Best of
Literary-Criticism

1993

United States: Essays 1952-1992


Gore Vidal - 1993
    It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post—World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth-century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics


Alex Preminger - 1993
    Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words.The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself as a standard work in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry.Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are extended; cross-references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.

Essays Critical and Clinical


Gilles Deleuze - 1993
    Lawrence, Lewis Carroll, and others, along with philosophers Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and others. Taken together, these 18 essays--all newly revised or published here for the first time--present a profoundly new approach to literature .

The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History


Susan Howe - 1993
    The Birth-mark traces the collusive relationships among tradition, the constitution of critical editions, literary history and criticism, the institutionalized roles of poetry and prose, and the status of gender. Through an examination of the texts and editorial histories of Thomas Shepard's conversion narratives, the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange and lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. In a concluding interview, Howe comments on her approach and recounts some the crucial biographical events that sparked her interest in early American literature.

Tendencies


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 1993
    Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing.The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes


Janet Malcolm - 1993
    Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm.

Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce


Joseph Campbell - 1993
    Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein has arranged this material as running commentary on A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. With a new foreword by Phil Cousineau for this Collected Works edition, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words is both an introduction to the major work of Joyce and a representative portrait of Joseph Campbell as a critic of Joyce. It is also a major contribution to Joyce criticism, the fruit of a lifetime’s meditation on the great Irish writer’s writings.

Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews


Danilo Kiš - 1993
    His dazzling fiction established him as one of the most artful and eloquent authors of postwar Europe. In this first collection of his non-fiction, Kis displays the dynamic, sensitive, and insistently questioning approach to the dilemmas of the modern world that distinguishes his novels and stories and confirms his reputation as one of the most important voices of our time.

Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry


Stephen Dunn - 1993
    W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry.Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts


Milan Kundera - 1993
    Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book.

The Illuminated Books of William Blake, Volume 3: The Early Illuminated Books


William Blake - 1993
    Made possible by recent advances in printing and reproduction technology, the publication of new editions of Jerusalem and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1991 was a major publishing event. Now these two volumes are followed by The Early Illuminated Books and Milton, A Poem. The books in both volumes are reproduced from the best available copies of Blake's originals and in faithfulness and accuracy match the acclaimed standards set by Jerusalem and Songs. These two volumes are uniform in format and binding with the first two volumes.The Early Illuminated Books comprises All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion; Thel; Marriage of Heaven and Hell; and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Milton, A Poem, second only to Jerusalem in extent and ambition, is accompanied by Laoco�n, The Ghost of Abel, and On Homer's Poetry.

Love and Friendship


Allan Bloom - 1993
    Allan Bloom explores the language of love from the Bible to Freud, shedding penetrating light on the true nature of our most basic human connections. "(A) rich mine of a book".--New York Daily News.

Broken English: Poetry and Partiality


Heather McHugh - 1993
    It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked." In Broken English, McHugh applies her poetic sensibility and formidable critical insight to topics ranging from the poetry of Val�ry and Rilke to ancient Greek drama and Yoruba folk songs, offering intense, passionate, highly personal readings that are informed and unified by her concern for the relationships among language, culture, and poetry.

Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies


Rey Chow - 1993
    this is no doctrinaire tract but rather a concerted attempt to look at important cultural problems from a fresh perspective.... Chow's book is an excellent example of its type."--Discourse & Society"I believe that Rey Chow has written a powerful set of essays which offer a critical strategy for approaching questions of otherness and other societies by forcing us to constantly reassess our position." --Harry HarootunianWriting Diaspora questions aspects of cultural politics, including the legacies of European imperialism and colonialism, the media, pedagogy, literature, literacy, sexuality, intellectual labor, the uses and abuses of theory, and popularized notions about "others."

The Holocaust as Culture


Imre Kertész - 1993
    Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self.  The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.

