+ XXXVIII) ranges from Gorgias and Plato to Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin. Each of the 147 contributions has a headnote introducing the writer and making connections to other critics, theorists and movements. An introduction surveys the history of theory and criticism.

    Stanton provides an intriguing look at Tolkien's fantasyscape that ultimately shows how all of these parts meld into a singularly compelling work of art that lives and breathes.

    A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question. The books in the series will all follow the same structure:a biography of the novelist, including other works, influences, and, in some cases, an interview; a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas; a summary of how the novel was received upon publication; a summary of how the novel has performed since publication, including film or TV adaptations, literary prizes, etc.; a wide range of suggestions for further reading, including websites and discussion forums; and a list of questions for reading groups to discuss.

    But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.

    Spanning more than a half century, from an impassioned essay on human nature, wartime atrocities, and their challenge to ethical beliefs, written in 1942 in the form of a letter to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, to brief biographical sketches and poetic prose pieces from the late 1990s, this volume presents Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple, beguiling guises. The incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape. Two great themes predominate in these essays, several of which have never appeared before in English: Milosz's personal struggle to sustain his religious faith, and his unswerving allegiance to a poetry that is "on the side of man."

    T. S. Eliot, bowled over by Joyce's brilliant manipulation of a continuous parallel between ancient myth and modern life, called it "the most important expression which the present age has found ... [one] to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."Ulysses depicts a world that is as fully conceived and vibrant as anything in Homer or Shakespeare. It has been delighting and puzzling readers since it was first published on Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922.It is, perhaps, a book whose pleasures you've always wanted to learn to savor but never quite worked yourself up to reading. And who can blame you? After all, Joyce himself famously boasted that "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant!"This is where Professor Heffernan's lectures help. Whether or not you have read this book, you'll find that his lectures, the fruit of decades of distinguished teaching, make an excellent guide to the many-layered pleasures of this modern epic.Illuminating the dramatic and artistic integrity behind the novel's most notoriously challenging passages, he explains why this frank, pathbreaking novel was praised as a landmark and damned as obscene—even banned—as soon as it first appeared.

    -- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

    This acclaimed dictionary is an invaluable introduction to the theories and theorists in the field and will prove an authoritative resource for all students.

    This selection of critical writings reveals a different side of the great writer--the deep and serious reader of literature and philosophy, and the eloquent and original thinker about society and art. This illuminating collection includes "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," "In Defense of Dorian Gray," reviews, and the writings from Intentions (1891), including "The Decay of Lying," "Pen, Pencil, Poison," and "The Critic as Artist."For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Refreshingly candid, laugh-out-loud funny, and, at the same time, intimate, the pieces trace Larry Levis's early years growing up on his father's farm, his decision at sixteen to become a poet, and his undergraduate experience in the days of the Vietnam War. In addition to memoir, there are critical reviews, including his seminal essay on the poet Philip Levine, and reviews of poets as diverse as W. D. Snodgrass and Zbigniew Herbert.David St. John's foreword speaks eloquently of Levis's enduring legacy: "Of the poets of his generation, Larry Levis spoke most powerfully of what it means to be a poet at this historical moment. With the same majesty he brought to his poetry, Larry Levis engaged his readers with the most subtle and disturbing questions of the self to be found in the prose--essays, reviews or interviews--of any contemporary American poet. Broadly international in his scope and deeply personal in his reflections, Levis addressed poetic concerns that are both immediate and timeless. For many of us who struggle with these issues, Larry Levis's prose on poetry stands as some of the most capacious to be found since Randell Jarrell's."The late Larry Levis was the author of six volumes of poetry. He was Director of the Creative Writing Program, University of Utah; Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University; and also taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

    With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.

    Despite her untimely and tragic death, she created an extraordinarily rich and complex body of work that reflected the profound developments of her time and place--including the radical changes in art--and her own cultural alienation. The Dream of the Audience, a touring exhibition organized by the Berkeley Art Museum, showcases the full range of work by this influential yet underrepresented Korean American artist, who worked in media ranging from performance, video, and film to artists' books, mail art, and works on paper and cloth. This book, designed to accompany the exhibition, is an essential reference to Cha's work. It contains three essays that provide an in-depth context to her visual art and the fullest analysis of her work to date. This volume's comprehensive view of Cha's oeuvre illuminates the recurring themes and formal approaches that distinguish her art. Constance M. Lewallen traces the influences on Cha's development while she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and places her work in the context of the artistic and social climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. Lawrence R. Rinder analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of the artist's multileveled and interrelated work. Trinh T. Minh-ha's essay is a poetic evocation of Cha's work as it relates to her ancestry and the suffering of the Korean people under the Japanese colonial policy of deracination. Together the essays show how her rich and original art is informed by a dizzying array of influences--from French film theory to Korean history.

    Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics.Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity.This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.

