Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

    In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

    Nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholars understood the term "mythology" as a gathering of song and story that derived from and described an identifiable world. Tolkien made a continuous effort over several years to construct a comprehensive mythology, to include not only the stories themselves but also the storytellers, scribes, and bards who were the offspring of his thought. In Interrupted Music Flieger attempts to illuminate the structure of Tolkien's work, allowing the reader to appreciate its broad, overarching design and its careful, painstaking construction. She endeavors to "follow the music from its beginning as an idea in Tolkien's mind through to his final but never-implemented mechanism for realizing that idea, for bringing the voices of his story to the reading public." In addition, Flieger reviews attempts at myth-making in the history of English literature by Spenser, Milton, and Blake as well as by Joyce and Yeats. She reflects on the important differences between Tolkien and his predecessors and even more between Tolkien and his contemporaries. This in-depth study will fascinate those interested in Tolkien and fantasy literature.

    His creative style and use of language served as one of the primary foundations on which later writers built. Through his writing, Chaucer's wit, charm, and eloquence give us a deeper understanding of not only the time in which he lived, but of how human emotion, fraility, and fortitude are the base elements of human existence. There are 14 lectures on 7 tapes with a manual included which are:Lecture 1- Chaucer's Life, times, and importanceLecture 2- Language, style, and literary backgroundLecture 3- The Book of the Duchess, the Romance of the Rose, and the Minor PoemsLecture 4- The House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite, The Parliament of Fowls, and BeothiusLecture 5- Troilus and Criseyde, Books I-IILecture 6- Troilus and Criseyde, Books III-VLecture 7 The Legend of Good WomenLecture 8- The Canterbury Tales : "The General Prologue"Lecture 9- The Canterbury Tales: "The Knights Tale" "The Miller's Tale" "The Reeve's Tale" and "The Cook's Tale"Lecture 10- The Canterbury Tales: "The Tales of Law's Tale" "The Wife of Bath's Tale" "The Friar's Tale" and "The Summoner's TaleLecture 11- The Canterbury Tales: "The Clerks Tale" "The Merchant's Tale" "The Squire's Tale" and "The Franklin's Tale"Lecture 12- The Canterbury Tales: "The Physician's Tale" "The Pardoner's Tale" "The Shipman's Tale" and "The Prioress's Tale"Lecture 13- The Canterbury Tales: "Sir Thopas" The Tale of Melibee" "The Monk's Tale" "The Nun's Priest's Tale" and "The Second Nun's Tale"Lecture 14- The Canterbury Tales: "The Canon's Yeoman's Tale" "TheManciple's Tale" The Retraction" and Our conclusions

    Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces written for great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize–winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.

    Virginia Woolf's Nose presents a variety of case-studies, in which literary biographers are faced with gaps and absences, unprovable stories and ambiguities surrounding their subjects. By looking at stories about Percy Bysshe Shelley's shriveled, burnt heart found pressed between the pages of a book, Jane Austen's fainting spell, Samuel Pepys's lobsters, and the varied versions of Virginia Woolf's life and death, preeminent biographer Hermione Lee considers how biographers deal with and often utilize these missing body parts, myths, and contested data to fill in the gaps of a life story.In Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters, an essay dealing with missing parts and biographical legends, Hermione Lee discusses one of the most complicated and emotionally charged examples of the contested use of biographical sources. Jane Austen Faints takes five competing versions of the same dramatic moment in the writer's life to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women. Virginia Woolf's Nose looks at the way this legendary author's life has been translated through successive transformations, from biography to fiction to film, and suggests there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life. Finally, How to End It All analyzes the changing treatment of deathbed scenes in biography to show how biographical conventions have shifted, and asks why the narrators and readers of life-stories feel the need to give special meaning and emphasis to endings.Virginia Woolf's Nose sheds new light on the way biographers bring their subjects to life as physical beings, and offers captivating new insights into the drama of life-writing. Virginia Woolf's Nose is a witty, eloquent, and funny text by a renowned biographer whose sensitivity to the art of telling a story about a human life is unparalleled--and in creating it, Lee articulates and redefines the parameters of her craft.

