in between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory and the importance of the shadow to good art.A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Delving into the nature of poetry, Jane Hirshfield also writes on the nature of the human mind, perception and experience. Nine Gates is about the underpinnings of poetic craft, but it is also about a way of being alive in the world -- alertly, musically, intelligently, passionately, permeably.In part a primer for the general reader, Nine Gates is also a manual for the working writer, with each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow a poem to convey meaning and emotion with clarity and force. Above all, Nine Gates is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our fundamental consciousness of what can be known when a person is most fully alive.

    Helen Vendler, widely regarded as an accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as a guide to some of the best-known poems in the English language.In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler interprets imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out new levels of import in particular lines, and the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect.

    Not only does it describe the genre authoritatively, but it redefines it, offering an exciting new analysis of this highly diverse and hugely popular sphere of art. With more than 4,000 entries and over one million words, this volume covers every aspect of fantasy-literature, film, television, opera, art, and comics. Written and compiled by a team of editors with unparalleled collective experience in the field, it is an invaluable reference for anyone interested in the art of the fantastic. This paperback edition includes thirty-two pages of update material obtained since the hardcover when to press.

    By inviting the reader to explore the imagination's grip on daily life and how one lives in the pressure of that grip, Baxter offers his own perspective on reading and writing contemporary fiction.

    In The Shadow Of The Vampire offers a close up view of her devotees and disciples, fangs and all. Over 100 photographs from Anne Rice's Memnoch Ball in New Orleans as well as other events serve as a portrait of this growing subculture. The photographs illustrate the themes the readers relate to in their fantasies and everyday lives and the extremes to which they will go to be close to their mentor. The subjects of the photographs, the fans themselves, explain in accompanying interviews their spiritual relationships to romance, eroticism, loneliness, bloodlust or outsider status of the characters in the book. From the people who sleep in coffins to the teenage Goth-rockers to the HIV-positive man who found a deep allegorical comfort in the vampire Lestat, their responses range from the burlesque to the sublime.

    Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse.The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia.Editors Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander offer helpful annotations throughout, and poet Robert Creeley, who enjoyed a long and mutually influential relationship with Olson, provides the book's introduction.

    Brilliant and witty, his memoir reveals Steiner's thoughts on the meaning of the western tradition and its philosophic and religious premises.

    Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion have long been recognized as among the most popular fiction of the twentieth century, and most critical analysis of Tolkien has centered on these novels. Granted access by the Tolkien estate and the Bodleian Library in Oxford to Tolkien's unpublished writings, Verlyn Flieger uses them here to shed new light on his better known works, revealing a new dimension of his fictive vision and giving added depth of meaning to his writing.Tolkien's concern with time--past and present, real and "faerie"--captures the wonder and peril of travel into other worlds, other times, other modes of consciousness. Reading his work, we "fall wide asleep" into a dream more real than ordinary waking experience, and emerge with a new perception of the waking world. Flieger explores Tolkien's use of dream as time-travel in his unfinished stories The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers as well as in The Lord of the Rings and his shorter fiction and poetry.Analyzing Tolkien's treatment of time and time-travel, Flieger shows that he was not just a mythmaker and writer of escapist fantasy but a man whose relationship to his own century was troubled and critical. He achieved in his fiction a double perspective of time that enabled him to see in the mirror of the past the clouded reflection of the present.

    Besides discussions of Austen's novels and letters, there are essays on religion, politics, class consciousness, publishing practices, domestic economy, style in the novels and the significance of her juvenile works. A chronology provides biographical information, and assessments of the history of Austen criticism highlight the most interesting recent studies in a vast field of critical diversity.

    Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing Murdoch's journey to a modern Platonism, this volume includes incisive evaluations of the thought and writings of T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvior, and Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy. Existentialists and Mystics not only illuminates the mysticism and intellectual underpinnings of Murdoch's novels, but confirms her major contributions to twentieth-century thought.

    John Brewster's landmark book shows us how English artists, amateurs, entrepeneurs, and audiences created a culture that is still celebrated for its wit and brilliance.

    H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study." Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the act of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, "It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid-queer stuff-but not bad."

    Bate opens by taking up questions of authorship, asking, for example, Who was Shakespeare, based on the little documentary evidence we have? Which works really are attributable to him? And how extensive was the influence of Christopher Marlowe? Bate goes on to trace Shakespeare's canonization and near- deification, examining not only the uniqueness of his status among English-speaking readers but also his effect on literate cultures across the globe. Ambitious, wide-ranging, and historically rich, this book shapes a provocative inquiry into the nature of genius as it ponders the legacy of a talent unequalled in English letters. A bold and meticulous work of scholarship, The Genius of Shakespeare is also lively and accessibly written and will appeal to any reader who has marveled at the Bard and the enduring power of his work.

