Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly recreates Beckett's life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989, revealing the real man behind the literary giant. Scrupulously researched and filled with previously unknown information garnered from interviews with the author and his friends, family, and contemporaries, Knowlson's unparalleled work is the definitive Beckett biography of our time.Nearing the end of his life, Samuel Beckett chose James Knowlson to be his biographer because he "knows my work best." One of the world's leading authorities on Beckett, Knowlson has drawn on his twenty-year friendship with the Nobel Prize winner, more than one hundred interviews, and research in dozens of archival collections-many previously untapped by scholars-to produce this definitive biography of one of the century's leading writers in both English and French.Damned to Fame follows the reclusive literary giant's life from his birth in Foxrock, a rural suburb of Dublin, in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989. Knowlson brilliantly re-creates Beckett's early years as a struggling author in Paris, his travels through Germany in 1936-37 as the Nazis were consolidating their power, his service in the French Resistance during World War II, and the years of literary fame and financial success that followed the first performance of his controversial Waiting For Godot (1953).Paris between the wars was a city vibrant with experimentation, both in the arts and in personal lifestyle, and Knowlson introduces us to the writers and painters who, along with the young Beckett, populated his bohemian community. Most notable was James Joyce, a fellow Irishman who became Beckett's friend and mentor and influenced him to devote his life to writing. We also meet the women in Beckett's life-his domineering mother, May; his cousin Peggy Sinclair, who died at a tragically young age; Ethna McCarthy, his first love, whom he immortalized in his poetry and prose; Peggy Guggenheim, the American heiress and patron of the arts; and the strong and independent Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom he met in the late 1930s and married in 1961.Beyond recounting many previously unknown aspects of the writer's life, including his strong support for human rights and other political causes, Knowlson explores in fascinating detail the roots of Beckett's works. He shows not only how the relationship between Beckett's own experiences and his work became more oblique over time, but also how his startling postmodern images were inspired by the paintings of the Old Masters, such as Antonello da Messina, Durer, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio.Perhaps most striking of all is Knowlson's portrait of Beckett's complex personality. Although Beckett is often depicted as melancholic, self-critical, and intensely preoccupied with his work, his own letters reveal him to have been also a witty, resilient, and compassionate man who could respond to adversity with humor and who inspired deep affection in his friends.

    With dazzling intelligence and wit, Gass sifts through cultural issues of our time and contemplates how written language, whether a sentence or an entire book, is a container of consciousness, the gateway to another's mind that we enter for a while and make our own.

    An eclectic stylist who crafts sentences like no one else, Davenport will fascinate "people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things".

    Exploring the relationship between literature and the physical environment, literary ecology is the study of the ways that writing both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world.An introduction to the field as well as a source book, The Ecocriticism Reader defines ecological literary discourse and sketches its development over the past quarter-century. The twenty-five selections in this volume, a mixture of reprinted and original essays, look backward to origins and forward to trends and provide generally appealing and lucidly written examples of the range of ecological approaches to literature. Lists of recommended readings, relevant periodicals, and professional organizations offer direction for further study.The Ecocriticism Reader is an illuminating entree into a field of study fully engaged with our most pressing contemporary problem--the global environmental crisis.

    He understood how politics is shaped by the clash of men with various colorings of self-interest and idealism, how violence breeds violence, how fragile human beings create masks and disguises for protection, how schemers do the same for advancement, how love can grow out of hate and hate out of love.Dare anyone say that these insights are irrelevant to living in the real world? For many in an older generation, the Bible and the Collected Shakespeare were the two indispensable books, and thus their sense of life and history was shaped by the best and best-told stories. And they were the wiser for it.Literature abstracts from the complex events of life (just as we all do in everyday life) and can reveal patterns that are like the patterns of events in the real world. Studying literature can give us sensitivity to those patterns. This sensitivity to the rhythm of life is closely connected with what the Bible calls wisdom.

