Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, reads the speech she delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.

    We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.

    Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

    The force of her thought is evident everywhere in these essays, from her explorations of other poets' work to her skeptical contemplation of current literary critical notions such as "sincerity" and "courage." Here also are Glück's revealing reflections on her own education and life as a poet, and a tribute to her teacher and mentor, Stanley Kunitz. Proofs and Theories is not a casual collection. It is the testament of a major poet.

    The volume includes recent essays from Alastair Duckworth, Marilyn Butler, D.A. Miller, Isobel Armstrong and Karen Newman.

    Few modern writers have left behind such a large and inventive body of work. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia is an exhaustive guide to this beloved author’s world, organized in a handy A-to-Z format.  The first edition of this book covered Vonnegut’s work through 1991. This new and updated edition incorporates his writing through his death, in 2007. Marc Leeds, founder and president of the Kurt Vonnegut Society and a longtime personal friend of the author’s, has devoted more than twenty-five years of his life to cataloging the Vonnegut cosmos—from the birthplace of Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut’s sci-fi writing alter ego) to the municipal landmarks of Midland City (the midwestern metropolis that supplies the setting for Vonnegut’s 1973 masterpiece Breakfast of Champions and, later, the locale for neutron-bombing in Deadeye Dick).  The Vonnegut Encyclopedia identifies every major and minor Vonnegut character (from Celia Aamons to Zog), as well as recurring images and relevant themes from all of Vonnegut’s works, including his revisionist libretto for Stravinsky’s opera L’Histoire du soldat or his 1980 children’s book Sun Moon Star. Leeds provides expert notes explaining the significance of many items, but relies primarily on extended quotations from Vonnegut himself. A work of impressive scholarship in an eminently browsable package, this encyclopedia reveals countless connections readers may never have thought of on their own.   A rarity among authors of serious fiction, Kurt Vonnegut has always inspired something like obsession in his most dedicated fans. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource for readers wishing to revisit his fictional universe—and those about to explore it for the first time.

    Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of "guided essay." Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.

    From the publication of Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event to his untimely death in 2006, Fran�ois Zourabichvili was regarded as one of the most important new voices of contemporary philosophy in France. His work continues to make an essential contribution to Deleuze scholarship today.This edition makes two of Zourabichvili's most important writings on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze available in a single volume. A Philosophy of the Event (1994) is an exposition of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, while the complementary Deleuze's Vocabulary (2003) approaches Deleuze's work through an analysis of key concepts in a dictionary form.This new translation is set to become an event within Deleuze Studies for many years to come.Key Features: Distinguishes Deleuze's notion of the event from the phenomenological, ontological and voluntarist conceptions that continue to lay claim to it today With an introduction by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, two of the world's leading commentators on Deleuze, explaining the key themes and arguments of Zourabichvili's work

    How about "Moby-Dick"? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a 'singular medley, ' as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... 'It is no longer a novel, ' T.S. Eliot said of "Ulysses." But if not novels, then what are they?" Literary history has long been puzzled by how to classify and treat these aesthetic monuments. In this highly original and interdisciplinary work, Franco Moretti builds a theory of the modern epic: a sort of super-genre that has provided many of the "sacred texts" of Western literary culture. He provides a taxonomy capable of accommodating "Faust," "Moby-Dick, The Nibelung's Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities "and "One Hundred Years of Solitude." For Moretti the significance of the modern epic reaches well beyond the aesthetic sphere: it is the form that represents the European domination of the planet, and establishes a solid consent around it. Political ambition and formal inventiveness are here continuously entwined, as the representation of the world system stimulates the technical breakthroughs of polyphony, reverie and leitmotif; of the stream of consciousness, collage and complexity. Opening with an analysis of Goethe's "Faust" and the different historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a discussion of Wagner's "Ring" and on to a sociology of modernist technique. He ends with a fascinating interpretation of "magic realism" as a compromise formation between a number of modernist devices and the return of narrative interest, and suggests that the west's enthusiastic reception of these texts (and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in particular) constitutes a ritual self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.

    In this engrossing book Michael Wood explores the blend of arrogance and mischief that makes Nabokov such a fascinating and elusive master of fiction. Wood argues that Nabokov is neither the aesthete he liked to pretend to be nor the heavy-handed moralist recent critics make him. Major works like Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada appear in a new light, but there are also chapters on earlier works, like the Real Life of Sebastian Knight; on selected short stories; and on the translation of Eugene Onegin, as well as detailed discussions of Nabokov's ideas of literature, memory, pity, and pain.The book comes fully to terms with Nabokov's blend of playfulness and seriousness, delving into the real delight of reading him and the odd disquiet that lurks beneath that pleasure. Wood's speculations spin outward to illuminate the ambiguities and aspirations of the modern novel, and to raise the question of how we uncover the author in a work, without falling into the obvious biographical traps. The Magician's Doubts slices through the dustier conventions of criticism and never loses sight of the emotional and sensual pleasure of reading.

