great Books Movement and its influence upon American college education, to which a large part of his life was devoted by way of teaching, and writing through association from the beginning with the set Great Books of the Western World, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

    Stewart focuses on specific cases of crimes of writing--the forgeries of George Psalmanazar, the production of fakelore, the ballad scandals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imposture of Thomas Chatterton, and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. In this way, she emphasizes the issues which arise once language is seen as a matter of property and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation.

    However, as reviews of the first volume in this translation agreed, whatever The Family Idiot may be called—"a dialectic" (Fredric Jameson, New York Times Book Review); "biography, philosophy, or politics? Surely . . . all of these together" (Renee Winegarten, Commentary); "a new form of fiction?" (Victor Brombert, Times Literary Supplement); or simply, "mad, of course" (Julian Barnes, London Review of Books)—its prominent place in intellectual history is indisputable.Volume 4 consists of part three, books one and two, of the original French work. This volume, the fourth in a projected five-volume English-language edition, includes Sartre's discussion of the onset of Flaubert's illness, or neurosis, in 1844, and a significant reading of his L'Education sentimentale.Sartre's approach to his complex subject, whether jaunty or judicious, psychoanalytic or political, is captured in all of its rich variety in Carol Cosman's translation.

    He considers new historicism's engagement with poststructuralism and locates the former within a tradition of pragmatic historiography in the United States.

    Their novels have been shaped as women, cut off psychically and physically from family and community, finding this identity through the perspectives of historical experience.In Claiming the Heritage, Missy Dehn Kubitschek writes the first full-length book on the subject of black women novelists and the heritage they discovered in the shaping of their art. From the examples of works by such acclaimed authors as Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, Jessie Fauset, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler, she represents the communal black experience from 1600 to the present as a great call to which these novelists have responded.Her book demonstrates that coming to terms with history of slavery and oppression is the fundamental necessity for the construction of a tenable black female identity.The concern with history characterizes not only contemporary fiction such as Sherely Anne Williams's slave narrative Dessa Rose and Toni Morrison's Beloved but also earlier novels such as Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is a unifying theme which defines the tradition of the African-American woman's novel. This tradition consistently reasserts the necessity of knowing both intellectually and emotionally the history of blacks in America in order for one to become a fully black woman.This book is not about conformity but about a continuing theme of great range. The author likens the subject of this study to a jazz chorale of black women improvising individually on the theme of black history and female identity.Building on the insights of Mary Helen Washington, Barbara Christian, and Hazel Carby, Kubitschek's careful readings of twentieth-century literature by African-American women synthesizes feminist and Afro-centric perspectives.

    Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel is a provocative study of the father-daughter story—a neglected dimension of the family romance.  It has important implications for the history of the novel, for our understanding of key texts in that history, and for theories concerning the representation of gender, family relations, and heterosexuality in Western culture.    In the English and American novel, argues Lynda Zwinger, “the good woman”  .  .  .  is a father’s daughter,  .  .  .  constructed to the very particular specifications of an omnipresent and unvoiced paternal desire.”  Zwinger supports her case with an analysis of both “high-brow” and “low-brow” novels and with ingenious textual analyses of five novels:  Clarissa Harlowe, Dombey and Son, Little Women, The Golden Bowl, and The Story of O.    In the dominant discourse of Anglo-American culture, the father’s daughter provides the cornerstone for the patriarchal edifice of domesticity and the alibi for patriarchal desire.  Zwinger’s analysis of the sexual politics embodied in the figure of this sentimental daughter raises compelling critical and cultural issues.  Zwinger shows how different readings of Clarissa’s story form a sentimental composite that  makes her available in perpetuity to heterosexual desire.  Dombey and Son  illuminates the erotic dimension of the sentimental, the titillation always inherent in the spectacle of virtue in distress.  Zwinger’s analysis of Little Women  in the context of Louisa May Alcott’s own life-text focuses upon the problems of a daughter trying to write the filial romance.  The Golden Bowl deploys the daughter of sentiment as a “cover story” for a feminine version of the Oedipal story, founded on the daughter who can’t say yes, but doesn’t say no.  The Story of O reveals the pornographic dimension in romantic and sentimental love.    In her conclusion, Zwinger offers an overview of the nineteenth-century novel, asking what difference it makes when the writer is a daughter.  She shows how the daughter’s family romance pictures the father as inadequate, ironically requiring the sentimental daughter as a patriarchal prop.  She develops a useful concept of hysteria and argues that generic “disorder” and hysterical “intrusions” mark the family romance novels of Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.  And finally, she makes the case that the daughter’s choice to stay home is not necessarily an act of simple complicity,  for by staying home she comes as close as she can to disrupting the father-daughter romance.

    The authors, one a historian and the other a Shakespearean, explore the cultural background of Caliban's creation in 1611 and his disparate metamorphoses to the present time.