    During the past ten years Harold Pinter has written a new play, three film scripts, sheaves of poems, several sketches and created, with composer James Clarke, a pioneering work for radio, Voices. He has acted on stage, screen and radio, he has appeared on countless political platforms, and his work has been extensively celebrated in festivals at Dublin's Gate Theatre and New York's Lincoln Center. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 2006, the European Theatre Prize. As if this were not enough, he has in the last five years twice come close to death. But he has faced hospitalisation with stoic resilience and his spirit remains as fiercely combative as ever. As he wrote in 2005 to Professor Avraham Oz, one of Israel's leading internal opponents of authoritarianism: "Let's keep fighting."

    In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative abhuman identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.

    Now, in an equally groundbreaking work, Benson takes on the late Wallace Stegner--conservationist, teacher, and author of more than two dozen works of history, biography, essays, and fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose (1971), the National Book Award-winning Spectator Bird (1976), and the bestselling Crossing to Safety (1987). Drawing on nearly ten years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, this authorized biography traces the trajectory of Stegner's life from his prairie childhood in Saskatchewan and teenage years in Salt Lake City to his prominence in the environmental movement and the impact of his Stanford University creative writing program--whose students included Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, and Ivan Doig. Wallace Stegner is a close encounter with one of the greatest American writers of our time.

    In this work, Joseph Gallagher brings the power and prestige of this medieval classic to a new generation of readers--taking them on a guided tour through heaven, purgatory, and hell.(Formerly titled To Hell and Back with Dante)Paperback

    Spanning the years of Machiavelli's adult life, from 1497 until his death in 1527, this correspondence between Machiavelli and his friends, colleagues and compatriots— some of whom were the most influential thinkers of the day—presents a panorama of life, people and critical events in Renaissance Italy.

    Following Harold Bloom's introduction, there appears a detailed biography of the author, discussing major events in her life and her important literary works. Then follows a thematic and structural analysis of the works, in which significant themes, patterns, and motifs are traced. An annotated list of characters supplies brief information on the chief characters in the works.A selection of critical extracts, derived from previously published material from leading critics, then follows. The extracts consist of statements by the author on her works, early reviews of the works, and later evaluations down to the present day. The items are arranged chronologically by date of first publication. A bibliography of Angelou's writings (including a complete listing of all books she has written, co-written, edited, and translated), a list of additional books and articles on her and on her autobiographical works, and an index of themes and ideas conclude the volume.

    The most revealing object of this focus, asserts Maggie Berg, is Catherine's diary, written in the blank spaces of culturally revered tomes and reflecting Catherine's oppression by and rebellion against a patriarchal society. Wuthering Heights, Berg avers, "offers a striking demonstration of how patriarchal ideology can issue in the abuse of women and children, and, more importantly, it demonstrates women's creative ways of resisting oppression." In discussions centering on the historical, literary, and critical contexts of the novel, Berg points to its enduring ability to agitate readers, to seize the popular imagination, to meld Gothic with realistic genres in ways that keep eroticism and domestic violence ever present and the novel's characters ever elusive. Also included is a seven-part reading of the novel that focuses on individual characters. Lockwood, Joseph, Nelly, and Edgar Linton, for example, are shown to prefer being inside societal institutions, whereas Catherine, Heathcliff, and Cathy intentionally position themselves outside the social mainstream; Catherine's diary is shown to be paradigmatic of the novel itself, a subversive statement against the repressions of Victorian society. A conclusion, evaluating visual aids to Wuthering Heights furthers readers' appreciation of the novel, as do a detailed chronology, notes, and bibliography.

    Utilizing the latest research to enhance our understanding of the biblical text, it takes its place as one of the most authoritative yet accessible Bible commentaries of our day.This JPS Torah Commentary series guides readers through the words and ideas of the Torah. Each volume is the work of a scholar who stands at the pinnacle of his field.Every page contains the complete traditional Hebrew text, with cantillation notes, the JPS translation of the Holy Scriptures, aliyot breaks, Masoretic notes, and commentary by a distinguished Hebrew Bible scholar, integrating classical and modern sources.Each volume also contains supplementary essays that elaborate upon key words and themes, a glossary of commentators and sources, extensive bibliographic notes, and maps.