    I consider Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts not only a brilliant study, but also a model to be emulated." --Ousseynou B. Traore, William Patterson UniversityAje is a Yoruba word that signifies a spiritual power of vast potential, as well as the human beings who exercise that power. Although both men and women can have Aje, its owners and controllers are women, the literal and cosmic Mothers who are revered as the gods of society. Because of its association with female power, its invisibility and profundity, Aje is often misconstrued as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington points out in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Aje is central to the Yoruba ethos and cosmology. Not only does it underpin the concepts of creation and creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Aje is essential to social harmony and balance. As Africans were forced into exile and enslavement, they took Aje with them and continued its work of creating, destroying, harming, and healing in the New World.Washington seeks out Aje's subversive power of creation and re-creation in a diverse range of Africana texts, from both men and women, from both oral and contemporary literature, and across space and time. She guides readers to an understanding of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual issues that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. She begins with an examination of the ancient forms of Aje in Yoruba culture, which creates a framework for innovative readings of important works by Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This rich analysis will appeal to readers of Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, feminist studies, and comparative literature.

    The Great Conversation is a compelling collection that captures the exhilarating and moving correspondence between Wright and his many friends. In letters to fellow poets Donald Hall, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, and Robert Bly, Wright explored subjects from his creative process to his struggles with depression and illness.A bright thread of wit, gallantry, and passion for describing his travels and his beloved natural world runs through these letters, which begin in 1946 in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, the hometown he would memorialize in verse, and end in New York City, where he lived for the last fourteen years of his life. Selected Letters is no less than an epistolary chronicle of a significant part of the midcentury American poetry renaissance, as well as the clearest biographical picture now available of a major American poet.

    Dick, UrsulaK. LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson, and more.Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,”conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.

    Miller moves from the headlines to the classroom, focusing in on how teachers and students alike confront the existential challenge of making life meaningful.  In meditating on the violent events that now dominate our daily lives—school shootings, suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, contemporary warfare—Miller prompts a reconsideration of the role that institutions of higher education play in shaping our daily experiences, and asks us to reimagine the humanities as centrally important to the maintenance of a compassionate, secular society. By concentrating on those moments when individuals and institutions meet and violence results, Writing at the End of the World provides the framework that students and teachers require to engage in the work of building a better future.

    With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.

    

    Tolkien. Using key episodes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, readers are taken back to the works of Old, Middle English and Old Norse literature that so influenced Tolkien. The original texts are presented with helpful new translations to help the reader approach the medieval poems and tales, and introductory essays draw on recent scholarship and Tolkien's own unpublished notes.

    The essays range from Ram�n Men�ndez Pidal's seminal study of how Cervantes dealt with chivalric literature to Erich Auerbachs polemical study of Don Quixote as essentially a comic book by studying its mixture of styles, and include Leo Spitzer's masterful probe into the essential ambiguity of the novel through minute linguistic analysis of Cervantes' prose. The book includes pieces by other major Cervantes scholars, such as Manuel Dur�n and Edward C. Riley, as well as younger scholars like Georgina Dopico Black. All these essays ultimately seek to discover that which is peculiarly Cervantean in Don Quixote and why it is considered to be the first modern novel.

    That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the status of revelation, vision, or experiential record - as something more than imaginative literature. In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. Moevs arrives at the radical conclusion that Dante believed that all of what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is in fact a creation or projection of conscious being. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy.

    Comprehensive reading and study guide 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.

    A clear influence on more recent writers such as J. K. Rowling, her humorous and exciting stories of wizard's academies, dragons, and griffins-many published for children but read by all ages-are also complexly structured and thought provoking critiques of the fantasy tradition. This is the first serious study of Jones's work, written by a renowned science fiction critic and historian. In addition to providing an overview of Jones's work, Farah Mendlesohn also examines Jones's important critiques of the fantastic tradition's ideas about childhood and adolescence.

    Leading authors in the area of women's literature and romance contribute to this fresh collection of essays on everything from Lydia's scandalous marriage to George Wickham to the female-dominated Bennett household and the emphasis placed on courtship and marriage. Contributors include Jo Beverly, Alesia Holliday, Mercedes Lackey, Joyce Millman, and Jill Winters. This compilation is an excellent companion for both those new to Jane Austen and well-versed Austen-philes.

    This collection of essays leads the reader into the curious and eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classic novel The Plains, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.Delicately argued, and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.