Pushkin Threefold: Narrative, Lyric, Polemic and Ribald Verse, the Originals with Linear and Metric Translations


Alexander Pushkin - 1993
    

Wuthering Heights and Poems


Emily Brontë - 1993
    Gradually he learns the violent history of the house's owner, the fierce, saturnine Heathcliff and the thwarted love that has led him to exact terrible revenge on the two families that have sought to oppose him.Since its original publication in 1847, Emily Bronte's only novel, whether repelling, captivating or intriguing different generations of readers, has never relaxed its powerful grip on the public, and the figure of the haunted, brutal Heathcliff has become part of Britain's cultural mythology.This edition also includes over sixty of Emily Bronte's poems, an introduction, notes, text summary, selected criticism and a chronology of Emily Bronte's life and times.(back cover)

Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry


Gordon Bowker - 1993
    Friends, relatives, wives, and doctors have helped Bowker to paint an unblinking portrait of the man and the writer. Bowker scoured archives and unearthed many revealing photographs to produce this trustworthy biography. The real Malcolm Lowry emerges and forces readers to re-examine his underexposed, underprized fiction.

The Body Embarrassed


Gail Kern Paster - 1993
    In this challenging and innovative book, Gail Kern Pasterexamines representations of the body in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama in the light of humoral medical theory, tracing the connections between the history of the visible social body and the history of the subject's body as experienced from within.Focusing on specific bodily functions and on changes in the forms of embarrassment associated with them, Paster extends the insights of such critics and theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias, and Thomas Laqueur. She first surveys comic depictions of incontinent women as leaky vessels requiring patriarchal management and then considers the relation between medical bloodletting practices and the gender implications of blood symbolism. Next she relates the practice of purging to the theme of shame and assays ideas about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing in medical and other nonliterary texts. Paster then turns to the use of reproductive processes in the plot structures of key Shakespeare plays and in Dekker's, Ford's, and Rowley's Witch of Edmonton.Including twelve vivid illustrations, The Body Embarrassed will be fascinating reading for students and scholars in the fields of Renaissance studies, gender studies, literary theory, the history of drama, andcultural history.

The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture


Terry Castle - 1993
    In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.

Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia


Alexander Etkind - 1993
    In the early decades of this century, psychoanalysis was one of the most important components of Russian intellectual life. Freud himself, writing in 1912, said that “in Russia, there seems to be a veritable epidemic of psychoanalysis.” But until Alexander Etkind's Eros of the Impossible, the hidden history of Russian involvement in psychoanalysis has gone largely unnoticed and untold.The early twentieth century was a time when the craving of Russian intellectuals for world culture found a natural outlet in extended sojourns in the West, linking some of the most creative Russian personalities of the day with the best universities, salons, and clinics of Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland. These ambassadors of the Russian intelligentsia were also Freud's patients, students, and collaborators. They exerted a powerful influence on the formative phase of psychoanalysis throughout Europe, and they carried their ideas back to a receptive Russian culture teeming with new ideas and full of hopes of self-transformation.Fascinated by the potential of psychoanalysis to remake the human personality in the socialist mold, Trotsky and a handful of other Russian leaders sponsored an early form of Soviet psychiatry. But, as the Revolution began to ossify into Stalinism, the early promise of a uniquely Russian approach to psychiatry was cut short. An early attempt to merge politics and medicine forms the final chapter of Etkind's tale, a story made possible to tell by the undoing of the Soviet system itself.The effervescent Russian contribution to modern psychiatry has gone unrecognized too long, but Eros of the Impossible restores this fascinating story to its rightful place in history.

Approaches to Teaching Austen's Pride and Prejudice


Marcia McClintock Folsom - 1993
    Despite its enormous appeal--the novel has been in print almost continuously since its publication in 1812--there are few scholarly works devoted to teaching it. As Marcia McClintock Folsom notes in her introduction to Approaches to Teaching Austen's Pride and Prejudice, respondents to an MLA survey on teaching this Austen novel expressed the need for relevant background materials, brief reviews of criticism, and descriptions of pedagogical strategies This volume, like others in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, "Materials," reviews available editions of Pride and Prejudice and works of criticism. The section also includes a handy biographical chronology and a map. In the second part, "Approaches," sixteen teachers offer ideas for presenting the novel in the classroom, such as examining the social and economic conditions of late-eighteenth-century England; discussing biographical details, Austen's unpublished writing (e.g., her juvenilia and letters), and the influence of other works on her fiction; considering the structure and themes of the novel; and analyzing Austen's use of language. This collection is an indispensable resource for teachers of courses ranging from introductory literature surveys and continuing-education classes to graduate-level seminars.

Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric


María Rosa Menocal - 1993
    It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history.It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet: Francisco de Quevedo, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Hernandez


Willis Barnstone - 1993
    Willis Barnstone’s selection of sonnets and the extensive historical and biographical background he supplies serve as a compelling survey of Spanish-language poetry that should be of interest both to lovers of poetry in general and to scholars of Spanish-language literature in particular.Following an introductory examination of the arrival of the sonnet in Spain and of that nation’s poetry up to Francisco de Quevedo, Barnstone takes up his six masters in chronological turn, preceding each with an essay that not only presents the sonneteer under discussion but also continues the carefully delineated history of Spanish-language poetry. Consistently engaging and informative and never dull or pedantic, these essays stand alone as appreciations—in the finest sense of that word—of some of the greatest poets ever to write. It is, however, Barnstone’s subtle, musical, clear, and concise translations that form the heart of this collection. As Barnstone himself says, "In many ways all my life has been some kind of preparation for this volume."

Critifiction: Postmodern Essays


Raymond Federman - 1993
    The author has coined the term "Surfiction" for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

What Henry James Knew And Other Essays On Writers


Cynthia Ozick - 1993
    Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Saul Bellow, Edith Wharton, J.M. Coetzee, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Truman Capote, Theodore Dreiser, William Gaddis, I.B. Singer, Gershom Scholem, Bruno Schulz, Gertrude Kolmar and S.Y. Agnon

Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 1993
    With six published novels, two anthologies, a volume of literary criticism, plays, and other published works behind her, she is one of the most celebrated American writers of her time. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in the preface of Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, coedited with K. A. Appiah, that "Morrison's greatest capacities as a writer are her ability to create a densely lyrical narrative texture that is instantly recognizable as her own, and to make of the particularity of the African-American 'experience' the basis for a representation of humanity tout court." These critical perspectives are reviews from the popular press, essays - by such noted scholars and authors as Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of Workings of the Spirits, and Roberta Rubenstein, author of Boundaries of the Self - and interviews with Morrison that present her own perspective. This unique and revealing collection, which also includes a chronology of her life and career, offers insight and information useful to academic and lay readers alike. The critical essays explain how Morrison's work is influenced by writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner, and James Baldwin; by Biblical scripture; and by Black music and speech rituals. They examine why Morrison's writing is "at once difficult and popular," says Gates. When Sara Blackburn reviewed Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, for the New York Times, she wrote that the novelist "reaped the benefits of a growing middle-class women's movement that was just beginning to acknowledge the reality of its blac

A Guide to The Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald


Ralph Hexter - 1993
    Hexter has created a valuable, detailed analysis, taking into account many of Homer's most fascinating subtleties.

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics


Isobel Armstrong - 1993
    In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as `a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics.

The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden


Anthony Hecht - 1993
    In this text - the result of a life-long critical and imaginative engagement with Auden's works - Anthony Hecht identifies and traces consistent habits of thought and belief within the poet's extensive and varied writings and through his celebrated conversions and repudiations.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Solitude and Solidarity


Michael Bell - 1993
    But a further reason for the enormous critical literature is that, despite his apparent transparency as a consciously popular writer, his fiction is peculiarly elusive of interpretation. Much good criticism of Marquez came in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the perception of his fiction has been dominated by that novel. It seemed the implicit goal to which the earlier fiction had been striving. In The General in his Labyrinth it emerges that the Bolivar figure is a reworking of earlier solitaries from throughout Marquez fiction and the fading of myth into history has its full pregnancy in the light of this double reference. By concentrating on the later novels, including The General in his Labyrinth, this study brings out the internal dialogue between the novels so that One Hundred Years of Solitude stands out, like Don Quixote in Cervantes' oeuvre, as atypical yet more deeply representative. Behind the popular impact of its 'magical realism' lies Marquez' abiding meditation on the nature of fictional and historical truth.