    The perilous intersection of writers' lives with public and private dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary giants as T.S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdieand Henry James.

    This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide.The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

    An introduction places The Master and Margarita and Bulgakov within Russian history and literature, and essays by scholars offer opinion and analysis of the novel's structure, its place in current criticism, its connection to Goethe, and its symbolism and motifs. There is also an abundance of primary source material, including an excerpt from an earlier version of the novel, and related correspondence and diary entries.Northwestern University Press and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) are pleased to announce the establishment of a new series of critical companions to Russian literature. Under the direction of the AATSEEL Publications Committee, leading scholars will edit volumes intended to introduce classics of Russian literature to both teachers and students at the high school and undergraduate levels. Each volume will open with the volume editor's general introduction discussing the work in the context of the writer's oeuvre as well as its place within the literary tradition. The introductory section will also include considerations of existing translations and of textual problems in the original Russian. The following sections will contain several informative and wide-ranging articles by other scholars; primary sources and other background material - letters, memoirs, early reviews, maps; and annotated bibliographies. Combining the highest order of scholarship with accessibility, these critical companions will illuminate the great works of Russian literature and enhance their appreciation by both teachers and students.

    These letters, edited by his biographer David Marr, chronicle White's gradual reluctant engagement with the world: his interest in Jewish culture after an early ignorant anti-Semitism; his idyllic wartime period in West Africa; his passionate and rancorous anti-royalism, sparked by the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis when the British Queen's representative sacked the Prime Minister; his deep held belief in the validity of homosexual unions, based on his own life-long relationship. These letters give an inner glimpse of a mostly private life.

    Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.

    While retaining the key elements of the first edition, including surveys of major figures such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, Bigsby also explores recent works by established dramatists.

    The original Counter Reformation myths saw the individualism of Don Juan, Don Quixote, and Faust as a problem to be quelled by death or mockery. However, the Romantic period, a time more favorably disposed toward myth, saw their dissension not as unacceptable disorder, but rather as admirable and heroic behavior. This incisive study traces attitudes toward these figures and the Romantic product Robinson Crusoe from disapproval to awe to skepticism, examining them as icons of such problems as solitude, narcissism, and the claims of the self versus the claims of the community. Pointedly, none of these figures marries or has a lasting relationship, save for the selfless devotion of a single male servant. Watt argues that the myths of Don Juan, Don Quixote, Faust, and Robinson Crusoe remain the distinctive products of Western society, embodying the most basic values of modern culture.

    The texts collected here were written or delivered as lectures during the last years of de Man's life, between 1977 and 1983. Many of them have never been available previously in any form.

    Perhaps the most well-known Companion of all has been The Oxford Companion to English Literature, now in its revised fifth edition. But theliterary canon isn't static, and modern literature in all of its richness demands a more comprehensive Companion to cover the wealth of contemporary writing crafted in our language: The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English. This unique new reference book to English-languagewriters and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world, covers the gamut from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, and James Joyce to Amy Tan. The survivors of the Victorian age featured in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English--writers such as Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Rabindranath Tagore, and Henry James--could hardly have imagined how richly diverse Literature in English would become by the end of thecentury. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are celebrated in this informative, readable, and catholic reference book, which includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,300 authors. All the great literary figures are included, whether American or Australian, British, Irish, or Indian, African or Canadian or Caribbean--among them Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Patrick White, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, D. H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Wole Soyinka, SylviaPlath--as well as a wealth of less obviously canonical writers, from Ana�s Nin to L. M. Montgomery, Bob Dylan to Terry Pratchett. The book comes right up to date with contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Carol Shields, Tim Winton, Nadine Gordimer, Vikram Seth, DonDelillo, and many others. Title entries range from Aaron's Rod to The Zoo Story; topics from Angry Young Men, Bestsellers, and Concrete Poetry to Soap Opera, Vietnam Writing, and Westerns. A lively introduction by John Sutherland highlights the various and sometimes contradictory canons that have emerged over the century, and the increasingly international sources of writing in English which the Companion records. Catering for all literary tastes, this is the most comprehensivesingle-volume guide to modern (and postmodern) literature.