    It traces the development of the stories from prehistoric India and Pharaonic Egypt to modern times. It explores the history of the translation, and explains the ways in which its contents have been added to, plagiarized and imitated. Above all, the book uses the stories as a guide to the social history and the counterculture of the medieval Near East and the world of the storyteller, the snake charmer, the burglar, the sorcerer, the drug addict, the treasure hunter and the adulterer.

    E. B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, John EdgarWideman and August Wilson, Jamaica Kincaid and Gloria Naylor, Stanley Crouch and Cornel West, and hundreds more. Moreover, the Companion includes entries on 150 major works of African American literature (including synopses of novels), from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun; on literary characters, ranging from Bigger Thomas, to Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace; on character types, such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster; and on such icons of blackculture as Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on the traditional literary genres, such as poetry, fiction, and drama; on genres of special import in African American letters, such as autobiography, slavenarratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; and on a wide spectrum of related topics, including journalism, the black periodical press, major libraries and research centers, religion, literary societies, women's clubs, and various publishing enterprises

    Yet there is astonishing interest in Julian today, and her book continues to be widely read. But why? What possible relevance could the writing of this unlettered woman have for us in today's troubled world, a world vastly different from medieval England? This question so challenged Sheila Upjohn, a recognized authority on Julian, that she embarked on a quest to answer the question Why Julian now?Upjohn's journey became a personal voyage of discovery that led her to explore, in Julian's company, the nature of God, creation, prayer, sin, the devil, salvation, and the social and religious differences between Julian's fourteenth-century context and our own world. The lively traveler's tales that record Upjohn's journey are at once moving and profound. She acknowledges Julian as a "spiritual giant" and reevalutes the wealth of Julian's teaching with a fresh and dynamic outlook. She also shows that Julian's clear-eyed vision is urgently needed today, that it can indeed transform our understanding of God as we travel into the twenty-first century.

    Centering on groups of avant-garde poets, the study particularly attends to those poets whose radical forms of new writing formed the basis for much of what followed in the Black Arts period. Exploring the farthest reaches of black creative experimentation in words and music, Black Chant yields an invaluable reassessment of African-American cultural history as it has been shaped throughout the era we now call postmodern.

    This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition. Each chapter provides a history of the scholarly interest in a particular topic, a synthesis of present knowledge and opinion, and an analysis of scholarly work that remains to be done. Written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, A Beowulf Handbook will be of value to nonspecialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf and to scholars at work on their own research. In its clear and comprehensive treatment of the poem and its scholarship, this book will prove an indispensable guide to readers and specialists for many years to come.

    The specific identity in question is that of Argentina, and Taylor’s focus is directed toward the years 1976 to 1983 in which the Argentine armed forces were pitted against the Argentine people in that nation’s "Dirty War." Combining feminism, cultural studies, and performance theory, Taylor analyzes the political spectacles that comprised the war—concentration camps, torture, "disappearances"—as well as the rise of theatrical productions, demonstrations, and other performative practices that attempted to resist and subvert the Argentine military.Taylor uses performance theory to explore how public spectacle both builds and dismantles a sense of national and gender identity. Here, nation is understood as a product of communal "imaginings" that are rehearsed, written, and staged—and spectacle is the desiring machine at work in those imaginings. Taylor argues that the founding scenario of Argentineness stages the struggle for national identity as a battle between men—fought on, over, and through the feminine body of the Motherland. She shows how the military’s representations of itself as the model of national authenticity established the parameters of the conflict in the 70s and 80s, feminized the enemy, and positioned the public—limiting its ability to respond. Those who challenged the dictatorship, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to progressive theater practitioners, found themselves in what Taylor describes as "bad scripts." Describing the images, myths, performances, and explanatory narratives that have informed Argentina’s national drama, Disappearing Acts offers a telling analysis of the aesthetics of violence and the disappearance of civil society during Argentina’s spectacle of terror.

    15 photos.

    Naoki Sakai turns this thinking on its head, and shows how this unity of language really only exists in our manner of representing translation. In analyses of translational transactions and with a focus on the ethnic, cultural, and national identities of modern Japan, he explores the cultural politics inherent in translation. Through the schematic representation of translation, one language is rendered in contrast to another as if the two languages are clearly different and distinct. And yet, Sakai contends, such differences and distinctions between ethnic or national languages (or cultures) are only defined once translation has already rendered them commensurate. His essays thus address translation as a means of figuring (or configuring) difference.