    The chronological organization brings into critical focus the shift from moral questions raised by the novels’ content, through examinations of Burroughs’ relationship to humanism and modernism, and finally to more focused literary and linguistic issues. In their introduction, the editors survey the progress of Burroughs’ critical reception and examine the reasons for the varied and intense responses to the work and the theoretical assumptions behind those responses. The reviewers include prominent figures such as Mary McCarthy and Marshall McLuhan as well as major academic critics such as Cary Nelson, Tony Tanner, and Ihab Hassan.

    P. Lovecraft, the editors have assembled essays by leading Lovecraft scholars that embody a wide variety of critical approaches. Biographical essays treat Lovecraft's relation to his parents and his heritage; thematic essays discuss issues such as the function of the narrator in his fiction; and the comparative and genre studies examine Lovecraft's relation to modernism.

    

    Wang’s thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature.Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West, the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber, and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin.By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang’s The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject.

    

    They asked whether subject and object are truly distinct, whether consciousness is unified or composed of disparate elements, what grounds exist for regarding today's "self" as continuous with yesterday's. If the American pragmatist William James declared himself, on balance, in favor of a "real and verifiable personal identity which we feel," his Austrian counterpart, the empiricist Ernst Mach, propounded the view that "the self is unsalvageable." The Vanishing Subject is the first comprehensive study of the impact of these pre-Freudian debates on modernist literature. In lucid and engaging prose, Ryan traces a complex set of filiations between writers and thinkers over a sixty-year period and restores a lost element in the genesis and development of modernism. From writers who see the "self" as nothing more or less than a bundle of sensory impressions, Ryan moves to others who hesitate between empiricist and Freudian views of subjectivity and consciousness, and to those who wish to salvage the self from its apparent disintegration. Finally, she looks at a group of writers who abandon not only the dualisms of subject and object, but dualistic thinking altogether. Literary impressionism, stream-of-consciousness and point-of-view narration, and the question of epiphany in literature acquire a new aspect when seen in the context of the "psychologies without the self." Rilke's development of a position akin to phenomenology, Henry and Alice James's relation to their psychologist brother, Kafka's place in the modernist movements, Joyce's rewriting of Pater, Proust's engagement with contemporary thought, Woolf's presentation of consciousness, and Musil's projection of a utopian counter-reality are problems familiar to readers and critics: The Vanishing Subject radically revises the way we see them.

    Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature.Each volume:-- Illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text-- Uses clear, conversational language-- Is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages-- Includes a chronology of the author's life and era-- Provides an overview of the historical context-- Offers a summary of its critical reception-- Lists primary and secondary sources and index

    It is a long essay on the life and work of Dickens in which Ackroyd demonstrates his argument for connecting the life and work, and, in the process, throws light upon both. In addition he has written 20 introductions to the whole range of Dickens' published work, from novels to journalism, in which he analyzes the writings themselves while at the same time providing an account of the novelist's career. Chatterton and First Light and his biography of T.S. Eliot was awarded the Whitbread PRize for the best biography of 1984.

    

    Michael Pearson writes about his travels to places of literary import: Frost's Vermont, Faulkner's Mississippi, Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, Hemingway's Key West, Steinbeck's California, and Twain's Missouri.

    They represent an exacting and meticulous scholarship illuminated by the acute ear of one of our finest poets and the argumentative abilities of one of the most subtle of critics.”—The Times Literary Supplement

    Drawing on a wide range of narratives from the period, Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the multiple and conflicting wishes that were covered by talk of "modesty" and explores some of the most striking uses of a modest heroine.Combining evidence from conduct books and ladies' magazines with the arguments of influential theorists like Hume, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft, this book begins by asking why writers were devoted to the anxious remaking of women's "nature" and to codifying rules for their porper behavior. Fictions of Modesty shows how the culture at once tried to regulate young women's desires and effectively opened up new possibilities of subjectivity and individual choice.Yeazell goes on to demonstrate that modest delaying actions inform a central tradition of English narrative. On the Continent, the English believed, the jeune fille went from the artificial innocence of the convent to an arranged marriage and adultery; the natural modesty of the Englishwoman, however, enabled her to choose her own mate and to marry both prudently and with affection. Rather than taking its narrative impetus from adultery, then, English fiction concentrated on courtship and the consciousness of the young woman choosing. After paired studies of Richardson's Pamela and Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (even Fanny Hill, Yeazell argues, is a modest English heroine at heart), Yeazell investigates what women novelists made of the virtues of modesty in works by Burney, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Gaskell.A speculative postscript briefly addresses the discourse of late nineteenth-century science in order to show how Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Havelock Ellis's psychology of sex replicate fictions of female modesty. While those who sought to codify modest behavior in previous centuries often appealed to Nature for support, our modern understanding of the natural, Yeazell suggests, owes something to the work of the novelists.Sharply reasoned and witty, Fictions of Modesty will appeal to all those interested in women's studies, the English novel, and the continuing history of relations between the sexes.