    He combines the scale and composition of the old masters with technology, to create huge transparencies which are exhibited on lightboxes. The book not only surveys his entire career to date, but also celebrates Wall's writings. Wall is to be the subject of surveys at MOCA, Chicago; Whitechapel, London; and Jeu de Paume, paris in 1995/1996.

    Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle examines the ways in which perceptions of loss were cast into archetypal stories that sought to account for the culture's troubles and assuage its anxieties. By examining the work of a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Stevenson to Stoker - Stephen Arata shows how the twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period.

    This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of narrative, represents the epitome of a centuries long developmental process.

    Williams argues that the principles of negative theology as applied to epistemology and language made possible a symbolism of negation and paradox whose chief sign was the monster. Part II provides a taxonomy of monstrous forms with a gloss on each, and Part III examines the monstrous and the deformed in three heroic sagas -- the medieval Oedipus, The Romance of Alexander, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- and three saints' lives -- Saint Denis, Saint Christopher, and Saint Wilgeforte. The book is beautifully illustrated with medieval representations of monsters. The most comprehensive study of the grotesque in medieval aesthetic expression, Deformed Discourse successfully brings together medieval research and modern criticism.

    He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings. In light of this possibility, Bernardete works back and forth from Homer to Plato to examine the relation between wisdom and justice and tries to recover an original understanding of philosophy that Plato, too, recovered by reflecting on the wisdom of the poet. At stake in his argument is no less than the history of philosophy and the ancient understanding of poetry. The Bow and the Lyre is a book that every classicist and historian of philosophy should have.

    Paradoxically, David Glover suggests, this very success has obscured the historical conditions and authorial circumstances of the novel’s production. By way of a long overdue return to the novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and correspondence of Bram Stoker, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals reconstructs the cultural and political world that gave birth to Dracula. To bring Stoker’s life into productive relationship with his writing, Glover offers a reading that locates the author within the changing commercial contours of the late-Victorian public sphere and in which the methods of critical biography are displaced by those of cultural studies. Glover’s efforts reveal a writer who was more wide-ranging and politically engaged than his current reputation suggests. An Irish Protestant and nationalist, Stoker nonetheless drew his political inspiration from English liberalism at a time of impending crisis, and the tradition’s contradictions and uncertainties haunt his work. At the heart of Stoker’s writing Glover exposes a preoccupation with those sciences and pseudo-sciences—from physiognomy and phrenology to eugenics and sexology—that seemed to cast doubt on the liberal faith in progress. He argues that Dracula should be read as a text torn between the stances of the colonizer and the colonized, unable to accept or reject the racialized images of backwardness that dogged debates about Irish nationhood. As it tracks the phantasmatic form given to questions of character and individuality, race and production, sexuality and gender, across the body of Stoker’s writing, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals draws a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary transitional figure. Combining psychoanalysis and cultural theory with detailed historical research, this book will be of interest to scholars of Victorian and Irish fiction and to those concerned with cultural studies and popular culture.

    Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Zoltan Kovecses demonstrates how cultural aspects, metaphorical language, and human physiology are part of an integrated system. This book challenges the simplistic division between the body and culture by stressing how human emotions are to a large extent constructed from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. Hb ISBN (2000): 0-521-64163-2

    What does the Jew stand for in modern culture? The conscious or unconscious, often hysterical repetition of myths and exaggerations, and the repertory of cliches, fantasies and phobias surrounding the stereotypes of the Jew and the Jewess, have meant that they are figures frequently represented both in the world of literature and art and in the industries of popular culture.