    A far-reaching exploration of the idea of creation in Western thought, literature, religion, and history, this volume can fairly be called a magnum opus. He reflects on the different ways we have of talking about beginnings, on the "coretiredness" that pervades our end-of-the-millennium spirit, and on the changing grammar of our discussions about the end of Western art and culture. With his well-known elegance of style and intellectual range, Steiner probes deeply into the driving forces of the human spirit and our perception of Western civilization's lengthening afternoon shadows.Roaming across topics as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, the history of science and mathematics, the ontology of Heidegger, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Steiner examines how the twentieth century has placed in doubt the rationale and credibility of a future tense -- the existence of hope. Acknowledging that technology and science may have replaced art and literature as the driving forces in our culture, Steiner warns that this has not happened without a significant loss. The forces of technology and science alone fail to illuminate inevitable human questions regarding value, faith, and meaning. And yet it is difficult to believe that the story out of Genesis has ended, Steiner observes, and he concludes this masterful volume of reflections with an eloquent evocation of the endlessness of beginnings.

    - Comprehensive reading and study guides for some of the world's most important literary masterpieces- Concise critical excerpts provide a scholarly overview of each work- "The Story Behind the Story" details the conditions under which the work was written- Each book includes a biographical sketch of the author, a descriptive list of characters, an extensive summary and analysis, and an annotated bibliography

    For Christians who are fans of Tolkien, Smith compares the tales of the Hobbits to those of spirituality, wherein God calls those that listen to embark on a journey.

    The book argues that, for example, Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo and Shopping and F**king are much more than a collection of shock tactics - taken together, they represent a consistent critique of modern life, one which focuses on the problem of violence, the crisis of masculinity and the futility of consumerism. The book contains extensive interviews with playwrights, including Sarah Kane (Blasted), Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and F**king), Philip Ridley (The Pitchfork Disney), Patrick Marber (Closer) and Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane).

    Even if you already know your Hunter S Thompson from your Jim Thompson, you''ll still find it hard to resist a book which tells you which cult novel has been implicated in assassinations, which world famous novelist offered to throw himself off a train to prove his devotion to his literary idol and which cult poet and prose stylist inspired a Broadway musical and the Velvet Underground. There''s a critical guide to over 150 cult authors - from Kathy Acker to Yevgeny Zamyatin, including potted biographies, their must reads, and their surprising influences. Reviews of 100 cult novels - seminal works by authors who never quite achieved cult status themselves but still produced one classic work. Finally, there''s a cult collection - a feast of literary trivia which categorises writers by the diseases they suffered for their art, reveals 12 literary giants who wrote standing up, and pores over the little known fictional epics of Sarah Bernhardt and Benito Mussolini.

    Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity, Black Gay Man introduces the eloquent new voice of Robert Reid-Pharr in cultural criticism.At once erudite and readable, the range of topics and positions taken up in Black Gay Man reflect the complexity of American life itself. Treating subjects as diverse as the Million Man March, interracial sex, anti-Semitism, turn of the century American intellectualism as well as literary and cultural figures ranging from Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde to W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, Black Gay Man is a bold and nuanced attempt to question prevailing ideas about community, desire, politics and culture. Moving beyond critique, Reid-Pharr also pronounces upon the promises of a new America. With the publication of Black Gay Man, Robert Reid-Pharr is sure to take his place as one of this country's most exciting and challenging left intellectuals.

    This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

    These specially commissioned essays are sophisticated but accessible, challenging but lucid, and are complemented by an introduction to Keats's life, a chronology, a list of contemporary people and periodicals, a source reference for famous phrases and ideas articulated in Keats's letters, a glossary of literary terms and a guide to further reading.

    Patton and Maureen Honey bring together a comprehensive selection of texts from the Harlem Renaissance-a key period in the literary and cultural history of the United States. The collection revolutionizes our way of viewing this era, since it redresses the ongoing emphasis on the male writers of this time. Double-Take offers a unique, balanced collection of writers-men and women, gay and straight, familiar and obscure. Arranged by author, rather than by genre, this anthology includes works from major Harlem Renaissance figures as well as often-overlooked essayists, poets, dramatists, and artists. The editors have included works from a wide variety of genres-poetry, short stories, drama, and essays-allowing readers to understand the true interdisciplinary quality of this cultural movement. Biographical sketches of the authors are provided and most of the pieces are included in their entirety. Double-Take also includes artwork and illustrations, many of which are from original journals and have never before been reprinted. Significantly, Double-Take is the first Harlem Renaissance title to include song lyrics to illustrate the interrelation of various art forms.

    Contributors include Alan Golding, Aldon Nielsen, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis; discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others. The editors take as their title a line from the work of Lyn Hejinian, one of the most respected of innovative women poets writing today.The volume is organized into four sections: the first two seek to identify, from two different angles, the ways women of different sociocultural backgrounds are exploring their relationships to their cultures' inherited traditions; the third section investigates the issue of visuality and the problems and challenges it creates; and the fourth section expands on the role of the body as material and performance.The collection will breach a once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women's writing and those who focus on formalist practice. By embracing "astonishment" as the site of formalist-feminist investigation, the editors seek to show how form configures feminist thought, and, likewise, how feminist thought informs words and letters on a page. Students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, women's writing, and late-20th-century American literature will welcome this lively discussion.