    Here, renowned writers and critics including Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Hermione Lee, and Marina Warner discuss the novels, stories and, polemics that made Carter one of the most spellbinding writers of her generation.

    Drawing on works by the Russian writers Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, by other writers as diverse as Sophocles, Cervantes, and George Eliot, by thinkers as varied as William James, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Jay Gould, and from philosophy, the Bible, television, and much more, Gary Saul Morson examines the relation of time to narrative form and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience.Morson asserts that the way we think about the world and narrate events is often in contradiction to the truly eventful and open nature of daily life. Literature, history, and the sciences frequently present experience as if contingency, chance, and the possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a result, people draw conclusions or accept ideologies without sufficiently examining their consequences or alternatives. However, says Morson, there is another way to read and construct texts. He explains that most narratives are developed through foreshadowing and "backshadowing" (foreshadowing ascribed after the fact), which tend to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities in each moment. But other literary works try to convey temporal openness through a device he calls "sideshadowing." Sideshadowing suggests that to understand an event is to grasp what else might have happened. Time is not a line but a shifting set of fields of possibility. Morson argues that this view of time and narrative encourages intellectual pluralism, helps to liberate us from the false certainties of dogmatism, creates a healthy skepticism of present orthodoxies, and makes us aware that there are moral choices available to us.

    Bodenheimer revisits pivotal episodes in Mary Ann Evans's life and career, including the Holy War through which she asserted her youthful religious skepticism; her decision to elope with the married writer George Henry Lewes; and her marriage with John Cross after Lewes's death. Bodenheimer also discusses the rumor campaign that led to the discovery that George Eliot was a woman, and she traces the trajectory of Eliot's impassioned conflict between her ambition and her womanhood.

    Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller. A daring analysis of much never-before-addressed material.

    From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt, and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets. Through subtle readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems, and the blues, Ramazani greatly enriches our critical understanding of a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the signal contributions to the American family elegy of Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, and Amy Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art—in particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.Grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also draw on various historical, formal, and feminist critical approaches. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the history of modern poetry."Consists of full, intelligent and lucid exposition and close reading. . . . Poetry of Mourning is itself a welcome contribution to modern poetry's search for a 'resonant yet credible vocabulary of grief in our time."—Times Literary Supplement

    The author overturns the traditional perspective by showing how figurative aspects of language reveal the poetic structure of mind. Ideas and research from psychology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory are used to establish important links between the poetic structure of thought and everyday use of language. The Poetics of Mind evaluates current philosophical, linguistic, and literary theories of figurative language and relates the empirical work on figurative language understanding to the broader issues concerning the nature of everyday thought and reasoning.

    Organized chronologically, this reference work traces the development of the novel and provides essays on its most illustrious practitioners, from Fielding and Austen to the postmodernists. The contributors challenge contemporary views of the classics by examining canonical writers, as well as women and post-colonial novelists. They also examine subgenres such as picaresque fiction, travelogues, historical romances, detective novels, adventures and the Bildungsroman. Brief biographies of the novelists discussed are given, along with lists for further reading.

    

    It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a quote from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains in her introduction the importance for those "within the circle" of African American literature to examine their own works and to engage this critical canon. The essays in this collection—many of which are not widely available today—either initiated or gave critical definition to specific periods or movements of African American literature. They address issues such as integration, separatism, political action, black nationalism, Afrocentricity, black feminism, as well as the role of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience. With selections from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others, this definitive collection provides a dynamic model of the cultural, ideological, historical, and aesthetic considerations in African American literature and literary criticism. A major contribution to the study of African American literature, this volume will serve as a foundation for future work by students and scholars. Its importance will be recognized by all those interested in modern literary theory as well as general readers concerned with the African American experience.Selections by (partial list): Houston A. Baker, Jr., James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Barbara Christian, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Sarah Webster Fabio, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Morrison, J. Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Wright

    Like other books in this series, it explains, identifies, and comments on many elements that a reader may find unfamiliar or difficult. These include the basic features of Faulkner's fictional town of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County, colloquialisms, dialects, folk customs and sayings, farm implements, biblical verses, and geographic and demographic details.Written especially for puzzled readers, teachers of Faulkner, graduate students, and interpretive scholars, the Reading Faulkner books offer terms and explications that reveal the richly cultural world in Faulkner's major works.Page references throughout are keyed to the definitive editions of Faulkner published by Library of America and to the Vintage editions prepared from the Library of America tapes.Hugh M. Ruppersburg, head of the English department at the University of Georgia, is the author of "Voice and Eye in Faulkner Fiction.