    Burroughs is one of the twentieth century's most visible, controversial, and baffling literary figures. In the first comprehensive study of the writer, Timothy S. Murphy places Burroughs in the company of the most significant intellectual minds of our time. In doing so, he gives us an immensely readable and convincing account of a man whose achievements continue to have a major influence on American art and culture. Murphy draws on the work of such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also investigates the historical contexts from which Burroughs's writings arose.From the paranoid isolationism of the Cold War through the countercultural activism of the sixties to the resurgence of corporate and state control in the eighties, Burroughs's novels, films, and music hold a mirror to the American psyche. Murphy coins the term "amodernism" as a way to describe Burroughs's contested relationship to the canon while acknowledging the writer's explicit desire for a destruction of such systems of classification. Despite the popular mythology that surrounds Burroughs, his work has been largely excluded from the academy of American letters. Finally here is a book that presents a solid portrait of a major artistic innovator, a writer who combines aesthetics and politics and who can perform as anthropologist, social goad, or media icon, all with consummate skill.

    Not since the controversy surrounding the advent of the so-called New Wave writers of the 1960s and early 1970s had anyone dared to categorize writers. A work that was originally intended as an homage, to illuminate the works of many of the younger writers in the field, was vilified in numerous fanzine articles and convention panels. But Swanwick's essay was not intended to generate controversy and it remains, beyond the initial conflagration, a thoughtful and insightful look into the science fiction field of the early to mid-1980s. Herein lies the genesis of writers like William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling and James Patrick Kelly. "A User's Guide to the Post Moderns," is published here for the first time since its initial magazine appearance along with "In the Tradition...", Swanwick's elegant assay on the fantasy genre, and a brand new introduction written specially for this collection.

    This is an anthology of works in Western literature which competent critics believe have touched the limits of art; that is, selections of prose and poetry that have been pronounced perfect or the best of their kind.

    . . . We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges. . . . That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering stream of forgetfulness) will try to represent and discuss by means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literature." from LetheLethe is an exploration of the art of forgetting as the counterpart of the rhetorical art of memory in Western culture from the Greeks to the present. It offers penetrating analyses of works by, among others, Augustine, Bellow, Borges, Casanova, Celan, Cervantes, Dante, Descartes, Freud, Goethe, Homer, Kant, Kleist, Levi, Locke, Mallarme, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ovid, Pirandello, Plato, Proust, Rabelais, Rousseau, Sartre, and Wiesel. What emerges is a general view of forgetting that combines a recognition of its necessity and inevitability with a critique of forgetting (particularly in the case of the Holocaust) and the need to combat it. Harald Weinrich's epilogue considers forgetting in the present age of information overflow, particularly in the area of the natural sciences.This magisterial book was first published in German in 1997 and has already been translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish; a Korean translation is in the works. This is the first of Weinrich's books to be translated into English and will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, intellectual and cultural historians, classicists, historians of philosophy, and other philosophers with literary interests. The range of the book is astonishing. In Steven Rendall's skillful and fluent translation, its readability is noteworthy.

    Offers powerful insight into the portrayal of romantic love by Jean Rhys, Clover Adams, Christina Stead, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and others.

    Robert J. Corber argues that a form of gay male identity emerged in the 1950s that simultaneously drew on and transcended left-wing opposition to the Cold War cultural and political consensus. Combining readings of novels, plays, and films of the period with historical research into the national security state, the growth of the suburbs, and postwar consumer culture, Corber examines how gay men resisted the "organization man" model of masculinity that rose to dominance in the wake of World War II. By exploring the representation of gay men in film noir, Corber suggests that even as this Hollywood genre reinforced homophobic stereotypes, it legitimized the gay male "gaze." He emphasizes how film noir’s introduction of homosexual characters countered the national "project" to render gay men invisible, and marked a deep subversion of the Cold War mentality. Corber then considers the work of gay male writers Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, demonstrating how these authors declined to represent homosexuality as a discrete subculture and instead promoted a model of political solidarity rooted in the shared experience of oppression. Homosexuality in Cold War America reveals that the ideological critique of the dominant culture made by gay male authors of the 1950s laid the foundation for the gay liberation movement of the following decade.

    Connolly's companion to Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading includes a general introduction discussing the work in the context of Nabokov's oeuvre as well as its place within the Russian literary tradition. Also included are primary sources and other background materials, as well as discussions of the work by leading scholars and an annotated bibliography. Combining the highest order of scholarship with accessibility, this critical companion illuminates a great work of literature, and will enhance is appreciation by both teachers and students.

    The purpose of the book is to demonstrate the ways in which Dostoevsky's thought and fiction served to stimulate and crystallize Camus's own thinking. Davison lucidly identifies the lines of divergence and counter-arguments which Camus produced as answers to the challenge of Dostoevsky's Christian/Tzarist vision of life. The traditional methods of comparative literary criticism are jettisoned in favour of the more exciting claim that Camus's literary and philosophical texts can be read as precise and detailed replies to some of Dostoevsky's central beliefs about immortality, religion and politics. The study ranges freely over the entirety of the works of both major writers.