    EXCHANGES OF EARTH & SKY, a collage-rich paean to birds in all their experimental flights, is poet Jack Collom's 21st book of poetry (all published by small presses). Collom lives in Boulder and teaches at Naropa University. He has twice been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. "Birds] foretell the future, their perspective/ is free and unique and quick./ Just like Jack Collom in this/ Field Guide to Birds for Poets"--Joanne Kyger. "Elegant and contrary. The ecology of a mind in flight"--Michael Rothenberg.Book design: Brad Miskell

    German culture has been central to Europe, and it has contributed the transforming spirit of Lutheran religion, the technology of printing as a medium of democracy, the soulfulness of Romantic philosophy, the structure of higher education, and the tradition of liberal socialism to the essential character of modern American life.In this book leading scholars and critics capture the spirit of this culture in some 200 original essays on events in German literary history. Rather than offering a single continuous narrative, the entries focus on a particular literary work, an event in the life of an author, a historical moment, a piece of music, a technological invention, even a theatrical or cinematic premiere. Together they give the reader a surprisingly unified sense of what it is that has allowed Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Luther, Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Jelinek, and Sebald to provoke and enchant their readers. From the earliest magical charms and mythical sagas to the brilliance and desolation of 20th-century fiction, poetry, and film, this illuminating reference book invites readers to experience the full range of German literary culture and to investigate for themselves its disparate and unifying themes.Contributors include: Amy M. Hollywood on medieval women mystics, Jan-Dirk Muller on Gutenberg, Marion Aptroot on the Yiddish Renaissance, Emery Snyder on the Baroque novel, J. B. Schneewind on Natural Law, Maria Tatar on the Grimm brothers, Arthur Danto on Hegel, Reinhold Brinkmann on Schubert, Anthony Grafton on Burckhardt, Stanley Corngold on Freud, Andreas Huyssen on Rilke, Greil Marcus on Dada, Eric Rentschler on Nazi cinema, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on Hannah Arendt, Gordon A. Craig on Gunter Grass, Edward Dimendberg on Holocaust memorials.

    Furtak begins with a critical examination of the ancient Stoic position that emotions ought to be avoided by rational human beings. He argues that, on the contrary, emotions ought to be understood as embodying a kind of authentic insight, which enables us to attain a meaningful and truthful way of seeing the world. Furtak's positive alternative to Stoicism draws heavily on the writings of S�ren Kierkegaard, particularly Either/Or and Works of Love, while also engaging with a wide range of other relevant philosophical, literary, and religious sources. He argues that a morality of virtue and narrative awareness is necessary for accurate emotional perception, and then attempts to define a qualified value realism based upon a reverential trust in love as the ground of human life. The outcome of this inquiry into the possibility of reliable emotion is an account of the ideal state in which we could trust ourselves to be rational in being passionate.

    NOT THE NOVEL

    The volume includes classic pieces of drama and literature criticism, such as his essays on Shakespeare and Coleridge, as well as less well-known material from his social and political journalism. This collection encourages the reader to reconsider the nature of critical writing, which Hazlitt transforms into an art form.

    Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis.

    In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines variations in the character of the local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

    They consider English literature, the English poets, Mother Russia, American poetry, out of eastern Europe, aspects of novels, correspondences between writers, and contemporary works. Only n

    From Aslan, the great lion, to Zardeenah, the mysterious lady of the night, this comprehensive and accessible companion contains hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries covering all the characters, events, places, and themes that Lewis magically wove into his timeless and magical world.This little book will be perfect for the millions of kids and parents who already love the Narnia books and want to go deeper into that world, as well as for those newly drawn to the story by the Narnia movie. The Pocket Companion is a perfect gift book, a natural movie tie-in, and will continue to help readers and fans get closer to the magical world of Narnia for years to come.

    Learning from the Left provides the first historic overview of their work. Spanning from the 1920s, when both children's book publishing and American Communism were becoming significant on the American scene, to the late 1960s, when youth who had been raised on many of the books in this study unequivocally rejected the values of the Cold War, Learning from the Left shows how "radical" values and ideas that have now become mainstream (including cooperation, interracial friendship, critical thinking, the dignity of labor, feminism, and the history of marginalized people), were communicated to children in repressive times. A range of popular and critically acclaimed children's books, many by former teachers and others who had been blacklisted because of their political beliefs, made commonplace the ideas that McCarthyism tended to call "subversive." These books, about history, science, and contemporary social conditions-as well as imaginative works, science fiction, and popular girls' mystery series-were readily available to children: most could be found in public and school libraries, and some could even be purchased in classrooms through book clubs that catered to educational audiences. Drawing upon extensive interviews, archival research, and hundreds of children's books published from the 1920s through the 1970s, Learning from the Left offers a history of the children's book in light of the history of the history of the Left, and a new perspective on the links between the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s.Winner of the Grace Abbott Book Prize of the Society for the History of Children and Youth

    The first critical analysis of Philip Pullman’s cross-age fantasy trilogy.

    In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited.Chapter 1, A Usable History, analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World, emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, Our Canon, Ourselves, addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays--and the aspects of those plays--that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, Boys will be Girls, explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, The Lady's Reeking Breath, turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, Shakespeare's Timeless Women, surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.