    H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling joined together to form the editorial board of the Readers' Subscription Book Club. Thus began a venture unique in the annals of American culture. Never before or since have three such eminent intellectuals collaborated to bring books to the attention of the general public. Now, a half century later, "A Company of Readers" tells the story of this extraordinary partnership and presents for the first time a selection of essays from the publications of the Readers' Subscription Book Club and its successor, the Mid-Century Book Society.As they composed their comments to club members, these distinguished editors freely shared with each other their notes and drafts. The result is criticism of the highest order: smart, humane, learned -- in short, stuff that makes for damn good reading. And because these pieces were written for the general public by men who knew that books still mattered, perhaps no other collection of essays gives so natural and vivid a picture of the cultural landscape at midcentury.Together, Auden, Barzun, and Trilling would plunge into a pile of books and pick out what they liked, what they thought would instruct and delight. What they chose may surprise you. Here is Auden on J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring, " Barzun on Virginia Woolf's "Writer's Diary, " and Trilling on Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows." Each book, whether weighty or light, summoned from the editors a spirited appraisal, in language that welcomed any kind of reader.The Mid-Century club disbanded in 1963, but its legacy lives on in these pages. "A Company of Readers" is essential to admirers of thisillustrious trio, and it offers a window on an America in which books took center stage.

    In this guide, Peter J. Leithart brings his rich biblical-typological insight to bear in opening up the Comedy for students, high school and up, mainly the sort of kids who keep looking for the jokes in the "comedy." After examining the meaning and place of the courtly love tradition leading up to Dante, the heart of the guide walks us carefully through the craft and symbolisms of each progressive stage-Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each section contains helpful study questions. Peter J. Leithart (Ph.D. Cambridge) is a Senior Fellow of Theology and Literature at St. Andrews College, as well as senior pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho. In his spare time, Leithart sleeps.

    This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, 'York Notes Advanced' introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

    Featuring agenerous and diverse sampling of more than sixty works, this collection includes beautiful, disturbing, and instructive works of literary memoir by such writers as Mary McCarthy, Annie Dillard, and Judy Ruiz; smart, funny, and moving personal essays by authors ranging from E.B. White to PhillipLopate to Ntozake Shange; and incisive, vivid, and quirky examples of literary journalism by Truman Capote, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sebastian Junger, and many others. This unique volume also contains examples of captivating nature writing, exciting literary travel writing, brilliant essays in science, surprising creative cultural criticism, and moving literary diaries and journals, incorporating several classic selections to set a context for the contemporary work. The editor's general introduction and introductions to each of the five sections provide useful definitions, crucial history, critical context, and abundant issues to debate. Ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in creative nonfiction, literary journalism, essay writing, and all levels of composition, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth is also an essential resource for all nonfiction writers, fromnovices to professionals.

    Often invoking the words of Blake's own contemporaries, G. E. Bentley describes the struggles of Blake's youth, his gradual embrace of the power of the spirit and visionary art and literature, and the serenity he achieved in his old age.

    The contributors focus on texts most commonly read in introductory Old English courses while also engaging with larger issues of Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and scholarship. Their approaches vary widely, encompassing disciplines from linguistics to psychoanalysis.In an appealing introduction to the book, R. M. Liuzza presents an overview of Old English studies, the history of the scholarship, and major critical themes in the field. For both newcomers and more advanced scholars of Old English, these essays will provoke discussion, answer questions, provide background, and inspire an appreciation for the complexity and energy of Anglo-Saxon studies.

    An exceptionally ghoulish child, obsessed with graveyards, owls, wolves and horror stories, she very early on decided to devote her life to books, reading and writing. Elizabeth Young?s collected writings exhibit her singular attraction to the bizarre and her dedication to the high standards of a critic. Witty, incisive, wide-ranging and also moving, Pandora?s Handbag chronicles the journey of a modern arts critic and Young?s personal journey from childhood to critic. Each previously published article is presented in its entirety, with original titles and additional notes. This collection includes two of Young?s crusading articles (on Drug Legislation and the Hepatitus C virus), which have become seminal texts.

    Leigh Gilmore presents a series of "limit-cases"-texts that combine elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory while representing trauma and the self-and demonstrates how and why their authors swerve from the formal constraints of autobiography when the representation of trauma coincides with self-representation. Gilmore maintains that conflicting demands on both the self and narrative may prompt formal experimentation by such writers and lead to texts that are not, strictly speaking, autobiography, but are nonetheless deeply engaged with its central concerns.In astute and compelling readings of texts by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson, Gilmore explores how each of them poses the questions, "How have I lived? How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. Challenging the very boundaries of autobiography as well as trauma, these stories are not told in conventional ways: the writers testify to how self-representation and the representation of trauma grow beyond simple causes and effects, exceed their duration in time, and connect to other forms of historical, familial, and personal pain. In their movement from an overtly testimonial form to one that draws on legal as well as literary knowledge, such texts produce an alternative means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.

    Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with an eye toward antiquity and the present, Caroline Walker Bynum explores the themes of metamorphosis and hybridity in genres ranging from poetry, folktales, and miracle collections to scholastic theology, devotional treatises, and works of natural philosophy. She argues that the obsession with boundary-crossing and otherness was an effort to delineate nature's regularities and to establish a strong sense of personal identity, extending even beyond the grave. She examines historical figures such as Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, Bernard Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante, as well as modern fabulists such as Angela Carter, as examples of solutions to the perennial question of how the individual can both change and remain constant. Addressing the fundamental question for historians--that of change--Bynum also explores the nature of history writing itself.