    It is divided into three main sections, on Malory in context, the art of the Morte Darthur, and its reception in later years. As well as essays on the eight tales which make up the Morte Darthur, there are studies ofthe relationship between the Winchestermanuscript and Caxton's and later editions; the political and social context in which Malory wrote; his style and sources; and his treatment of two key concepts in Arthurian literature, chivalry and the representation of women. The volume also includes a brief biography of Malory with a list of the historical records relating to him and his family. It ends with a discussion of the reception of the Morte Darthurfrom the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and a select bibliography.Contributors: P.J.C. FIELD, FELICITY RIDDY, RICHARD BARBER, ELIZABETH EDWARDS, TERENCE MCCARTHY, CAROL MEALE, JEREMY SMITH, ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD, BARBARA NOLAN, HELEN COOPER, JILL MANN, DAVID BENSON, A.S.G. EDWARD

    In an engaging and entertaining style, she explore myths and fairy tales involving victims and heroes and encourages individuals to reach a new level of spiritual and emotional maturity.

    The power of writing, especially poetry, is celebrated here in short texts that present both practical instruction and spiritual insight:    •  Lu Ji's essay in verse, "The Art of Writing," reveals the inner process every writer must go through in preparing for the creative act.    •  Sikong Tu's "Twenty-four Styles of Poetry" teaches that poets must perfect themselves internally in order to achieve perfection in what they write.    •  "Poets' Jade Splinters" contains aphoristic prescriptions and humorous anecdotes about poetry, poets, and the rules of composition. Assorted commentaries and critical evaluations focus on Chinese lyrical poetry.

    -- Presents concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work -- Provides multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters -- Digests of critical extracts prefaced by headnotes

    In this work, Gregory Smith offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the turn to postmodernity in the writings of these philosophers.Smith argues that, while much of postmodern thought is rooted in Nietzsche and Heidegger, it has ironically attempted, whether unwittingly or by design, to deflect their philosophy back onto a modern path. Other alternative paths emanating from both Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought that might more powerfully speak to postmodern culture have been ignored. Nietzsche and Heidegger, Smith suggests, have made possible a far more revolutionary critique of modernity then even their most ardent postmodern admirers have realized.Smith contends that the influences on the postmodern in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger are founded in a new vision of praxis liberated from theory. Ultimately, these philosophers do transcend the nihilism often found in the guise of postmodernism. Their thought is, moreover, consistent with the possibility of limited constitutional government and the rule of law. Smith's book takes the first step toward recovering these possibilities and posing the fundamental questions of politics and ethics in ways that have heretofore been closed off by late-modern thought.

    We journey with James through Italy and France, witness his first love affair in Paris, and settle with him in London at the height of Empire in the Victorian Age. We scale the heights of London society with him, and as the world opens to James we share with him the experience of writing a series of celebrated and successful novels, culminating with Washington Square (on which the play The Heiress is based) and his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady. The Washington Post Book World notes: “It is no small ambition to write a biography of James that is commensurate with that master, and Sheldon Novick has done it.”“Splendidly written . . . Novick has aimed to bring James back to life and he has succeeded brilliantly.”–The Washington Post Book World“Like a movie of James’s life, as it unfold moment to moment.”–The New York Times“Masterful in bringing James and his world to life.”–San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle“Beautifully written, with a grace that enables [Sheldon Novick] to weave his subject’s words in and out of his own with a properly Jamesian suavity . . . Novick’s account gives one a profound respect for James’s persistence and power of will.”–The New Republic

    Lewis, the most beloved Christian thinker and storyteller of our century. The year 1998 marks the centenary of this legendary writer's birth.A brilliant Mind of the Twentieth Century, C.S. Lewis drew upon his vivid, luminous imagination to reveal the "divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality" of the world we live in. His explorations of Christian faith, transcending sectarian divisions, have been praised by churchmen from Billy Graham to Pope John Paul II, while his fictional works, including the Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, have enchanted readers of all ages for decades.C.S. Lewis Companion & Guide, recipient of the 1997 Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Gold Medallion Award for Biography, presents Lewis's life and reflections in one authoritative volume. Organized in sections dedicated to the central ideas, events, people, and works from his remarkable career, this delightful compendium is an indispensable reference for Lewis devotees and novices alike. From the spiritual searching of his early years through his prolific literary and intellectual career, C.S. Lewis Companion & Guide provides keen insight into Lewis' legacy.