    Comprises 35 original essays written by leading figures in the field Includes contributions from pioneers in the field such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller and Gerald Prince Represents all the major critical approaches to narrative and investigates and debates the relations between them Considers narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine Features analyses of a variety of media, including film, music, and painting Designed to be of interest to specialists, yet accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of the field

    Offering work from both academics with long-standing reputations and newer voices in the field, it combines general essays that provide background and contextual information with detailed readings of specific Chaucerian texts. The book devotes an entire section to Chaucer's "afterlife," which considers his reputation in later periods, his influence on later writers, and his presence in modern and contemporary culture. Guides to further reading for each chapter and a chronology are also included.

    This is a fascinating and clinically relevant phenomenon neglected within psychiatry. Far from being a rare condition, it can be as prevalent as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and frequently occurs in association with other neuropsychiatric conditions. This book is a review of depersonalization, dealing with the subject from a wide range of perspectives and covering historical, conceptual, clinical, trans-cultural, pharmacological and neurobiological factors. It discusses recent neuroimaging studies providing fresh insights into the condition and opening up new opportunities to manage the symptoms with pharmacologic and psychotherapeutic interventions. It will be relevant to psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, as well as primary care practitioners, neurologists and psychiatric nurses.

    His many subjects - music legends, movie directors, artistic provocateurs, up-and-coming talents, visionary songwriters - all speak with rare candor about the meanings within and the motivations behind their best work. Many of these interviews - which originally appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times and other publications - have been significantly expanded. DeCurtis has also written new introductions that tell the story behind these stories, transforming this collection into an episodic memoir of a life on the front lines of cultural journalism. These gripping conversations will make readers feel that they are sitting, as DeCurtis did, at a dinner table or in a quiet room alone, learning everything they want to know about some of the most revered artists of our time.

    Why did the European spirit succumb to such a devastating fiasco? the young Milosz asks. Half a century later, when Legends of Modernity saw its first publication in Poland, Milosz said: If everything inside you is agitation, hatred, and despair, write measured, perfectly calm sentences... While the essays here reflect a perfect calm, the accompanying contemporaneous exchange of letters between Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski express the raw emotions of agitation, hatred and despair experienced by these two close friends struggling to understand the proximate causes of this debacle of western civilization, and the relevance, if any, of the teachings of the Catholic church. Passionate, poignant, and compelling, Legends of Modernity is a deeply moving insight into the mind and emotions of one of the greatest writers of our time.

    1160). The birth of utopic thinking, it argues, is tied to an understanding of alterity having as much to do with the ways the medieval West understood itself as the manner in which the foreign was mapped. Drawing upon the insights of cultural studies, film studies, and psychoanalysis, this book rethinks the contours of the known and the unknown in the medieval period. It demonstrates how the idea of otherness intersected in intricate ways with other categories of difference (spatial, gender, and religious). Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies will be interested in the manner in which the book considers the formal dimensions of how histories of the Oriental "other" were written and lived.

    Readers will find research-informed insights from a wide variety of international contexts. The new edition includes chapters on e-assessment, the learner's perspective on assessment and learning, and the influence of assessment on how we value learning.

    Taking the reader through the New York that inspired, and was in turn inspired by, the formidable Mrs Parker, this guide uses rarely seen archival photographs from her life to illustrate Dorothy Parker's development as a writer, a formidable wit, and a public persona.

    Theory, as the many theoretical ism's (among them postcolonialism, postmodernism, and New Historicism) are now known, once seemed so exciting but has become ossified and insular. This iconoclastic collection is an excellent companion to current anthologies of literary theory, which have embraced an uncritical stance toward Theory and its practitioners. Written by nearly fifty prominent scholars, the essays in Theory's Empire question the ideas, catchphrases, and excesses that have let Theory congeal into a predictable orthodoxy. More than just a critique, however, this collection provides readers with effective tools to redeem the study of literature, restore reason to our intellectual life, and redefine the role and place of Theory in the academy.

    This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.Echoing the pastoral and elegiac modes of the Romantic poets, whose reverence for nature never prevented them from addressing it with all the ideas and sensibilities their times allowed, Sina Queyras's stunning collection explores the infrastructures and means of modern mobility. Addressing the human project not so much as something imposed on nature but as an increasingly disturbing activity within it, Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. 'Cleanse the doors of perception,' Blake urged, and with that in mind, Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome — each decision can make or unmake us.