    Subsequent chapters define Shakespeare's main artistic tools and illustrate their poetic and theatrical contributions: Renaissance rhetoric, imagery and metaphor, blank verse, prose speech, and wordplay. The conclusion surveys Shakespeare's multiple and often conflicting ideas about language, encompassing both his enthusiasm at what words can do for us and his suspicion of what words can do to us.

    He now presents a guide to some of these literary works, tracing the main currents of Western culture for all who wish to understand the roots of their civilization and the basis for its achievements. Hart focuses on the productive tension between the classical and biblical strains in our civilization-- between a life based on cognition and one based on faith and piety. He begins with the Iliad and Exodus, linking Achilles and Moses as Bronze Age heroic figures. Closely analyzing texts and illuminating them in unexpected ways, he moves on to Socrates and Jesus, who "internalized the heroic," continues with Paul and Augustine and their Christian synthesis, addresses Dante, Shakespeare (Hamlet), Molière, and Voltaire, and concludes with the novel as represented by Crime and Punishment and The Great Gatsby. Hart maintains that the dialectical tensions suggested by this survey account for the restlessness and singular achievements of the West and that the essential books can provide the substance and energy currently missed by both students and educated readers.

    A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel's two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth--as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where modernity itself is unimaginable without the genre.By viewing the novel as much more than an aesthetic form, this landmark collection demonstrates how the genre has transformed human emotions and behavior, and the very perception of reality. Historical, statistical, and formal analyses show the novel as a complex literary system, in which new forms proliferate in every period and place.Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, looks at the novel mostly from the outside, treating the transition from oral to written storytelling and the rise of narrative and fictionality, and covering the ancient Greek novel, the novel in premodern China, the early Spanish novel, and much else, including readings of novels from around the world.These books will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literature.

    S. EliotThe great fourteenth-century poet has been an unequaled influence on many writers in the twentieth century, whose "confessions" may well foster a deeper appreciation of Dante. Previously published essays by some of this century's most renowned poets-Pound, Eliot, Mandelstam, Robert Fitzgerald, Borges, Merrill, Montale, Lowell, Duncan, Auden, Yeats, Charles Williams, Nemerov, Heaney-join new essays commissioned by the editors. Contemporary poets Mary Campbell, W. S. Di Piero, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, Alan Williamson, and Charles Wright reflect on Dante as well as on their own complex (and often contentious) relationship to his legacy. Their engagement with his work offers a fresh perspective on the Commedia and its author that more academic writing does not provide.As the editors write, a new consideration of Dante "should generate insights not only about his work but also about poetry written in our own language and time.

    The essays cover such topics as temptation, his use of the gospels, the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree

    Allegories of Violence demilitarizes the concept of war and asks what would happen if we understood war as discursive via late 20th Century novels of war.

    Through close readings of the works of a number of writers, it argues that the long-standing affinity between Philippine literature and nationalism is based, in part, on the power of literature to formulate and work through a set of questions central to nationalist debates on the possibility and necessity of social change. It asks: What is the relationship between knowledge and action? Between the personal and political? Between the foreign and Filipino? Between culture and history, culture and politics, culture and economics?

    The early presence of esotericism in North America has not been much studied, and even less so the indebtedness to esotericism of some major American literary figures. In this book, Arthur Versluis breaks new ground, showing that many writers of the so-called American Renaissance drew extensively on and were inspired by Western esoteric currents.

    This book offers an insight into Eisenstein's grand project. Tsivian reconstructs the director's "mental film" that underlies the finished work.

    He begins this collection by establishing his belief that there is a 'new world order' of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. Phillips writes about the moment when St Kitts, the small island of his birth, became independent and talks about the role and responsibility of being a writer born into a postcolonial world who lives on both sides of the Atlantic. He then turns the spotlight on Britain speculating about his parents' migration in the late fifties, the continued legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he both of, and not of, Britain.

    It combines an original student-friendly introduction to Jung, his life and work, his treatment of gender and the range of post-Jungian gender theory, with new research linking Jung to deconstruction, post-Freudian feminism, postmodernism, the sublime, and the postmodern body.Feminism has neglected Jung to its own detriment. While evaluating the reasons for this neglect, Jung: A Feminist Revision uses the diversity of feminist critical tools from historical analysis to poststructuralism. In a fresh and illuminating study, this book provides both a critique of Jung and demonstrates his positive potential for future feminisms. New theories are explored which develop relationships between the work of Jung and Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, H�l�ne Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. Particular attention is paid to the growth of post-Jungian studies of gender. This includes a cogent study of the tradition of Jungian feminism that looks to 'the feminine principle' and narratives of goddesses. Jungian 'goddess' feminism's enduring appeal is re-examined in the context of postmodern re-thinking of subjectivity and gender.The book proposes a re-orientation of Jungian studies in its relationship to feminism. The result is an accessible text that introduces Jung and sets out his relevance to contemporary feminisms.This book will be essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying feminist theory, psychoanalytical theory, literature and psychology.

    In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction and the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's oeuvre in relation to major themes. A final chapter looks at the pitfalls of translating Mann into English. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading.