    Deconstructing the Hero offers analytical readings of some of the most widely read adventure stories such as Treasure Island, the James Bond stories and Star Wars. The book describes how adventure stories are influential in shaping children's perception and establishing values. When many of these stories define non-white, non-European people as inferior, and women as marginal or incapable, we should be worried about what they are teaching our children to think. Margery Hourihan shows how teaching children to read books critically can help to prevent the establishment of negative attitudes, discourage aggression and promote values of emotion and creativity.

    The role of narrator and narratees, methods of characterization and scenery description, and the development of the plot are discussed. The study aims to enhance our understanding of this masterpiece of European literature. All Greek references are translated and technical terms are explained in a glossary. It is directed at students and scholars of Greek literature and comparative literature.

    Plays featured include:* King John* Henry VI, Part I* Henry VI, Part II* Henry, Part III* Richard III* Richard II* Henry V.It will be a must for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social implications of Shakespeare today.

    He argues that culture is not what was done, but what is remembered and that the social competition among different memories is as dynamic as the biological struggle for survival. Taylor builds his argument on a broad base of cultural achievements, from Michelangelo to Frankenstein, from Shakespeare to Casablanca, from Freud to Invisible Man. He spans the continents to draw upon Japanese literature, Native American history, ancient Greek philosophy, and modern American architecture.

    Such work, while important, masks our failure to imaginatively appropriate Adorno's ideas. In Exact Imagination, Late Work, Shierry Weber Nicholsen begins the process of appropriation through the centrality of the aesthetic dimension.Adorno uses the term "exact imagination" to describe nondiscursive rationality. Exact imagination, which is the opposite of creative imagination, marks the conjunction of knowledge, subjective experience, and aesthetic form. Unlike exact imagination, "late work" is characterized by the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity.Exact imagination and late work mark the bounds of Nicholsen's exploration. The five interlocked essays, based on material from Adorno's "aesthetic writings," take up such issues as subjective aesthetic experience, the historicity of artworks and our experience of them, Adorno's conception of language, the nature of configurational or constellational form in Adorno's work, and the relation between the artwork, aesthetic experience, and philosophy. A subtext is the unraveling of Adorno's use of the ideas of his colleague Walter Benjamin. Nicholsen's essays themselves can be perceived as a constellation of their own around the central issue of the inseparability of form in its aesthetic dimension and nondiscursive rationality.

    This wide-ranging volume covers Williams' works, from the early apprenticeship years through to his last play before his death in 1983. In addition to essays on the major plays, the contributors also consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical concerns. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams also features a bibliographic essay surveying the major critical statements on Williams.

    This New Casebook brings together essays by leading scholars over the past twenty years, encouraging the student to consider a range of different critical approaches.

    The second edition features many additional terms, both traditional and recent, with a greater array of examples that make it an even more useful and informative reference than before.

    Alfred Kessler, an avid collector of the works of G. K. Chesterton, uncovered a rare treasure - Chesterton's personal copy of a privately published edition of Holbrook Jackson's Platitudes in the Making (1911), with original responses by Chesterton written in green pencil between the lines of Jackson's book. Since 1911, this hitherto unknown Chesterton "book within a book" has been seen only by a privileged few. Now, Ignatius Press is pleased to present this beautiful facsimile edition in which admirers of Chesterton everywhere will have the opportunity for an extraordinary glimpse of the remarkable wisdom and humor of this literary giant "at play."

    The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for -- -if not invent -- -amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the -past misfortunes, - of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis -- -simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition -- -is at the heart of their politics.Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted as constitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the city is formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side of the beautiful unitary city of Athens. In a brilliant analysis of the Greek word for voting, diaphora, Loraux underscores the conflictual and dynamic motion of democratic life. Voting appears as the process of dividing up, of disagreement -- -in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Not only does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows the contemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments of internal stasis.

    Using the most recent work in Gothic and gender studies, the authors enter the current debate on the nature of female Gothic and raise questions about du Maurier's relationship to such a tradition. They demonstrate that using recognizable popular forms, she was able to explore through Gothic writing the anxieties of modernity in the kind of fiction many people find accessible. This, they claim, explains the compulsive quality of her best novels and their enduring popularity.

    In this pioneering study Franco Moretti presents a fresh and exciting perspective by mapping the often unexpected relations between literature and geography.

    Most radical of all is the possibility that the very notion of literature is rendered untenable by postmodernism. How did this possibility arise? Who are the key figures responsible for its emergence; which are the key texts of its expression? This Anthology provides ways of responding to such questions.

    In this analysis of Barnes's distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes's greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way.In evaluating Barnes's fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue surrounding his divided career as a writer of serious novels, published under his own name, and of detective thrillers, published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. Moseley provides close readings of Barnes's book-length works, defending the writer against the charge that some of these volumes should not be considered novels at all and examining his commitment to writing books rich in the exploration of serious ideas.