    Grossman, with an authoritative command of Hugo’s work and Hugo criticism, situates the novelist’s masterpiece in relation both to his earlier novels—up to and including Notre-Dame de Paris— and to the poetry published during his exile under the Second Empire. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and on Thomas Weiskel’s analysis of the romantic sublime, Grossman illustrates how the novel’s motifs and structures correspond to a closely connected set of ethical, spiritual, political, and aesthetic concerns.The religious motifs in Les Misérables identify the sublime not just with utopian ideals (and the overthrow of Napoleon III’s grotesque Second Empire) but with artistic death and resurrection. Examining the ways the novel is largely concerned with the monstrous "brutalities of progress" called revolutions that must precede the advent of heaven on earth, Grossman traces that link to a mythos of sin and redemption and shows how the moral concerns of the plot also illuminate Hugo’s aesthetics.Les Misérables explores the tensions between heroes and scoundrels, chaos and order, law and lawlessness. Grossman painstakingly follows the novel’s ethical hierarchy from the grotesque (criminality) to the conventional (bourgeois complacency) and the sublime (sainthood), demonstrating how that hierarchy corresponds to two other hierarchies: the literary and the political.

    It is the first full-length study to be devoted to the literature of this period seen as a whole and including developments up to thepresent day. No knowledge of Greek is assumed and all quotations are given both in Greek and in English.

    He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers.Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney.

    She shows how writings by Margaret Cavendish, Frances Burney, Virginia Woolf, and others reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic.

    This pioneering work offers a short course on the basics of semiotics and a demonstration of what narrative theory can do outside the domain of literary studies. Bal analyzes and interprets texts and images from popular culture to fine art, from ancient to modern times.

    This intelligent, exceptionally well-written biography presents the full operatic flow of a life of lasting accomplishment.

    Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan.The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances.Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different site of memory--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory.The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, V�v� Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Genevi�ve Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.

    One only has to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realize the challenge presented by the illegitimate child.Drawing on a wide rage of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crises in early modern England, reading them in relation to witch craft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State.The characters discussed range from demi-devils, unnatural villains and clowns to outstanding heroic or virtuous types who challenge officially sanctioned ideas of illegitimacy. The final chapter of the book considers bastards in performance; their relationship with theatre spaces and audiences. Illegitimate voices, Findlay argues, can bring about the death of the author/father and open the text as a piece of theatre, challenging accepted notions of authority.

    Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions."Clarice Lispector is the premiere Latin American woman prose writer of this century," Suzanne Ruta noted in the New York Times Book Review, "but because she is a woman and a Brazilian, she has remained virtually unknown in the United States." Passionate Fictions provides American readers with a critical introduction to this remarkable writer and offers those who already know Lispector's fiction a deeper understanding of its complex workings.

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

    -- Covers more than 1,400 of the most important authors who write in English-- Ranges from the author of Beowulf to present-day writers-- Includes writers in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-- Each volume covers approximately 12 authors and includes a concise biography, a selection of critical extracts, and a complete and up-to-date bibliography of the author's separate publications

    According to Harold Schonberg, he was the "foremost music critic of his time, possibly of all time." A Travers Chants is the collection of writings he himself selected from his thirty-odd years of musical journalism. These essays cover a wide spectrum of intellectual inquiry: Beethoven's nine symphonies and his opera, Fidelio; Wagner and the partisans of the "Music of the Future"; Berlioz's idols - Gluck, Weber, and Mozart. There is an eloquent plea to stop the constant rise in concert pitch (an issue still discussed today), a serious piece on the place of music in church, and a humorous and imaginative account of musical customs in China. But Berlioz's writings also contain biting satire and ridicule - of opera singers, of the Academy, of dilettantism. This new translation, phrased in lively, idiomatic English and annotated for the twentieth-century reader, is illustrated with lithographs and drawings from Berlioz's lifetime. Berlioz's writings are a treasure-house of information on nineteenth-century musical life, performance practice, and taste.