    By putting children at the center of our thinking about American history, Karen Sánchez-Eppler recognizes the important part childhood played in nineteenth-century American culture and what this involvement entailed for children themselves.Dependent States examines the ties between children's literacy training and the growing cultural prestige of the novel; the way children functioned rhetorically in reform literature to enforce social norms; the way the risks of death to children shored up emotional power in the home; how Sunday schools socialized children into racial, religious, and national identities; and how class identity was produced, not only in terms of work, but also in the way children played. For Sánchez-Eppler, nineteenth-century childhoods were nothing less than vehicles for national reform. Dependent on adults for their care, children did not conform to the ideals of enfranchisement and agency that we usually associate with historical actors. Yet through meticulously researched examples, Sánchez-Eppler reveals that children participated in the making of social meaning. Her focus on childhood as a dependent state thus offers a rewarding corrective to our notions of autonomous individualism and a new perspective on American culture itself.

    Heidi Brayman Hackel argues for a history of reading centred on the traces left by merchants and maidens, gentlewomen and servants, adolescents and matrons - precisely those readers whose entry into the print marketplace provoked debate and changed the definition of literacy. By telling their stories and insisting upon their variety, Brayman Hackel displaces both the singular 'ideal' reader of literacy theory and the elite male reader of literacy history. This interdisciplinary study draws upon portraiture, prefaces, marginalia, commonplace books, inventories, diaries, letters and literature (Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Greene, Dekker, Lyly, Jonson and others). A contribution to literary studies, the history of the book, cultural history and feminist criticism, this accessible book will also appeal to readers interested in our continuing engagement with print and the evolution of reading material.

    This textbook approaches Shakespeare's plays through the lens of interpretation, combining film theory, literary theory, and close readings of the texts to provide students with a scholarly yet accessible way to approach 14 of Shakespeare's most-often produced plays. Descriptions of key stage, film, and video interpretations, along with scrupulously edited and annotated play scripts, reinforce the belief that each staging--whether in the theater, on film, or for television--is an interpretation of the play, its point of view conditioned by the times, the medium, and the artist's vision. This innovative approach empowers students to develop their own critical interpretations and is especially well suited to today's students who respond readily to visual media.

    Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book—impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority—thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"—dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics—through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

    

    Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the id�e fixe, who have come close to surrendering to something or someone diabolically seductive or coercive, will recognize in these characters their own encounter with a dangerously systematized world.--From the introduction.Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the id�e fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life.In van Zuylen's view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the id�e fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies--Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them--embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion.

     Tells the story of the historical development of tragedy from classical Greece to modernity Features 28 essays by renowned scholars from multiple disciplines, including classics, English, drama, anthropology and philosophy Broad in its scope and ambition, it considers interpretations of tragedy through religion, philosophy and history Offers a fresh assessment of Ancient Greek tragedy and demonstrates how the practice of reading tragedy has changed radically in the past two decades

    Elizabeth Friedmann met Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1985, after five years of correspondence, and worked with her until her death in 1991. From the vantage point of a close friend and with access to all of (Riding) Jackson's papers, Friedmann now sheds new light on the life and work of one of the most important yet perplexing figures in American and British literary history. With fascinating detail, Friedmann recreates the writer and her world. We share a young Laura's excitement when, in the early 1920s, her poems attract the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. We recognize her sense of destiny when she goes to England and begins her productive collaboration with Robert Graves. Friedmann shows the life and world circumstances that led to such historic works as A Survey of Modernist Poetry (written with Graves) and the Collected Poems of 1938. She takes us into Laura's diverse circle of associates that included Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. So intimate is this portrait that the "scandals" of (Riding) Jackson's personal and professional lifeher "three-life" with Graves and Nancy Nicholson, her attempted suicide, her role in the breakup of Schuyler Jackson's first marriage, and her renunciation of poetryare demystified, put into perspective, made understandable. Friedmann shows that (Riding) Jackson was not a divided woman, as some have said. Rather, she maintained a "mannered grace" and possessed an inner consistency of thought and purpose. Beautifully written, fair-minded, and compassionate, A Mannered Grace humanizes a complex and often demonized figure, and allows for a reassessment of her remarkable achievement.

    If the author is "dead," if feminism is "post-," why does the figure of the woman author keep appearing as a central character in contemporary fiction? Drawing on a diverse range of contemporary authors--including Atwood, Byatt, Brookner, Coetzee, Lurie, Le Guin, Michele Roberts, Shields, Spark, Weldon, Walker--this study explores the complexity and continuing fascination of this figure.

    In the best tradition of sound-bites and pithily entertaining witticism, the authors gather together essential facts and fascinating insights about William Shakespeare--probably the most famous writer of all time--and the world in which he lived and worked.