    In the first book devoted to long poems by women, Lynn Keller explores this rich and evolving body of work, offering revealing discussions of the diverse traditions and feminist concerns addressed by poets ranging from Rita Dove and Sharon Doubiago to Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker, and Susan Howe. Arguing that women poets no longer feel intimidated by the traditional associations of long poems with the heroic, public realm or with great artistic ambition, Keller shows how the long poem's openness to sociological, anthropological, and historical material makes it an ideal mode for exploring women's roles in history and culture. In addition, the varied forms of long poems—from sprawling free verse epics to regular sonnet sequences to highly disjunctive experimental collages—make this hybrid genre easily adaptable to diverse visions of feminism and of contemporary poetics.

    In this path-breaking study, Anthony Yu goes beyond the customary view of Hongloumeng as a vivid reflection of late imperial Chinese culture by examining the novel as a story about fictive representation. Through a maze of literary devices, the novel challenges the authority of history as well as referential biases in reading. At the heart of Hongloumeng, Yu argues, is the narration of desire. Desire appears in this tale as the defining trait and problem of human beings and at the same time shapes the novel's literary invention and effect. According to Yu, this focalizing treatment of desire may well be Hongloumeng's most distinctive accomplishment.Through close readings of selected episodes, Yu analyzes principal motifs of the narrative, such as dream, mirror, literature, religious enlightenment, and rhetorical reflexivity in relation to fictive representation. He contextualizes his discussions with a comprehensive genealogy of qing--desire, disposition, sentiment, feeling--a concept of fundamental importance in historical Chinese culture, and shows how the text ingeniously exploits its multiple meanings. Spanning a wide range of comparative literary sources, Yu creates a new conceptual framework in which to reevaluate this masterpiece.

    But a better model for the 1990s is to be found, according to Joan DeJean, in the culture wars of France in the 1690s—the time of a battle of the books known as the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. DeJean brilliantly reassesses our current culture wars from the perspective of that earlier fin de siècle (the first to think of itself as such), and rereads the seventeenth-century Quarrel from the vantage of our own warring "ancients" and "moderns." In so doing, DeJean shows that a fin de siècle taking place in the shadow of culture wars can be more a source of constructive cultural revolution than of apocalyptic gloom and doom. Just as the first fin de siècle's battle of the books served as the spark that set off the Enlightenment, introducing radically new sexual and social politics that laid the groundwork for modernity, so can our current culture wars result in radical, liberating changes—if we take an active stand against our own "ancients" who seek to stifle such reforms.

    Understanding exile as flight from political persecution or types of oppression that single out women, this title concentrates on diasporic writers and filmmakers who depict the vulnerability of women to poverty and exploitation in their homelands and their search for safe refuge.

    Edited with a Critical Introduction, Complete Paraphrase of the Text, Explanation, Commentaries, and Questions and Answers.

    He does so by reading the text as a dramatization of what is perhaps life's central motivating struggle—the inescapable human need to pursue an ideal of expressive freedom within the difficult terms set by culture.Eldridge sees Wittgenstein as a Romantic protagonist, engaged in an ongoing internal dialogue over the nature of intentional consciousness, ranging over ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. The picture of the human mind that emerges through this dialogue unsettles behaviorism, cognitivism, and all other scientifically oriented orthodoxies. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, akin to writing a poem, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and skepticism. Eldridge's careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work will influence all subsequent scholarship on it.

    For over 150 years readers have fallen under the spell of Jane Eyre, as they've read the story of the plain but spirited governess and her relationship with the handsome, brooding Mr. Rochester. Charlotte Bronte's own life was no less interesting than her heroine's, and Stewart Ross traces Charlotte's remarkable story from a Dickensian boarding school and the death of her beloved older sisters, through the games of imagination played on the moors with her siblings Anne, Emily and Branwell, to her lonely years as a governess and ultimate success and fame. As Charlotte's compelling story unfolds, we see the reflections of her life in excerpts from her greatest work, Jane Eyre. This remarkable book offers a glimpse of the process that transforms life into literature and serves as an enticing introduction to one of the greatest novels in the English language.