    Examining British novels written in 1890-1914, Jane Eldridge Miller demonstrates how these social, legal, and economic changes rendered the traditional narratives of romantic desire and marital closure inadequate, forcing Edwardian novelists to counter the limitations and ideological implications of those narratives with innovative strategies. The original and provocative novels that resulted depict the experiences of modern women with unprecedented variety, specificity, and frankness. Rebel Women is a major re-evaluation of Edwardian fiction and a significant contribution to literary history and criticism. "Miller's is the best account we have, not only of Edwardian women novelists, but of early 20th-century women novelists; the measure of her achievement is that the distinction no longer seems workable." —David Trotter, The London Review of Books

    

    Thereafter she was catapulted into fame. Throughout the late sixties and the seventies she attracted a host of devoted and admiring readers in the counterculture, who were magnetized by her personal liberation and openness. For a woman to make such a probing exploration of the intimate recesses of her psyche made her a cult figure with a large and lasting readership. Born in France, she came to America in the thirties. Her liaison with Henry Miller and his wife June, documented in her explicitly detailed diaries, became the subject of a major film of the nineties. Nin's forthright books such as Delta of Venus, her diaries that continue to be published in a steady flow, and her charismatic charm made her the subject of many candid interviews, such as those collected here. Eight included in this volume are printed for the first time. Many others were originally published in magazines that are now defunct. Nin elaborates on subjects only touched upon in the diaries, and she speaks also of her role in the women's movement and of her philosophies on art, writing, and individual growth.

    In the 1950s, when dirty books (and great ones) were being banned in Britain and America, Maurice Girodias launched a career in Paris that earned him the nickname the "Prince of Porn". John de St. Jorre gives a high-spirited account of this infamous publisher whose eclectic list included Lolita, The Ginger Man, Henry Miller's several Tropics, and the outrageous romp called Candy. Photos.

    The same listing is also sorted by author and by title to provide cross references. This book offers information not found on most book lists and the highlights point out some of the best children's literature. There are reading and interest levels for children and adults. an excellent resource.

    Sally Munt asks why the form has proved so attractive as a vehicle for oppositional politics; whether the pleasures of detective fiction can be truly transgressive; and when exactly it was that the dyke detective appeared as the new super-hero for today. Along the way Munt poses some critical questions about the relations between fiction and activism, politics and representations, the writer and the reader. This will be an enticing book both for addicts of the genre and for teachers and their students.

    Limón  works at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, popular culture, history, and literary criticism.  A native of South Texas,  he renders a historical and ethnographic account of  its rich Mexican-American folk culture.  This folk culture, he shows—whether expressed through male joking rituals, ballroom polka dances, folk healing, or eating and drinking traditions—metaphorically dances with the devil, both resisting  and accommodating  the dominant culture of Texas.     Critiquing the work of his precursors— John Gregory Bourke, J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and Americo Paredes—Limón deftly demonstrates that their accounts of Mexican-Americans in South Texas contain race, class, and gender contradictions, revealed most clearly in their accounts of the folkloric figure of the devil.  Limón's own field-based ethnography follows, and again the devil appears as a recurrent motif,  signaling the ideological contradictions of folk practices in a South Texas on the verge of postmodernity.

    An interdisciplinary distillation of American literary history, it weds the voice of traditional criticism with the diversity of interests that characterize contemporary literary studies. Volume 1 covers the colonial and early national periods, discussing authors ranging from Renaissance explorers to the poets and novelists of the new republic. It should prove an indispensable guide for scholars and students in the fields of English and American literatures and American history.

    very readable, lucid, intriguing study... " --Spenser Newsletter..". a very thoroughgoing inventory of the cruel male fantasies and nightmares imposed on... female-gendered figures... " --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900"Cavanagh has managed to give an almost entirely new reading of [ The Faerie Queene]; it is the first feminist rereading of the entire epic, and it reshapes the contours of the huge poem in often startling and remarkable ways." --Maureen Quilligan, University of Pennsylvania

    Exploring a variety of social, cultural, and practical forces, Avery shows how the literature of the old world influenced that of the new and describes the emergence of uniquely American styles and themes in children's books. Her topics include the early days of colonial publishing, the defenders and detractors of Mother Goose, the influence of Sunday schools and tract societies, the "chaste eroticism" of romantic fiction for young readers, and changing notions of American heroes and heroines.

    The essays in the first section focus primarily on Plato's social and political theory, and in particular the place of women within the state. The second section concentrates on examining the role of the feminine within Plato's metaphysics and epistemology.Tuana introduces both sections and a detailed bibliography is included.

    Linda Kinnahan traces notions of the feminine and the maternal that develop as Williams seeks to create a modern poetics. Positioning Williamas in relationship to these three generations of Anglo-American women, the book pursues two questions: what can women poets, writing with an informed awareness of Williams, teach us about his modernist poetics of contact, and just as importantly, what can they teach us about the process, for women, of constructing a self within a male-dominated tradition?

    In the course of its critique this books inspects, with startling originality, texts from the Bible to Jane Eyre, Hamlet to Batman (the movie), Tristram Shandy to Finnegan's Wake, concentrating particularly on classic nineteenth-century realist novels such as Emma, Hard Times, Bleak House, Middlemarch, The Trumpet Major and Heart of Darkness, as well as classic twentieth-century novels, including Beckett's Watt and Golding's Rites of Passage .