    Hodder explores these representations of ecstasy throughout Thoreau's writings from the riverside reflections of his first book through Walden and the later journals, when he conceived his journal writing as a spiritual discipline in itself and a kind of forum in which to cultivate experiences of contemplative non-attachment. In doing so, Hodder restores to our understanding the deeper spiritual dimension of Thoreau's life to which his writings everywhere bear witness.

    It is not a guide to "children's literature" but has a wider task--to include any author, or illustrator, or work, believed by the editors to have made a significant impact on young readers, or to have in some way influenced the development of children's books. In addition to the long-established traditions of children's writing from Great Britain and the USA, the Guide covers the increasing range of successful children's books produced in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, West Africa, and India; and the exciting renaissance in children's books currently taking place in Ireland and South Africa. Reflecting the developing scholarly appreciation for the history of children's books, The Guide gives due weight to children's books from pre-Norman times, and acknowledges recent developments in publishing practices and in children's own reading. Victor Watson is Assistant Director of Research, Homerton College, University of Cambridge. He has edited several volumes about children's literature, including Opening the Nursery Door (Routledge, 1997) and Where Texts and Children Meet (Routledge, 2000).

    In this award-winning book, now in paperback, Schroth discusses fifty works - from books of the Old Testament to contemporary works - that challenge the social conscience and raise moral and religious issues in a provocative way.

    Using unpublished and newly released primary materials scholars analyze Eliot's legacy in relation to idealist philosophy, music, popular culture, anti-Semitism, feminism, and literary studies.

    The Myth of Power and the Self brings together Walter Sokel's most significant essays on Kafka written over a period of thirty-one years, 1966-1997. This volume begins with a discussion of Sokel's 1966 pamphlet on Kafka and a summary of his 1964 book, Tragik und Ironie (Tragedy and Irony), which has never been translated into English, and includes several essays published in English for the first time. Sokel places Kafka's writings in a very large cultural context by fusing Freudian and Expressionist perspectives and incorporating more theoretical approaches--linguistic theory, Gnosticism, and aspects of Derrida--into his synthesis. This superb collection of essays by one of the most qualified Kafka scholars today will bring new understanding to Kafka's work and will be of interest to literary critics, intellectual historians, and students and scholars of German literature and Kafka.

    For many, girls represented the true essence of childhood or bygone times of innocence; but for middle-class men, especially writers, the interest ran much deeper. In Men in Wonderland, Catherine Robson explores the ways in which various nineteenth-century British male authors constructed girlhood, and analyzes the nature of their investment in the figure of the girl. In so doing, she reveals the link between the idealization of little girls and a widespread fantasy of male development--a myth suggesting that men become masculine only after an initial feminine stage, lived out in the protective environment of the nursery. Little girls, argues Robson, thus offer an adult male the best opportunity to reconnect with his own lost self.Tracing the beginnings of this myth in the writings of Romantics Wordsworth and De Quincey, Robson identifies the consolidation of this paradigm in numerous Victorian artifacts, ranging from literary works by Dickens and Barrett Browning, to paintings by Frith and Millais, to reports of the Royal Commission on Children's Employment. She analyzes Ruskin and Carroll's "high noon" of girl worship and investigates the destruction of the fantasy in the closing decades of the century, when social concerns about the working girl sexualized the image of young females.Men in Wonderland contributes to a growing interest in the nineteenth century's construction of childhood, sexuality, and masculinity, and illuminates their complex interconnections with a startlingly different light. Not only does it complicate the narratives of pedophilic desire that are generally used to explain figures like Ruskin and Carroll, but it offers a new understanding of the Victorian era's obsession with loss, its rampant sentimentality, and its intense valorization of the little girl at the expense of mature femininity.

    Here he discusses the character of creative writing, the attitude of the artist to his environment, and the transmutation of the artist's experience into a work of art. He offers, as well, brilliant studies of Pushkin, Gogol, Belinsky, Lermontov, and Krylov, and a penetrating account of his own difficulties in writing Fathers and Sons. There are also descriptions of travels through Italy, simply and beautifully written pieces on country life, and eyewitness accounts of the 1848 political riots in Paris. David Magarshack has provided a first-class translation and has written an introduction which explains and sets the scene for each of the essays. "The best possible introduction to the author a reader could ask for....Turgenev is an uninsistent, lyric meditator, who sees with a precise eye wherever he looks, and whether he is drawing a bead on a quail or escaping from a burning ship, always asks the uncomfortable questions of himself." New York Herald-Tribune."

    In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will later be enforced by impersonal justice. Intense grief at the death of someone in our life discloses the contours of that life to us. Wonder spurs scientific inquiry.The strong current of Western thought that idealizes a dispassionate world has ostracized the passions as quaint, even dangerous. Intense states have come to be seen as symptoms of pathology. A fondness for irony along with our civic ideal of tolerance lead us to prefer the diluted emotional life of feelings and moods. Demonstrating enormous intellectual originality and generosity, Philip Fisher meditates on whether this victory is permanent-and how it might diminish us.From Aristotle to Hume to contemporary biology, Fisher finds evidence that the passions have defined a core of human nature no less important than reason or desire. Traversing the Iliad, King Lear, Moby Dick, and other great works, he discerns the properties of the high-spirited states we call the passions. Are vehement states compatible with a culture that values private, selectively shared experiences? How do passions differ from emotions? Does anger have an opposite? Do the passions give scale, shape, and significance to our experience of time? Is a person incapable of anger more dangerous than someone who is irascible?In reintroducing us to our own vehemence, Fisher reminds us that it is only through our strongest passions that we feel the contours of injustice, mortality, loss, and knowledge. It is only through our personal worlds that we can know the world.