    Lynn Enterline analyzes what happens when Renaissance authors revisit Ovid's stories of violence and desire, paying close attention to the ways in which his subversive representations of gender, sexuality and the body influence later conceptions of the self and erotic life. This vividly original book makes a profound contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature.

    Combining social history, literary theory, musicology, and feminist thought, Chopin at the Boundaries is the first book to situate Chopin's music within the construct of his somewhat marginal sexual identity and to explore how this should figure in our understanding of his compositional methods. Through this novel approach, Kallberg reveals a new Chopin, one situated precisely where questions of gender open up into the very important question of genre.

    From Aunt Jemima Pancakes to ethnic Barbie dolls, corporate America peddles racial and gender stereotypes, packaging and selling them to us as breakfast food or toys for our kids.Moving from the realm of child's play through the academy and the justice system, Ann duCille draws on icons of popular culture to demonstrate that it isn't just race and gender that matter in America but race and gender as reducible to skin color, body structure, and other visible signs of difference. She reveals that Mattel, Inc., uses stereotypes of gender, race, and cultural difference to mark--and market--its Barbie dolls as female, white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. The popularity of these dolls suggests the degree to which we have internalized dominant definitions of self and other.In a similar move, Skin Trade interrogates the popular discourse surrounding the trial of O. J. Simpson, arguing that much of the mainstream coverage of the case was a racially coded message equally dependent on stereotypes. Focusing on Newsweek and Time in particular, duCille shows how the former All-American was depicted as un-American. She explores other collusions and collisions among race, gender, and capital as well. Especially concerned with superficial distinctions perpetuated within the academic community, the author argues that the academy indulges in its own skin trade in which both race and gender are hot properties.By turns biting, humorous, and hopeful, Skin Trade is always riveting, full of strange connections and unexpected insights.

    S. Di Piero is one of the most capable and wide-ranging poet-critics of his generation. His essays are contemplative, analytical, and interdisciplinary, critical yet arising out of his own artistic practice. Di Piero looks at interrelations between the arts, and at the ways in which the arts express aspects of contemporary culture as well as the individual temperaments and gifts of their makers. These essays are elegant and passionate tributes to the intersection of art and self.

    Medina, Jr., the prominent novelist and critic. Medina's literary manner of capturing the essence of traditional family life remains unrivaled by modern fiction writers. As an essayist, translator, and editor, Medina has brought many personal touches to scholarly work.

    These essays by some of the foremost commentators writing on the West today constitute the first attempt since his death to assess the diversity of Stegner's contributions to American intellectual life. The essayists engage his novels, short stories, memoirs, and biographies; the intersection between Stegner's fiction and history; and his role as an environmental essayist. These interpretative pieces are preceded by more personal accounts by his son Page Stegner, former students James R Hepworth and Wendell Berry, and writers William Kittredge and Ivan Doig. They identify several themes that pervade Stegner's life and work -- a search for continuity between past and present, hope and optimism about the future, and an attempt to foster for the West, as Stegner put it, 'a society to match its scenery'.

    Taking issue with the traditional concept of the political poem and with recent New Historicist criticism, Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of the political allegory of Dryden's Absolom and Architophel and other overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple reference.

    The tales provide a glimpse of medieval life, and the professions of the pilgrims figure prominently in the poetry. To have a clear understanding of Chaucer's work, the reader needs to know about the vocations of the pilgrims. For some 600 years, this information has been difficult to locate. This reference work conveniently synthesizes and discusses information about the occupation of each of Chaucer's pilgrims and provides an historical context.The volume contains individual entries for each of Chaucer's pilgrims, and the entries share a similar format to foster comparison. Each entry includes three parts. First, the pilgrim's profession is discussed in terms of the daily routine of the medieval occupation. Second, the vocation is examined in terms of its reflection in the tale told by the pilgrim. Third, the vocation and the tale are discussed, when possible, in relation to the descriptions of the characters provided in the General Prologue. Each entry includes a bibliography, and the volume concludes with a list of works for further reading.