    We have no captive audience. We do not teach. We write to be readable and to engage the interest of what Virginia Woolf called 'the common reader.'"    In a life that spanned almost the entire course of the twentieth century--he was born in 1900 and died in 1997--Sir Victor Pritchett mastered nearly every form of literature: the novel, short fiction, travel writing, biography, criticism, and memoir. Now, Sir Victor's son Oliver has selected representative samples to illustrate the tremendous scope of his father's brilliance. Included in this volume are sections of Pritchett's memoirs, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil; his reflections on turning eighty; and an account of a visit to the Appalachians written in 1925. There are also portraits of Dublin, New York, the Amazon, and Spain; selections from the novels Dead Man Leading and Mr. Beluncle; thirteen complete short stories; excerpts from biographies of Turgenev and Chekhov; and critical pieces on Twain, Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, and others.    "Pritchett has lived as a man of letters must, by his pen, and he has done it with a freshness of interest and an infectious curiosity that have never waned," observed novelist Mar- garet Drabble. Taken together with Oliver Pritchett's appreciation of his father, and John Bayley's "In Memoriam," The Pritchett Century stands as the most comprehensive collection of Sir Victor's work available in one volume.The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.From the Hardcover edition.

    Approaches to Teaching World Literature 59.

    This volume examines Sappho's poetry through the lens of lesbian desire. It focuses on the active female gaze in the texts and the narrative voice - one that describes female experience and desires as primary, not secondary to the dominant (male) culture.

    She discusses work by three popular women novelists of the time: M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and "Ouida". Early and later novels of each writer are interpreted in the context of their reception, showing that attitudes toward fiction drew on Victorian beliefs about health, nationality, class and the body, beliefs that the fictions themselves both resisted and exploited.

    His innovative approach to the problem of Shakespeare's treatment of Shylock can stand for the originality of his book as a whole... Yaffe's interpretations are likely to prove controversial, but they are always thought-provoking." -- Virginia Quarterly ReviewMuch attention has been paid to the place of Shylock in the history of anti-Semitism. Most scholars have agreed with Harold Bloom that Shakespeare's famous villain is drawn with a "murderous anti-Semitism" and that Shakespeare uncritically mirrors the rife anti-Semitism of his times. While others see only gross caricature in The Merchant of Venice, however, Martin Yaffe finds a subtle analysis of the Jew's place in a largely Christian society. In Shylock and the Jewish Question, Yaffe challenges the widespread assumption that Shakespeare is, in the final analysis, unfriendly to Jews. He finds that Shakespeare's consideration of Judaism in The Merchant of Venice provides an important contrast to Marlowe's virulent The Jew of Malta. In many ways, he argues, Shakespeare's play is even more accepting than Francis Bacon's notably inclusive New Atlantis or the Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza's argument for tolerance in the Theologico-Political Treatise."Although Yaffe focuses on the Jewish question, his study is a lead-in to a study of the rise of liberal democracy, the development of religious toleration, the relation of church and state, and the inter-relation between politics, economics and religion -- all of these being vital in history's evolution towards modernity." -- Serge Liberman, Australian JewishNews"In a critique that promises to refuel scholarly controversy over the portrait of Shylock... Yaffe's retro-prospective approach to its political philosophy suggests interesting possibilities for contrasting popular anti-Semitic culture and the more tolerant, enlightened statesmanship of the seventeenth-century." -- Frances Barasch, Shakespeare Bulletin

    Torgovnick investigates the numerous ways we have turned toward the primitive out of spiritual hunger for such deeply human experiences - a hunger that could once be satisfied within the West's own mystical traditions but that often no longer can be. Brilliantly encompassing religion, art, psychology, literature, and other aspects of our culture, Primitive Passions offers new insight into our ideas of spirituality and gender, and, ultimately, into the hidden but vital parts of ourselves.

    Linguistics and Literature is the first book to offer an overview of how linguistic theory can be applied to the oral and written literatures of the world

    In the forefront of this new movement was the influential journal Tel Quel, which both canonized a body of preferred avant-garde texts (both literary and theoretical) and nullified prominent figures from preceding generations. In a broad remapping of French modernism, this book shows how the milieu of Tel Quel transferred myths of the powers of literature inherited from Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, and Breton to theory, in the process erasing the traces of these myths and their common ground.The author analyzes cultural and theoretical positions—pure art, automatism, engagement, and transgression—that structured the literary and critical field from the 1920's to the 1950's to show their strong impact on the formulation and elaboration of theoretical issues in more recent decades. Focusing on the question of relations between poetry and action, she reexamines these positions and uncovers proximities between them that significantly displace theoretical issues.These proximities emerge when a philosophical subtext of Bergson—antiphilosopher and nondialectical thinker—is revealed to operate alongside the more obvious subtext of Hegel. The discourse of Bergson shifts the category of action central to these literary polemics and revalues the visual register, suggesting a reconsideration of Surrealism. The book concludes by examining the ideological pressures associated with the eclipse of the discourse of Bergson as well as some of the effects of this erasure on our understanding of the modern as distinct from the postmodern.