Shakespeare and Ovid


Jonathan Bate - 1993
    Bate examines the full range of Shakespeare's works, identifying Ovid's presence not only in the narrative poems and pastoral comedies, but also in the Sonnets and mature tragedies. Demonstrating how profoundly creative Ovid's influence was, especially in his representations of myth, metamorphosis, and sexuality, this original and elegantly written study reveals Shakespeare as an extraordinarily sophisticated reader of Ovidian mythand as a metamorphic artist as fluid and nimble as his classical original.

The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies


Jon D. Levenson - 1993
    He focuses on the relationship between two interpretive communities--the community of scholars who are committed to the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation and the community responsible for the canonization and preservation of the Bible.

The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-1972


Edmund Wilson - 1993
    Edited by Wilson's biographer, this volume records the final years of one of our foremost critics and writers, taking its place alongside his major works as an enduring contribution to American culture....Witnessing his own foibles and the ironies of human nature, expressing feeling more deeply than he often had in his journal, he writes his account of this decade with a concentration undiluted by other large-scale projects. The extraordinary personal record begun in another pivotal period in American life, with "The Twenties," comes to a fitting culmination in "The Sixties."

Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton


David Quint - 1993
    In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lus�adas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubign�'s Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated.Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film


Jalal Toufic - 1993
    Drawing on various altered states of consciousness he underwent, films and novels on the undead, psychiatric case studies and mystical reports, the author tackles many of the certainly dubious but also dubiously certain characteristics of the undeath state, for example: over-turns that undo the dead's turn to answer an interpellation; doubles; frequent unworldly freezings still, ones that reveal the occasional worldly immobilization of the living as merely motion-less-ness, i.e. a variety of movement; the implicit indefinite fall of/in the cadaver; the turning of the metaphorical into the literal; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (e.g., the lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?" While the author's first book, Distracted, was written for the living, (Vampires) was written about and for those who are "mortals to death" (the title of a special issue the author edited for the journal Discourse). It thus belongs—somewhat edgily as the author qualifies the validity of guidebooks for the dead—on the same shelf as the Bardo Thödol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

A Stein Reader


Gertrude Stein - 1993
    Ulla E. Dydo's textual scholarship demonstrates Stein's constant questioning of convention, and A Stein Reader changes the balance of work in print, concentrating on Stein's experimental work and including many key works that are virtually unknown or unavailable.A Stein Reader includes unpublished work, such as the portrait "Article"; shows the astonishing stylistic change in the neglected "A Long Gay Book"; draws attention to the many unknown plays such as "Reread Another;" and offers fascinating portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Sitwell. Illuminating headnotes bring out connections between pieces and provide invaluable keys to Stein's motifs and thought patterns.

The Cambridge Companion to Dante


Rachel Jacoff - 1993
    Fifteen specially-commissioned essays by distinguished scholars provide background information and up-to-date critical perspectives on Dante's life and work, focusing on areas of central importance. Three essays introduce the three canticles of the Divine Comedy, and others explore the literary, intellectual and historical background to Dante's writings, his other works and his reception in the commentary tradition and in literature in English. The book also includes a chronological table and suggestions for further reading.

Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning


Rasheed El-Enany - 1993
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Phrasikleia


Jesper Svenbro - 1993
    The inscription speaks for Phrasikleia, who shall always be called maiden, for she has received this name from the gods instead of marriage.

The Merchant of Venice Study Guide


Bethine Ellie - 1993
    Easy-to-use, reproducible lessons on literary terms, comprehension and analysis, critical thinking, related scriptural principles, vocabulary, activities, plus a complete answer key.

Objects In The Terrifying Tense, Longing From Taking Place


Leslie Scalapino - 1993
    Leslie Scalapino's meticulous commitment to understanding certain writings has resulted in this wonderful book. It proposes that such an understanding does not fix ideas or limit the attention. Rather 'to understand' gives one access to perpetually gliding present--an enormous guided moment of mobile thought. This moment--or what she calls 'reality'--is the realm of understanding, and it is also the only grounds for it. OBJECTS IN THE TERRIFYING TENSE/LONGING FROM TAKING PLACE is a moment of reading, spectacular, in place and with momentum--Lyn Hejinian.

Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature


Roberto González Echevarría - 1993
    Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores.Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relentless probing of the limits of language and morality that mark the work as the beginning of literary modernity in Spanish, and the start of a tradition distinguished by a penchant for the excesses of the Baroque. González Echevarría pursues this tradition and its meaning through the works of major figures such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Nicolás Guillén, and Severo Sarduy, as well as through the works of lesser-known authors.By revealing continuities of the Baroque, Celestina's Brood cuts across conventional distinctions between Spanish and Latin American literary traditions to show their profound and previously unimagined affinity.

The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies


Richard L. Hunter - 1993
    The present book seeks to offer some of that analysis and to place the Argonautica within its social and intellectual context. A series of studies deal with notions of heroism; with eros and the suffering of Medea; the role of the divine; poetic voice and literary self-consciousness; and the Ptolemaic context of the poem. A pervasive theme of the book is Apollonius' creative engagement with Homer, and a final chapter sketches out an approach to Virgil's use of Apollonius in the Aeneid. The Argonautica emerges as a brilliant and original experiment. This book is the only advanced study of the Argonautica currently available. All Greek is translated.

Roman Epic


Anthony J. Boyle - 1993
    Roman epic draws together fourteen critically and methodologically distinct essays, focusing on particular epicists, their reaction to, influence on and rewriting of each other. The book examines the formation and transformation of Roman epic from its beginnings in the third century BCE Saturnian poets Livius and Naevius to the Renaissance Latin epics of Petrarch and Vida. What results is the revelation of Roman epic not only as Rome's highest poetic genre but as a self-consciously intertextual, primarily political form. The Roman epicist's creative exploitation of his predecessors is not restricted to stylistic similarities and generic codes, but often encompasses more important levels of social, moral and political meaning. In the Roman tradition the epic form shows an impetus to reform the celebratory values implicit in the form itself, admitting a plurality of interactive, often critical, narrative voices. This book reveals how epic developed and critically considers the generic and literary tradition to which the texts belong. It demonstrates epic's critical significance for the foundational culture of the western world.

Licensed by Authority


Richard Burt - 1993
    Focusing on Jonson's writings and the political vicissitudes of his career, Richard Burt offers a provocative reinterpretation of Jacobean and Caroline theater censorship and theatrical culture.Informed by the writings of Foucault and Bourdieu, Licensed by Authority historicizes censorship, arguing that it was less a matter of denying dramatists liberty of speech than a network of productive strategies for legitimating and delegitimating specific discursive practices. Burt draws on a rich body of archival and literary evidence, including plays by Shakespeare and by Jonson's Caroline contemporaries, in order to demonstrate that censorship was nurtured and sustained not only by a culturally diverse Stuart court but also by the playwrights themselves, along with theatrical entrepreneurs, printers, poets, and critics.

Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy


Edwin T. Arnold - 1993
    Arnold and Dianne C. Luce Cormac McCarthy is securely established as one of the masters of American literature. His first four novels, his screenplay "The Gardener's Son," and his drama The Stonemason are all set in the south. Starting with Blood Meridian (1985), he moved west, to the border country of Texas and Old and New Mexico, to create masterpieces of the western genre, including All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Few writers have so completely and successfully described such different locales, customs, and people. Yet McCarthy is no regionalist. His work centers on the essential themes of self-determination, faith, courage, and the quest for meaning in an often violent and tragic world. For readers wishing to know McCarthy's works this collection is both an introduction and an overview. With the exception of the drama The Stonemason (1994), all his major publications are covered. This handbook is an essential resource for McCarthy scholars, students, or serious readers. Edwin T. Arnold is a professor of English at Appalachian State University. Dianne C. Luce is chair of the English department at Midlands Technical College.

Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law


E.P. Thompson - 1993
    A brilliant interdisciplinary re-examination of Blake's cultural milieu and intellectual background by the renowned historian and critic.

Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography


Frank McLynn - 1993
    Not for nothing was Robert Louis Stevenson the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.The greatest of Scottish novelists, Stevenson lived a life as extraordinary and as absorbing as his books. But it was a life tormented by an autocratic father, recurring illness, the prudery of the Victorian reading public and, most of all, the stresses imposed on him by his wife and stepchildren.This powerful new study is published to mark the centenery of Stevenson's death at the age of forty-four.