    The contributors articulate how the works of diverse American writers of African, Mexican, Irish, Chinese, South Asian, Jewish, and Native American descent reclaim suppressed pasts, facilitating the emergence of newly empowering ethnic identities.

    In the case of our most important cultural documents -- Shakespeare, for instance, or Sophocles -- this commentary remains our most powerful inquiry into questions of reading, aesthetics, violence, and ethical responsibility.To support his argument, Goodhart offers a close analysis of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus, Shakespeare's Richard II, four passages from the Hebrew Torah (the story of Joseph and his brothers, the ten commandments, the story of Jonah, and the story of Job), and a talk given shortly after the war by Yiddish poet and playwright Halpern Leivick. Goodhart concludes that criticism as we know it within a formal academic humanities setting, far from expounding the critical reading a given work makes available to us, more often acts out or repeats the very structures or conflicts which are its subject matter. As a result, the most powerful forms of commentary upon our myth-making capacities may be found less in these critical texts than in the literary texts they model and whose perspectives they would usurp."Exploring themes introduced in his well-known essay on Oedipus, Goodhart concludes that literature is best understood as an interpretation of criticism. The demystifications provided by critics are often recreations of the myths that literary texts attempt to expose. Others have suggested as much, but have not pursued the issue, as he and Ren Girard do, to the foundations of Western thought. His dialogic relation to Girard illuminates both the Judaic and Christiantraditions." -- Wallace Martin, University of Toledo

    After an immensely creative period working in a variety of media, in the early 1930s Lorca turned his attention to writing and staging plays, the most famous of which are Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. Despite his international reputation and the widespread translation of his poetry and plays since his assassination by Franco’s soldiers in 1936, this is the first study to chart Lorca’s specific attitudes toward theater in relation to his historical audience.   Soufas provides a reading of Lorca’s theater from the vantage point of Modernist aesthetics as well as historical performance dynamics. It is premised on the assumption that Lorca’s theater emerges as a consequence of an ongoing dialog with his historical audience, a rather conservative and uncultured milieu that had largely dictated the agenda of the Madrid theater scene during the 1920s.   Soufas takes as a critical point of departure the idea that any literary study of theater must also include and account for the complete process by which a script is converted into a stage production. In most instances, dramatic authority is at least in part a function of how well a dramatist deals with the historical audience that initially judges the worth of the productions. Soufas’ approach solves the problem of how to evaluate Lorca’s theater; by placing his work in a performance context, Soufas uncovers a significant aspect of the evolution of Lorca’s theater.

    Three of our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologies that surround Robert Frost.

    He considers the role of the professional theater and theatricality in the cultural transformation that was concurrent with religious and socio-political change, and then concentrates upon the formal means by which Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays called into question the absolutist assertions of the Elizabethan state. Drawing dramatic examples from the genres of tragedy and history, Montrose finally focuses his cultural-historical perspective on A Midsummer Night's Dream.The Purpose of Playing elegantly demonstrates how language and literary imagination shape cultural value, belief, and understanding; social distinction and interaction; and political control and contestation.

    Aristotle's influence on the practice and theory of rhetoric, as it affects political and legal argumentation, has been continuous and far-reaching. This anthology presents Aristotle's Rhetoric in its original context, providing examples of the kind of oratory whose success Aristotle explains and analyzes.The contributors—eminent philosophers, classicists, and critics—assess the role and the techniques of rhetorical persuasion in philosophic discourse and in the public sphere. They connect Aristotle's Rhetoric to his other work on ethics and politics, as well as to his ideas on logic, psychology, and philosophy of language. The collection as a whole invites us to reassess the place of rhetoric in intellectual and political life.

    As a study of Japanese literature, it aims to define the state of Japanese literary studies in the field of women's writing and to point to directions for future research and inquiry. As a study of women's writing, it presents cross-cultural interpretations of Japanese material of relevance to contemporary work in gender studies and comparative literature. The essays demonstrate various critical approaches to the tradition of Japanese women's writing--from a consideration of theoretical issues of gendered writing in classical and modern literature to a consideration of the themes and styles of a number of important contemporary writers.