    These lectures, letters, reviews, addresses, prefaces, and interviews-what Wilbur calls the "prose by-products of a poet's life"-not only reveal the ideas and concerns that inform his remarkable oeuvre but also offer fresh takes on the works and lives of poets we thought we knew, poets we ought to know, and much more. Here, then, are his appreciations of Poe, Milton, Tennyson, and Longfellow; paeans to his contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop, Mae Swenson, and John Ciardi; an introduction to the work of the neglected poet Witter Bynner; his comments on some of his own poems; and thoughts on the art of translation. Throughout all, Wilbur's voice resonates with clarity, reason, and authority.

    Writings about Lewis that explore his evangelistic methods, how his personal journey prepared him to be such an evangelistic influence, and what made his approach so inviting in an unsympathetic age.

    Denying that the speech of the Laws represents the views of Socrates, Weiss deftly brings to light numerous indications that Socrates provides to the attentive reader that he and the Laws are not partners but antagonists in the argument and that he is singularly unimpressed by the case against escaping prison presented by; the Laws. Weiss's greatest innovation is her contention that the Laws are very much like the judges who preside at Socrates' trial-interested not in justice and truth but in being shown deference and submission. If Weiss's argument is correct, then the standard conception of the history of political thought; is in error-political philosophy begins not with the primacy of the state over the citizen but with the affirmation of the individual's duty to act in accordance with his own careful determination of what justice demands.

    The sourcebook includes:* An exploration and the history of vampire myths, including the tale of Vlad the Impaler* An overview of vampire films from the silent classic Nosferatu to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula* A discussion of vampire bats and the lore of blood* A complete bibliography, filmography with movie stills, telefilmography, and a theater chronology* Maps of Transylvania, London, and Whitby* A calendar to coincide with the "real time" actions of Bram Stoker's Dracula, complete with sunrise and sunset times as well as the all-important phases of the moon* And much more...

    In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors here explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space.The essays are organized into three sections: "Early English Drama and Physical Space" examines the settings in which plays were acted; "Early English Drama and Social Space" juxtaposes the theater with such contemporary subcultures as the church, the city, and the court. Finally, "Early English Drama and Conditions of Performance and Publication" explores a wide range of material conditions and contexts, from props to printers.A major summary of contemporary scholarship and a storehouse of new theoretical and historical information, "A New History of Early English Drama" skillfully illustrates the complex influence of physical and social elements woven into the texts, and provides an innovative approach to literary studies and cultural history.

    Romanticized symbols of nationhood, they have served, however unwillingly, as a politicized site of contestation between opposing forces.In this first book-length study in English devoted exclusively to Haitian women's literature, Myriam Chancy finds that Haitian women have their own history, traditions, and stories to tell, tales that they are unwilling to suppress or subordinate to narratives of national autonomy. Issues of race, class, color, caste, nationality, and sexuality are all central to their fiction--as is an urgent sense of the historical place of women between the two U.S. occupations of the country. Their novels interrogate women's social and political stance in Haiti from an explicitly female point of view, forcefully responding to overt sexual and political violence within the nation's ambivalent political climate. Through daring and sensitive readings, simultaneously historical, fictional and autobiographical, Chancy explores this literature, seeking to uncover answers to the current crisis facing these women today, both within their country and in exile.The writers surveyed include Anne-christine d'Adesky, Ghislaine Rey Charlier, Marie Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, and Edwidge Danticat, whose work has recently achieved such high acclaim.

    Of the fourteen essays, written from the late 1970's to the present, three have never before been published; the essays' appearance in a single volume makes available for the first time the full scope of Berger's unique approach to ethical discourses in Shakespeare's plays. The sequence of essays displays both the continuity and the revisionary development that mark his critical practice since the early work on The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, and the Elizabethan theater.When one compares Berger's earlier work from the 1960's with the writing from the 1980's and 1990's in the present collection, one sees that the difference stems primarily from the impact on the later work of his encounters with the whole range of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Much of the excitement and vitality of Berger's current work comes from his efforts to incorporate new methodological influences into his previous system. Because he comes to poststructuralism as a mature critic whose larger interpretive framework is already in place, his response is not simply to immerse himself in the new theoretical modes and adopt them wholesale, but rather to make them his own.Among the plays discussed are The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, Macbeth, 2 Henry IV, Richard II—and, in two of the new essays, 1 Henry IV and Measure for Measure. Also new is Berger's retrospective account of his critical development in the extensive opening "Acknowledgments."