The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature


Ian Chilvers - 1993
    Complete with translations of all Greek and Latin words, it is ideal for anyone interested in the classical world and its literary heritage. In addition to accounts of the lives and works of key authors, entries on important characters, plot summaries, and details of the development of such literary forms as comedy and tragedy, the Companion also offers comprehensive historical, political, social, and artistic background information.

Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction


Joseph Andriano - 1993
    His close reading of the individual texts leads to illuminating intertextual parallels, drawn through an archetypal perspective, which creates coherence among the many recurring image-patterns and motifs.The haunting is an incursion into the male ego's dominion: the female demon is seen as a usurper or intruder; she inhabits and insidiously attempts to exert her influence, to feminize the male. These demands include the impelling need to acknowledge male femininity, or androgyny. Ignoring this drive, which Andriano views as instinctual and archetypal, often results in what the Romantics called nympholepsy, and what Carl Jung called anima-possession.Although the notion that men need to acknowledge their own femininity is not new, the realization that doing so involves coming to terms not only with Eros (in its widest sense) but also with Thanatos has never been sufficiently emphasized, except perhaps by the post-Jungian James Hillman, by whose work Andriano is especially influenced. This book clearly and succinctly demonstrates that fear of the inner feminine prevents a man from ever fully maturing; his anima remains that of a child (he can only view women as girls or mothers), and he never comes to know, much less to love, the dark side of his soul, his own lady of darkness.

Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment


David Lloyd - 1993
    David Lloyd commences with recent questioning of Irish identity in the wake of the northern conflict and returns to the complex terrain of nineteenth-century culture in which those questions of identity were first formed. In five linked essays, he explores modern Irish literature and its political contexts through the work of four Irish writers—Heaney, Beckett, Yeats, and Joyce.Beginning with Heaney and Beckett, Lloyd shows how in these authors the question of identity connects with the dominance of conservative cultural nationalism and argues for the need to understand Irish culture in relation to the wider experience of colonized societies. A central essay reads Yeats's later works as a profound questioning of the founding of the state. Final essays examine the gradual formation of the state and nation as one element in a cultural process that involves conflict between popular cultural forms and emerging political economies of nationalism and the colonial state. Modern Ireland is thus seen as the product of a continuing process in which, Lloyd argues, the passage to national independence that defines Ireland's post-colonial status is no more than a moment in its continuing history.Anomalous States makes an important contribution to the growing body of work that connects cultural theory with post-colonial historiography, literary analysis, and issues in contemporary politics. It will interest a wide readership in literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata


Van C. Gessel - 1993
    This volume traces the lives and careers of three literary giants and their varying responses to Japan's increasing internationalization.

Blake and the Idea of the Book


Joseph Viscomi - 1993
    By using facsimiles created in his own studio, Viscomi, an experienced printmaker, offers the most complete explanation of how the illuminated plates were made, how Blake's techniques compared to other eighteenth-century print technologies, and how the plates were printed and the impressions colored. His analysis of these procedures reveals that the Illuminated Books were produced in small editions and not, as is assumed, one copy at a time and by commission. These new facts of production redefine such basic concepts in Blake scholarship as style, period, intention, and difference, which in turn alter the dates of nearly all copies of all the Illuminated Books and refute current approaches to reading and editing Blake. By placing Blake's modes of production in their historical, technical, and aesthetic context, Viscomi enables us to see how profoundly Blake's metaphors, images, symbols, themes, and analogies are grounded in graphic execution, while exposing a wealth of connections between material processes and larger meanings throughout the works.

Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba


Charles Segal - 1993
    Segal shows how these plays draw on ancient traditions of poetic and ritual commemoration, particularly epic song, and at the same time refashion these traditions into new forms. In place of the epic muse of martial glory, Euripides, Segal argues, evokes a muse of sorrows who transforms the suffering of individuals into a "common grief for all the citizens," a community of shared feeling in the theater. Like his predecessors in tragedy, Euripides believes death, more than any other event, exposes the deepest truth of human nature. Segal examines the revealing final moments in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba, and discusses the playwright's use of these deaths--especially those of women--to question traditional values and the familiar definitions of male heroism. Focusing on gender, the affective dimension of tragedy, and ritual mourning and commemoration, Segal develops and extends his earlier work on Greek drama. The result deepens our understanding of Euripides' art and of tragedy itself.