    In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history ("Axel's Castle," "To the Finland Station," and "Patriotic Gore"), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life--a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others--in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and work. Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a deep commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Along the way, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained--in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity--a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. "Edmund Wilson" will be recognized as the lasting biography of this brilliant man whose life reflected so much of the cultural, social, and human experience of a turbulent century. Lewis Dabney edited the Edmund Wilson Reader as well as Wilson's last journal, "The Sixties." He is professor of English at the University of Wyoming. A "San Francisco Chronicle "Best Book of the Year From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history ("Axel's Castle," "To the Finland Station," and "Patriotic Gore"), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life--a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others--in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and work. Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a deep commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Along the way, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained--in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity--a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. "Edmund Wilson" will be recognized as the lasting biography of this brilliant man whose life reflected so much of the cultural, social, and human experience of a turbulent century. "Dabney . . . is diligent . . . All the information one needs about Wilson is here."--Colm Toibin, "The New York Times Book Review" "Dabney . . . is diligent . . . All the information one needs about Wilson is here."--Colm Toibin, "The New York Times Book Review""" "A thoroughgoing, authoritative and consistently engaging look at one of the giants of American letters by an acknowledged expert on his life and writings. Wilson's trenchant literary criticism, his long career, his uproarious domestic life and his manifold friendships are all set down in enthralling detail."--"Los Angeles Times Book Review" "Lewis Dabney's "Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature" is by far the most comprehensive deep-dish study of both his life and work . . . [It] makes one nostalgic for such a time and such a man."--Allen Barra, "The"" Star-Ledger" (Newark) "Dabney sums up Wilson's college experience deftly and with characteristic elegance . . . [and he] is admirably restrained in his treatment of [the] famous literary union, or disunion, [with novelist Mary McCarthy], out of which a lesser biographer would have plucked much dirty linen. He is careful and, so far as one can tell, fair in his account of the famous fight between the couple a few months into their marriage."--John Banville, "The Irish Times" "Dabney's [new book] is a wonderful, meaty biography of the greatest American critic of the 20th century."--John Banville, "The Guardian" "Edmund Wilson was the most distinguished and influential literary critic of the twentieth century; he was also a fascinating character and fascinated by life. Lewis Dabney does justice to all aspects of Wilson's career in this incisive, measured, and reflective biography."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "Edmund Wilson survives as a critic because of his endless vitalism and fierce love of literature. These are the qualities admirably conveyed in Lewis Dabney's eloquent biography."--Harold Bloom "Briskly written and packed with revealing details about a very complicated man, Lewis Dabney's "Edmund Wilson" is the most satisfying account to date of this accomplished critic, literary journalist, and cultural historian. Lurid episodes in Wilson's personal life blend with Dabney's incisive commentary on the diverse books and articles Wilson steadily turned out for more than fifty years. This is a solid, serious, and entertaining book."--Daniel Aaron, author of "Writers on the Left" "Dabney follows Wilson's brilliant trajectory from protected youth to Jazz Age high-liver and liver-damaged 'literary alcoholic, ' from sexual naif to the chronicler of suburban sexual high-jinks in "Memoirs of Hecate County," from somewhat snooty highbrow to much more worldly highbrow. For all the life changes--and all the adventures and misadventures in the company of Edna Millay, Mary McCarthy, the Algonquian Circle, Vladimir Nabokov, and such--Wilson remained consistent to at least a few principles and pleasures, confessing, for instance, 'that he was never happier than when telling people about a work they were unfamiliar with in a language they didn't know.' That he did so in the pages of "The New Yorker," "The New Republic," and "Vanity Fair" ought to make his admirers--and Wilson still has many, having, as Dabney observes, passed the ten-year test for longevity long ago--yearn for better, more lettered days. A solid, much-needed work of literary biography."--"Kirkus Reviews""" "Dabney, who edited "The Sixties "(1993), the final volume of Wilson's published journals, presents a meticulous biography that is lapidary and illuminating in its proficient explications of Wilson's volatile personal relationships and benchmark writings." Donna Seaman, "Booklist "(starred review) "This thorough biography gives the definitive treatment to the life and work of one of the early 20th century's most highly revered men of letters . . . A complex account . . . Comprehensive, well-researched."--"Library Journal" (starred review) "Dabney meticulously unfolds the circumstances behind the writing of his most significant books while tracing the evolution of Wilson's thought . . . Readers seeking an introduction to Wilson will find their perseverance through this hefty tome rewarded with a rich context for approaching his writings."--"Publishers Weekly"

    Ages 16+.