     Provides a close analysis of each of Milton's prose and poetry works. Reveals how Milton was the first writer to self consciously construct himself as an 'author'. Focuses on the development of Milton's ideas and his art.

    Aesthetic assumptions and poetic styles have altered over the centuries, yet the great and often terrifying themes of time, change, age, and death are timeless. The poems here—from Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Sharon Olds, Stanley Kunitz, and W. S. Merwin—trace the trajectory of grief, but they also illustrate how the deepest sorrow has produced countless poignant and resonant works of art—words that can aid us as we struggle with our own farewells.

    Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory.Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion's authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and "Sahara of the Bozart." As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature.The volume includes an overview of every southern state's belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South's lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region's deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge.Description of Contents 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets 2 tables of contents -- alphabetical and subject -- and a complete index A separate bibliography for most entries

    Nicola Bown explores what the fairy meant to the Victorians, and why they were so captivated by a figure which nowadays seems trivial and childish. She argues that fairies were a fantasy that allowed the Victorians to escape from their worries about science, technology and the effects of progress. The fairyland they dreamed about was a reconfiguration of their own world, and the fairies who inhabited it were like themselves.

    For some in the academy, deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are responsible for the demise of accountability in the study of literature.Countering these facile dismissals of Derrida and deconstruction, Herman Rapaport explores the incoherence that has plagued critical theory since the 1960s and the resulting legitimacy crisis in the humanities. Against the backdrop of a rich, informed discussion of Derrida's writings--and how they have been misconstrued by critics and admirers alike--The Theory Mess investigates the vicissitudes of Anglo-American criticism over the past thirty years and proposes some possibilities for reform.

    Exploring silence as the absence of language, which is nonetheless inherent in language itself, and eternity as the outside of time, cutting through time itself, the book unfolds a series of connections between these temporal and linguistic themes.

    Yet many of the Revival’s Protestant leaders, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge, failed to address the profound cultural differences that made uniting the two Irelands so problematic, while Catholic leaders of the Revival, particularly the journalist D. P. Moran, turned the movement into a struggle for greater Catholic power. This book fully explores James Joyce’s complex response to the Irish Revival and his extensive treatment of the relationship between the "two Irelands" in his letters, essays, book reviews, and fiction up to Finnegans Wake. Willard Potts skillfully demonstrates that, despite his pretense of being an aloof onlooker, Joyce was very much a part of the Revival. He shows how deeply Joyce was steeped in his whole Catholic culture and how, regardless of the harsh way he treats the Catholic characters in his works, he almost always portrays them as superior to any Protestants with whom they appear. This research recovers the historical and cultural roots of a writer who is too often studied in isolation from the Irish world that formed him.

    In examining the practices of Thecla's devotees in Asia Minor and Egypt, Stephen Davis shows that Thecla's cult was closely linked with communities of women as a means of empowerment.

    Includes over 3,400 entries on Poe's poetry and characters, biographical information on his life, family, friends, and journeys that affected his work.

    For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an aesthetic of testimony: every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama - anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value.

    David's Day). It was also marked by numerous controversies, especially Campbell's running feud with Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, about whom he remarked in "The Georgiad": "Hither flock all the crowds whom love has wrecked / Of intellectuals without intellect / And sexless folk whose sexes intersect.."Acknowledged as one of the finest poets of his generation after the publication of his long poem The Flaming Terrapin, Campbell came to prominence in the 1920s when he captured the imagination of the English intelligentsia with his romantic background and controversial style. Pearce's vivid biography centers on Campbell's ongoing feud with the Bloomsbury group and the ideas they championed, the friend ships Campbell forged with figures such as C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and the Sitwells, and Roy and his wife Mary's reception into the Catholic Church. Campbell's literary relationships and wonderfully romantic life is, thus, the context for this riveting account of Campbell's reckless life and the fascinating poetry that was left behind. That poetry, in the judgment of Pearce, was "both perplexing and challenging—yet no more so than the poet himself." Both Roy Campbell the man and his poetry richly deserve the engrossing reappraisal offered here by acclaimed biographer Joseph Pearce. Joseph Pearce is writer in residence at Ave Maria College. A prolific writer, his previous biographies include Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton, and The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde.

    His popularity also extends to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. John Fleming offers the first book-length assessment of Stoppard’s work in nearly a decade. He takes an in-depth look at the three newest plays (Arcadia, Indian Ink, and The Invention of Love) and the recently revised versions of Travesties and Hapgood, as well as at four other major plays (Rosencrantz, Jumpers, Night and Day, and The Real Thing). Drawing on Stoppard’s personal papers at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC), Fleming also examines Stoppard’s previously unknown play Galileo, as well as numerous unpublished scripts and variant texts of his published plays. Fleming also mines Stoppard’s papers for a fuller, more detailed overview of the evolution of his plays. By considering Stoppard’s personal views (from both his correspondence and interviews) and by examining his career from his earliest scripts and productions through his most recent, this book provides all that is essential for understanding and appreciating one of the most complex and distinctive playwrights of our time.