Anxiety Veiled


Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz - 1993
    Tracking the relationship between male anxiety and female desire in his drama, she demonstrates in this rich and incisive book that Euripides' plays support a structure of male dominance while simultaneously inscribing female strength.

Erotic Literature: Twenty Four Centuries Of Sensual Writing


Jane Mills - 1993
    EROTIC LITERATURE

Literature and Politics: The Colonial Experience in Nine Philippine Novels


Jaime An Lim - 1993
    

The Prolific and the Devourer


W.H. Auden - 1993
    Auden is unquestionably one of the most fascinating and influential literary figures of the twentieth century. His formal innovations in poetry and drama have immeasurably affected modern literary consciousness, as have his reactive views about political and literary trends. At the time he wrote The Prolific and the Devourer, Auden was moving away from his vocal Marxism of the 1930s toward a committed Christianity in the 1940s and beyond. The Prolific and the Devourer sheds new light on the personal and public worlds he inhabited, philosophically drawing the line between the position of the artist and that of the politician. The book takes its title and, in part, its form from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Auden's interpretation, the Prolific are those who produce: the farmer; the skilled worker; the scientist; the cook; the innkeeper; the doctor; the teacher; the athlete; the artist. The Devourers are the political types who depend on what is already produced for their well-being: the "Judges, Policemen, Critics. These are the real Lower Orders, the low, sly lives, whom no decent person should receive in his house." As in Blake, the sections and subsections of Auden's book are unified and propelled by the oracular need to express the key components of human nature. The first section contains a series of aphoristic statements and personal reflections that usher us into the enormous territory to be explored. In the second section, Auden chooses examples from politics, religion, and literature to expound his views on human and historical evolution. The third section examines the characters of the Prolific and the Devourer in relation to Catholic, Protestant, andRomantic traditions and to Socialist and Fascist beliefs. The question and answer form employed in the final section allows Auden to reveal his inner struggle to reach some understanding of God, the supernatural, and pacifism. At a time when spiritual and political values are co

Reading Matthew: A Literary & Theological Commentary on the First Gospel


David E. Garland - 1993
    Garland's commentary reveals the movement of the story's plot while also highlighting the theology of Matthew. Reading Matthew is an essential book for students and ministers studying the first Gospel.

The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England


Jean E. Howard - 1993
    In language that is both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Jean Howard examines the social and cultural facets of early modern theatre. She looks at the ways in which some theatrical practices were deemed deceptive and unreliable, while others were lent legitimacy by the powerful. An exciting and challenging work by one of the leading writers in the field, The Stage and Social Conflict in Early Modern England is important reading for anyone interested in the period.

Body Work: Objects Of Desire In Modern Narrative


Peter Brooks - 1993
    In this tour through art and literature - from Rousseau, Flaubert, and Manet at the origins of modernism to Duras and Mapplethorpe in our own time - Peter Brooks sees the dynamic of narrative as propelled by desire to expose truth that can be found inscribed in the flesh.

The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt


Charles W. Chesnutt - 1993
    Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man's dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century. Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt's everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt's journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed--and, unexpectedly, assisted--a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.

Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860


Daniel A. Cohen - 1993
    Cohen explores a major cultural shift embodied in hundreds of early New England crime publications. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers, he shows how the arbiters of an increasingly pluralistic literary marketplace gradually supplanted pious execution sermons with last-speech broadsides, gallows verses, criminal autobiographies, trial reports, newspaper stories, and romantic docudramas. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's preoccupation with crime and punishment.

Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman


Susan Manning - 1993
    Widely hailed as an innovator of dance modernism, she never acknowledged her complex relationship with National Socialism. In Ecstasy and the Demon, Susan Manning advances a sociological explanation for the collaboration between German modern dancers and National Socialism. She models methods for dance studies that contextualize choreography in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions, bringing dance scholarship into conversation with intellectual trends across the humanities.The introduction to this second edition brings Manning’s groundbreaking work to bear on dance studies today and reconsiders Wigman’s career from the perspective of queer theory and globalization, further illuminating the interplay of dance and politics in the twentieth century.Susan Manning is professor of English, theater, and performance studies at Northwestern University.