    From the ever-popular Faces of Death movies to purported snuff films, from classic B-movies such as The Tingler, to more popular but no less controversial films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Brottman takes a wide-eyed look at movies most folks watch only through parted fingers.While most critics have been quick to dismiss such films as mere shock-fests (if they even bother to talk about them at all), Brottman argues that these movies tell us quite a bit about who we are as a society, what makes us anxious, and what taboos we truly believe cannot be crossed. Part anthropology, part psychoanalysis, Offensive Films vivisects these movies in order to figure out just what about them is so offensive, obscene, or bizarre. In the end, Brottman proves that these films, shunned from the cinematic canon, work on us in sophisticated ways we often choose to remain unaware of.

    ORGIES OF THE HEMP EATERS includes an array of interviews, rants, aphorisms, photos, recipes, cookbooks, rituals, trip tales, stories, commentaries, poems, art, literature, lyrics, reviews, and four Cannabis glossaries. It also contains commentaries by Louisa May Alcott, Charles P. Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Allen Ginsberg, and Friedrich Nietzsche, plus supplementary bibliographies, multiple appendices and an extensive index.

    This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, irrelevant descriptions of nature in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations.This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the new way of looking that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls the way things look each day. The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.

    This book fills in the gaps that have seperated us from those times, drawing out the tantalising puzzles the novel provokes.

     A highly innovative introduction to the extraordinary phenomenon of Shakespeare Explores Shakespeares works through the Seven Ages of Man, from childhood to second childishness and mere oblivion Now includes more material on fathers and sons, the perils of courtship, the circumstances of Shakespeares own life, the performance history of his plays on stage and on screen, and more A new final chapter on Shakespeare Today looks at the remarkable diversity of interpretations in modern criticism and performance of Shakespeare Discusses a wide range of plays and poems Suitable for both non-specialist readers, and scholars seeking a fresh approach to the study of Shakespeare

    It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color—a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation. The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote—a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

    Focusing on stories with artist figures, objets d'art, child protagonists, and embodied images, Lake describes how O'Connor's fiction actively resisted romantic theories of the imagination and religious life by highlighting the epistemological necessity of the body. Ultimately O'Connor challenges the romantic and modern notion of the artist as a fire-stealing Prometheus and replaces it with a notion of the artist as a locally committed craftsman. Drawing upon M. M. Bakhtin's early essays in Art and Answerability and Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Lake illustrates O'Connor's conviction that art deliberately assigns the highest value of transcendental beauty to those beings least valued by the modern world, and challenges us to do the same. The book culminates with an original reading of Parker's Back that shows how in art, as in life, true knowledge comes to us through our own grotesque bodies and those of others. Unafraid of the mystery of being human, art can be the place where we encounter anew the world as more than what the intellect can unravel.

    She shows how popular representations of mothers codified and enforced a model of motherhood naturally and inevitably, removed from participation in the public world, and presented other ideals as monstrous. At the same time, she points out, some of the most influential texts resisted the newly reduced vision of maternal excellence by imagining alternatives to domesticity and dependence. Addressing broader social and cultural issues, and drawing radical comparisons between past and present, Bowers argues that Western culture continues to be limited by its commitment to the contradictory maternal ideals established in eighteenth-century discourse.

    Packaged in a cheap-and-cheerful format, the book is the perfect impulse buy for gays and the straights who love them.Quotable Queers (and their straight counterparts) include:Queer EyeÆs Fab FiveRosie OÆDonnellOscar WildeColumnist Dan Savagek.d. langTom CruiseWhitney Houstonàand more!

    Archival research has excavated substantial amounts of new material, both visual and literary, which is presented in chronological order. But the fundamental aim is to explain why Greek tragedy, which played an elite role in the curricula of largely conservative schools and universities, was magnetically attractive to political radicals, progressive theatre professionals, and to the aesthetic avant-garde. All Greek has been translated, and the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Greek tragedy, the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, theatre history, British social history, English studies, or comparative literature.

    Unlike modern thinkers who understand the body as a purely material phenomenon or post-modern critics who see in it a "text" produced by culture, Donne understands the body as a (scriptural) text written by God.In this study, McDuffie offers a comprehensive interpretation of Donne's reading of the body. In Donne's imaginative universe, the human person lies at the center of the great interconnected web of God's signs and acts. As such, he makes it the touchstone of his own theology. While his anthropology is basically orthodox, the emphasis Donne places on the body and the role it plays in his religious poetics are distinctive. Refusing to restrict God's revelation to the written words of Scripture, Donne turns habitually to the book of the human body as a collection of signs that indicate God's nature, his intent, and the human condition. He also, at times, represents the human body not as a "mere" sign but as sacrament: a seal of the promises of God that conveys his presence and grace.In his reading of the book of the body, Donne discerns the narrative of salvation history: the trajectory proceeding from creation, through fall to redemption and resurrection. He sets the body and salvation history into a dialogical relationship, always reading one in terms of the other. Donne reads in the body God's great love for the material, the ravages of the Fall, God's redemptive action in Christ and in the lives of the saints, and the literal and figurative deaths that serve as gateways to resurrection and eschatological fulfillment.