    Images of their disloyalty pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her seduction of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion.In exploring the relationship between femininity and citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and women's domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that Asian American women not only mediate sexuality's construction as a determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow's bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic, feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim multiple loyalties.

    Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors or works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs. This is a literary period in which literature fully entered the marketplace, and in which an ideology was constitued - civic, domestic, Christian and imperial - that was to inform British society for more than a century. These are among the issues that Cronin addresses and, in so doing, successfully restructures nineteenth-century literary studies.

    This aim is reached in two ways: (1) in essays that display the ideological underpinnings of a Jewish and Hellenistic Paul in historical and modern scholarly interpretations of him, and (2) in essays that use case studies from the Corinthian correspondence that draw freely on Jewish and Greco-Roman contextual material to illuminate this Pauline phenomena.

    By placing their stories side by side with narratives about the groups in question, Nelson arrives at some important insights regarding the nature of identity. She regards personal identity as consisting not only of how people view themselves but also of how others view them. These perceptions combine to shape the person's field of action. If a dominant group constructs the identities of certain people through socially shared narratives that mark them as morally subnormal, those who bear the damaged identity cannot exercise their moral agency freely.Nelson identifies two kinds of damage inflicted on identities by abusive group relations: one kind deprives individuals of important social goods, and the other deprives them of self-respect. To intervene in the production of either kind of damage, Nelson develops the counterstory, a strategy of resistance that allows the identity to be narratively repaired and so restores the person to full membership in the social and moral community. By attending to the power dynamics that constrict agency, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair augments the narrative approaches of ethicists such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor.

    -- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights-- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers

    It combines practical advice on study skills with key information on literary theories and theorists, offering invaluable support throughout any English degree.Key Features:A study skills guide combined with an overview of literary theories makes for a one-stop reference that can be used throughout your English degree. The study skills section prepares you for your course with advice on using the library for essay writing, and for your exams with tips on revision and preparation. The digital resource section provides information on how to use Google Books and sites such as Facebook, as well as the pros and cons of using Wikipedia. Understanding literary theory is essential to all English degrees and this section outlines the main theories in a clear and comprehensive way. Literary theorists are profiled to ensure that you have a comprehensive grounding in the subject.

    By tracing the transformations of this motif in Second Temple, Rabbinic, and early medieval Judaism and early, late antique, and Byzantine Christianity, this book sheds light on the history of interpretation of Genesis, the changing status of Enochic literature, and the place of parabiblical texts and traditions in the interchange between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

    obscenity laws, and you may find yourself hours later absorbed in the imaginary worlds of Camelot and The Matrix or sidetracked by the fascinating history of "The New Yorker. Designed to satisfy the curious browser as well as the serious researcher, this exciting new resource offers the most up-to-date information on literature available in English from around the world, from the invention of writing to the age of the computer. Interwoven throughout the more than 2,500 succinct and insightful entries on Creators, Works of Literature, and Literary Facts and Resources are the fascinating facts and quirky biographical details that make literature come alive. Readers will discover, for instance, that Walt Whitman was fired from his government job after his personal copy of "Leaves of Grass was discovered in his desk by the Secretary of the Interior, who was scandalized by it; that James Baldwin remembered listening to blues singer Bessie Smith ("playing her till I fell asleep") when he was writing his first book; and that a publisher turned down the serialization rights to "Gone with the Wind, saying, "Who needs the Civil War now -- who cares?"Looking for information about book burning or how many Nobel laureates have come from Japan? You'll find it here. Trying to remember the name of that movie based on a favorite book? Read the "Variations" section -- you'll be amazed at the pervasive presence of great literature in today's entertainment. From Aristophanes to Allende, from Bergson to Bloom, thebiographical entries will inform readers about the men and women who have shaped -- and are shaping -- the literary world. Look into "Works of Literature" to discover the significance of "Beowulf, The Fountainhead, Doctor Zhivago, and nearly 1,000 other titles. Check the "Dictionary of Literature" to find out what the critics and theorists are talking about. And if you wish to delve even deeper, "Websites for Literature" and "Literary Factbooks and Handbooks" are just two of the bibliographies that will point readers in the right direction.Unique in scope and design and easy to use, "The New York Public Library Literature Companion will be at home on every reader's shelf. Whether you are immersed in Stephen King or "King Lear, this book has the insights, facts, and fascinating stories that will enrich your reading forever. With four major research centers and 85 branch libraries, The New York Public Library is internationally recognized as one of the greatest institutions of its kind. Founded in 1895, the library now holds more than 50 million items, including several world-renowned collections of literary manuscripts and rare books. Among the books published from the library in recent years are "The New York Public Library Desk Reference (1998); "The Hand of the Poet (1997); "Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (1999); "A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (1998); and "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (2000).

    Several previously unpublished essays are collected here -- including an analysis of two of Shakespeare's greatest plays, The Merchant of Venice and Antony and Cleopatra. The title essay reflects on the vital importance of a sense of humour on the spiritual road to freedom and joy. These essays combine Christian spirituality with Jungian psychology to discuss the importance of openly and consciously facing the suffering that is part of being human.