    Lisa L. Moore argues that literary representations of female sexual agency—and in particular "sapphic" relationships between women—were central to eighteenth-century debates over English national identity. Moore shows how the novel’s representation of women’s "romantic friendships"—both platonic and sexual—were encoded within wider social concerns regarding race, nation, and colonialist ventures.Moore demonstrates that intimacy between women was vividly imagined in the British eighteenth century as not only chaste and virtuous, but also insistently and inevitably sexual. She looks at instances of sapphism in such novels as Millenium Hall, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Belinda, and Emma and analyzes how the new literary form of the novel made the bourgeois heroine’s successful negotiation of female friendship central to the establishment of her virtue. Moore also examines representations of sapphism through the sweeping economic and political changes of the period and claims that middle-class readers’ identifications with the heroine’s virtue helped the novel’s bourgeois audience justify the violent bases of their new prosperity, including slavery, colonialism, and bloody national rivalry. In revealing the struggle over sapphism at the heart of these novels of female friendship—and at the heart of England’s national identity—Moore shows how feminine sexual agency emerged as an important cultural force in post-Enlightenment England

    Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

    Primarily devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, the study not only takes account of major literary trends and important contributions in scholarship and criticism but also provides new critical insights and an original point of view.

    This concept, Jean-Michel Rabat� argues, runs throughout Joyce's work, and involves and incorporates its opposite, hospitality, a term Rabat� understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to the other. Rabat� explores Joyce's complex negotiation between these two poles in a study of interest to all scholars of modernism.

    He had lost his wife and was on the brink of leaving his career as a minister. In this reduced state he traveled to New Hampshire, where he made his famous decision to pursue wholeness--in his life and in his writing. This book reveals how Emerson went about achieving this purpose--and how he conceived a uniquely American literary practice.Central to this project were the aims and methods of natural science, which Emerson discovered in spectacular form at the Museum of Natural History (Jardin des Plantes) in Paris exactly a year after his momentous decision. Lee Rust Brown describes Emerson's use of these scientific techniques to integrate a disparate, constantly enlarging field of subject matter--ultimately, to reconceive himself as an institution of private research and public presentation not unlike the museum itself, methodically gathering specimens from the exotic frontiers of experience and setting them out, in their manifold affinities, on common ground.The Emerson Museum shows how this undertaking transformed the legacy of European romanticism into a writing project answerable to American urgencies. The natural science of the time was itself informed by romantic demands for wholeness of prospect, and its methods offered Emerson a way to confront an American reality in which any manifestation of unity--literary, political, philosophical, psychological--had to embrace an expanding and fragmenting field of objective elements. In the experimental format of Emerson's essays, Brown identifies the evolution of this new approach and the emergence of wholeness as a national literary project.

    Placing Frost's critical concerns in a context of literary theory, this study explores the poet's struggles with the vocation of poetry.

    This study demonstrates that there is such a thing as feminist realism; that this style empowers women; and that it is a vehicle of their interconnectedness beyond cultural specificities.

    Exploring this dynamic in Charlotte Bronta's Villette, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, she argues that although women's disclosures to male confessors repeatedly depict wrongdoing committed against them, they themselves are viewed as the transgressors. Bernstein emphasizes the secularization of confession, but she also places these narratives within the context of the anti-Catholic tract literature of the time. Based on cultural criticism, poststructuralism, and feminist theory, Bernstein's analysis constitutes a reassessment of Freud's and Foucault's theories of confession. In addition, her study of the anti-Catholic propaganda of the mid-nineteenth century and its portrayal of confession provides historical background to the meaning of domestic confessions in the literature of the second half of the century.Originally published in 1997.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

    After reviewing controversies and archaeological data regarding the fifth-century performance space, Wiles turns to the chorus and shows how dance mapped out the space for the purposes of any given play. He shows how performance as a whole was organized and, through informative diagrams and accessible analyses, brings the theater of Greek tragedy to life.

    This reference work assembles in dictionary format a complete and current body of information on Poe's life and work. More than 1900 entries cover all phases of Poe's art and literary criticism, his family relationships, his numerous travels and residences, and the abundance of critical responses to his works. Each entry provides bibliographical information, and the volume concludes with an extensive listing of works for further consideration. ]]Best known for his mysterious and imaginative short fiction, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, as well as hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe has secured a lasting place in the American literary canon. He was one of the first American authors to be given serious attention in Europe, and his works popularized the Gothic, the short story, and detective fiction in America. Poe's works are frequently studied in schools and colleges, but he also retains his appeal as one of America's most demanding popular authors. His works reflect his vast and sometimes arcane erudition, his probing insights into the workings of the mind, his theories of literature and aesthetics, and his interest in science and the supernatural.Through more than 1900 alphabetically arranged entries, this reference book provides complete and current coverage of Poe's life and work. Some entries treat Poe's known reading and his responses to literary contemporaries and international literary figures. Others comment on the impact of various writers and literary traditions on Poe's imagination. Still others address Poe's views on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to mesmerism to phrenology. Each entry is supplemented by a bibliographical note which gives the basis for the entry and suggests sources for further investigation. Each entry for Poe's fiction and poetry contains a critical synopsis, and an extensive bibliography at the end of the volume lists the most important critical and biographical studies of Poe.