    Jacqueline Rose argues here for the importance of these two arenas of historic conflict to the English literary and cultural imagination and to the new disciplinary boundaries of the humanities today. As in her previous books, her fundamental question is the place of fantasy in public and private identities. But in States of Fantasy she pushes her investigation into what at first glance seem unlikely places. In fact, as she convincingly demonstrates, nowhere demonstrates more clearly than the above regions the need for a psychoanalytically informed understanding of historical process. And nothing makes more visible the unbreakable line that runs between literature and politics than the place of England and its writing in those histories. Her provocative study offers the strongest rebuttal to critics who try to sever the links between the study of literature and culture and the making and unmaking of the modern world.

    B. White's Charlotte's Web, and Chris Van Allsburgh's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick - provides the substance of the Nimble Reader. McGillis employs these texts as well as others to explain the basic tenets and processes of criticism and to discuss criticism's usefulness in enhancing our understanding of children's literature. He skillfully balances theoretical discussions of various types of criticism - archetypal, psycho-analytical, political, structuralist, poststructuralist, reader response, and the New Criticism - with practical analysis of his primary texts and other works. With his engaging choice of texts, emphasis on practical criticism, and inclusion of bibliographies of both children's literature and works on literary theory and criticism, McGillis has succeeded in producing a dual-purpose volume: The Nimble Reader not only demonstrates a new approach to children's literature as a serious object of study but also represents one of the clearest presentations of literary theory published to date.

    This text aims to provide students with a critical introduction to the major developments in literary criticism and literary theory in English since the 1890s.

    Academic, Scholarly, Research

    The authors use a variety of critical methodologies to examine the diary as a text, as a form of women's self-inscription, as a window to the diarists' historical and contemporary lives, and as a theoretical tool that allows us to question longstanding assumptions.

    In addition, Ricks puts his appreciative pen in the service of other literary figures and genres, including drama, the novel, history and philosophy, and a discussion of Victorian biographies. Ricks wraps up the collection with a series of critical questions on literature and theory; plus two notes--on the canon, and on Empson and political criticism. W.H. Auden once wrote of Christopher Ricks that he is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding; with this latest volume every scholar as well as serious reader will join the poet in finding much to appreciate.

    Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 investigates Shakespearean criticism over a decade later, introducing new debates and new theorists into the frame. Both established scholars and new names appear here, providing a broad cross-section of contemporary Shakespearean studies, including psychoanalysis, sexual and gender politics, race and new historicism.Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 represents the forefront of contemporary Shakespearean studies. This urgently-needed addition to a classic work of literary criticism is one which teachers and scholars will welcome.

    Like its predecessor, The After-War World makes full use of previously unpublished and long-lost material. It is the firstbiography to establish Ford's importance to modern literature: exploring the relations between a writer's life, autobiography, and fiction, and showing how Ford's case challenges the conventions of literary biography itself. Saunders provides a ground-breaking reading of Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, and describes the founding of the transatlantic review, the influential literary journal that published Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Picasso, and many more major writers and artists.Ford's personal relationships were no less complex than his work: while living with Stella Bowen after the breakup of his partnership with Violet Hunt he had a brief affair with Jean Rhys, but he was to spend his final years until his death in 1939, with the Polish American painter Janice Biala.Throughout his career Ford endlessly reinvented himself, and this biography, for the first time, offers a sustained and critical account of his dazzling literary transformations.

    Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

    Linda Wagner-Martin traces the book's critical reception, comments on its importance, and provides extended analyses of the novel's major characters.

    The book shows how this taste was formed in Greco-Roman antiquity out of a series of revolutions in storytelling, centered on Homer, early tragedy, Hellenistic comedy, and the Greek love-novels of the early centuries AD. Along the way, it draws on cognitive science and current literary theory to offer a resilient yet accessible new theory of what plot is and how it works.