    But as Eleanor Kaufman argues in The Delirium of Praise, this mode of exchange is serious and substantial enough to merit scholarly attention. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, laudatory essays give new status to supposedly inferior forms of communication and states of being—including chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work—and emphasize affective states or emotions such as joy, friendship, and longing.The Delirium of Praise examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals—Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski—and their laudatory essays about each other. Structured as a circular series of exchanges, the book examines pairings of two thinkers with respect to a given theme. The exchange between Bataille and Blanchot takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-René des Forêts; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange considers "absence of work" ( désoeuvrement) and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; and the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Where the praise is most excessive, approaching delirium, Kaufman locates a powerful thought-energy that pushes the laudatory essay to its limits. In her conclusion, she presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality.Kaufman uncovers a suspension of subjectivity, of personality, even of place and time, that is both articulated in the laudatory essays and enacted by them. Her examination of this neglected mode as practiced by five important French thinkers offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century intellectual history.

    From McPhee Gribble came many new writers, including Helen Garner, Tim Winton, Drusilla Modjeska, new perspectives on Australian life and history, new stories - and fleetingly, the hope that an Australian company could become a fully fledged player in the international publishing industry.

      An ingenious reappraisal of a classic text, Dracula's Crypt presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity. Probing psychobiographical, political, and cultural elements of Stoker's background and milieu, Joseph Valente distinguishes Stoker's viewpoint from that of his virulently racist, hypermasculine vampire hunters, showing how the author's dual Anglo-Celtic heritage and uncertain status as an Irish parvenu among London's theatrical elite led him to espouse a progressive racial ideology at odds with the dominant Anglo-Saxon supremacism. In the light of Stoker's experience, the shabby-genteel Count Dracula can be seen as a doppelgänger, an ambiguous figure who is at once the blood-conscious landed aristocrat and the bloodthirsty foreign invader.   Stoker also confronts gender ideals and their implications, exposing the "inner vampire" in men like Jonathan Harker who dominate and absorb the women who become their wives. Ultimately, Valente argues, the novel celebrates a feminine heroism, personified by Mina Harker, that upholds an ethos of social connectivity against the prevailing obsession with blood as a vehicle of identity.   Revealing a profound and heretofore unrecognized ethical and political message, Dracula's Crypt maintains that the real threat delineated in Dracula is not racial degeneration but the destructive force of racialized anxiety itself. Stoker's novel emerges as a powerful critique of the very anxieties it has previously been taken to express: anxieties concerning the decline of the British empire, the deterioration of Anglo-Saxon culture, and the contamination of the Anglo-Saxon race.

    Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works.The contributors to this volume -- distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature -- investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives -- including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape ichnography -- to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos.

    This book provides a critical assessment of the concept and its use in the social sciences, considering its theoretical basis and historical development and linking these closely to the concept of the "Other". As the first sustained book-length treatment of stereotyping in either sociology or media and cultural studies, the text embraces such key topics as nationalism and national identity, gender, racism and imperialism, normality and social order, and the figure of the stranger in the modern city. It is interdisciplinary, moving between sociology, social psychology, cultural history, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory, and offers an indispensable examination of the roots of prejudice and bigotry in modern societies.

    Certain emotions expressed in literature are considered "feminine," certain emotions are typed as "masculine," and there is little room in critical studies for the male writer who shares in feminine experiences or who finds himself on the wrong ideological side of those firmly gendered dichotomies.Confined by such strict codes, male writers--homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual--possessing the sensibilities typecast as feminine often face a crisis of gender identity. They struggle to overcome early childhood experience and adult cultural expectations as men with feminine creative emotions that are often repressed in more conventionally masculine lives.Almost a Girl challenges both feminist orthodoxy and men's movement thinking to show how several important male writers have drawn creative strength from their identification with, even envy of, a positive image of the feminine. Williamson opposes the feminist argument that men cannot really empathize with female experience, as well as the men's movement's insistence that female identification is common but psychically dangerous. As he explores the psychic confusion, even torment, and ambivalence toward women that accompanied their mixed gender identification, Williamson honors the works and imaginative courage of such diverse writers as Rainer Maria Rilke, Randall Jarrell, D.H. Lawrence, and Cesare Pavese.

    Abiola Irele provides a comprehensive formulation of what he calls an African imagination manifested in the oral traditions and modern literature of Africa and the Black Diaspora. The African Imagination includes Irele's probing criticalreadings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hampat� B�, and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others, as well as examinations of the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West. Taken as awhole, this volume makes a superb introduction to African literature and to the work of one of its leading interpreters.

    James Grantham Turner examines a broad range of Civil War and Restoration texts, from sex-crime records to Milton's epics and Rochester's mannerly obscene lyrics. Throughout, he interprets satirical texts, whether political or pornographic, as an attempt to neutralize women's efforts to establish their own institutions and voice. This exhaustive study will be of interest to cultural historians as well as literary scholars.

    Arguing that many of these notions are limited to stereotypes, Chan goes beyond this to present a more complex understanding of the topic. Incorporating historical references, literary analysis and sociological models to describe the construct a variety of masculine identities, Chan also examines popular novels (Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan), films (Bruce Lee), comic books (Master of Kung Fu), and literature (M. Butterfly).