The Crowded Dance of Modern Life


Virginia Woolf - 1993
    Here she provides some responses to what she called "the crowded dance of modern life".

A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings


Frederik L. Rusch - 1993
    But because of his reclusive, introspective nature, Toomer's fame waned in later years, and today his other contributions to American thought and literature are all but forgotten. Now, this collection of unpublished writings restores a crucial dimension to our understanding of this important African American author. Thematically arranging letters, sketches, poems, autobiography, short stories, a play, and a children's story, Frederik Rusch offers insight into Toomer's mind and spirituality, his feelings on racial identity in America, and his attitudes toward and ideas about Cane. Rusch highlights Toomer's reflections on America, its people, landscape, and politics, reveals his significance for the problems and issues of today, and helps us understand Toomer not only as writer, but also as social critic, prophet, mystic, and idealist. Exploring Toomer's attempts to find self-realization and transcend social and cultural definitions of race, this book offers a unique view of the United States through the life of one of its most significant and fascinating intellectuals.

Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746�1892


Frances Smith Foster - 1993
    it strikes a perfect balance between insightful literary analysis and historical investigation." --Eighteenth-Century Studies..". an impressive study of a wide range of writers.... Foster's work is both scholarly and accessible. Her prose is economical and direct, making this book enjoyable as well as instructive." --Belles Lettres..". an impressively wide-ranging discussion of texts and contexts... " --Signs"Foster has written a fine book that provides the reader with a context for understanding the importance of the written word for women who chose to 'set the record straight'." --Journal of American History..". fascinating, meticulously researched... Likely to prove seminal in the field... highly recommended... " --Library Journal" Written by Herself comprises a volume of remarkable female characters whose desires for social change often made them catalysts for spiritual awakening in their own times." --MultiCultural Review..". an outstanding piece of scholarship... Foster's book offers deeply intelligent, provocative, totally accessible analysis of a tradition and of writers still not sufficiently read and taught." --American Literature"Well written and thoroughly researched. Highly recommended... " --ChoiceThe first comprehensive cultural history of literature by African American women prior to the 20th century. From the oral histories of Alice, a slave born in 1686, to the literary tradition that included Jarena Lee and Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, this literature was argument, designed to correct or to instruct an audience often ignorant about or even hostile to black women.

Feminist Theory and the Classics (Thinking Gender)


Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz - 1993
    This text aims to provide a broad introduction to issues in feminist theory for classicists, and at the same time, to provide feminists with an introduction to feminist work on antiquity.

The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction


Monika Fludernik - 1993
    Drawing on a vast range of literature, she provides an invaluable resource for researchers in the field and introduces English readers to extensive work on the subject in German as well as comparing the free indirect discourse features of German, French and English.This study effectively repositions the whole area between literature and linguistics, opening up a new set of questions in narrative theory.

Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender


Teresa Córdova - 1993
    society. Chicanas roles in politics, history, bilingualism, the work force, literature, and higher education are examined in depth in the twenty essays. Introducing the third printing of this influential book in a new foreword by Teresa Córdova, which updates readers on the gains and struggles of Chicanas in the association since these essays were originally published. Córdova puts the conference that gave root to these essays in historical perspective as an important turning point for Chicana academics on the road to establishing their rightful place on university campuses.

British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire


Nigel Leask - 1993
    There has been a tendency, however, to confine such study to the European scene. In this book, Nigel Leask sets out to study the work of Byron, Shelley and De Quincey (together with a number of other major and minor Romantic writers, including Robert Southey and Tom Moore) in relation to Britain's imperial designs on the 'Orient'. Combining historical and theoretical approaches with detailed analyses of specific works, it examines the anxieties and instabilities of Romantic representations of the Ottoman Empire, India, China and the Far East. It argues that these anxieties were not marginal but central to the major concerns of British Romantic writers. The book is illustrated with a number of engravings from the period, giving a visual dimension to the discussion of Romantic representations of the East.

Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching: A Guide for Teaching


Barbara Stoler Miller - 1993
    It is intended to help in promoting multicultural education.