    As a literary and cultural study, this book examines the textual dialogue between Argentines of European descent and Arab immigrants to Argentina from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.Using methods drawn from literary analysis and cultural studies, Christina Civantos shows that the Arab presence is twofold: the Arab and the Orient are an imagined figure and space within the texts produced by Euro-Argentine intellectuals; and immigrants from the Arab world are an actual community, producing their own texts within the multiethnic Argentine nation. This book is both a literary history--of Argentine Orientalist literature and Arab-Argentine immigrant literature--and a critical analysis of how the formation of identities in these two bodies of work is interconnected.

    Clement's letter contains two excerpts from this lost gospel, including a remarkably different account of the raising of Lazarus.Forty-five years of cursory investigation have yielded five mutually exclusive paradigms, abundant confusion, and rumours of forgery. Strangely, one of the few things upon which most investigators agree is that the letter's own explanation of the origin and purpose of this longer gospel need not be taken seriously.Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery calls this pervasive bias into question. After thoroughly critiquing the five main paradigms, Scott G. Brown demonstrates that the gospel excerpts not only sound like Mark, but also employ Mark's distinctive literary techniques, deepening this gospels theology and elucidating puzzling aspects of its narrative. This mystic gospel represents Mark's own response to the Alexandrian predilection to discover the essential truths of a philosophy beneath the literal level of revered texts.

    Scholars have focused on works produced for the marketplace, but have overlooked art created and displayed outside of established venues and institutions of higher learning. Drawing upon sketches, paintings, and photographs, Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel is a groundbreaking study that examines the art that women produced whilst traveling, as well as the circumstances that took these artists - both amateurs and professionals - far beyond the reaches of the traditional Grand Tour. Traveling throughout the British Empire, including the Middle East, India, Canada, and North Africa, and even to the Americas, the artists adapted to new climes and foreign cultures partially by documenting the unfamiliar through their art, sometimes at great physical risk. This volume of essays offers fresh evidence that through their travel and art, women extended both geographic and social boundaries. Each author presents evidence that women overcame institutional as well as cultural obstacles to improve their artistic skills and to use their art to convey worlds most British citizens would never see for themselves.

     Supplies the cultural, historical and philosophical background to the literary criticism of each era Enables students to see the development of literary criticism in context Organised chronologically, from classical literary criticism through to deconstruction Considers a wide range of thinkers and events from the French Revolution to Freud's views on civilization Can be used alongside any anthology of literary criticism or as a coherent stand-alone introduction

    Dubbed 'film noir' by French critics in the 1970s, both for their heavy use of shade and black outlook, these films have fascinated critics, students, moviegoers and moviemakers ever since. Film Noir analyses the defining films of the genre, including: . The Maltese Falcon. The Big Sleep. Kiss me Deadly. The Postman Always Rings Twice Plus it profiles iconic actors, such as Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, and legendary directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles

    Cryptic alphabets; 2. Deviant logics; 3. Uneasy pleasures; 4. The destructive element; 5. Exhausted futures; Coda: Violence and psychopathology; End notes; Bibliography; Index

    In this fascinating book, Joseph Goering explores the links between these sacred images and the origins of one of the West’s most enduring legends.While tracing the early history of the grail, Goering looks back to the Pyrenean religious paintings and argues that they were the original inspiration of the grail legend. He explains how storytellers in northern France could have learned of these paintings and how the enigmatic “grail” in the hands of the Virgin came to form the centerpiece of a story about a knight in King Arthur’s court. Part of the allure of the grail, Goering argues, was that neither Chrétien nor his audience knew exactly what it represented or why it was so important. And out of the attempts to answer those questions the literature of the Holy Grail was born.

    It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial "others." Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or dime store novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both who claim in their autobiographical pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering. Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today's audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance.

    M. Barrie. Simultaneously, Barrie surfaced as the subject of two major biographies and a feature film. The engaging essays in Second Star to the Right approach Pan from literary, dramatic, film, television, and sociological perspectives and, in the process, analyze his emergence and preservation in the cultural imagination.

    Bruns, "when it is innovative not just in its practices, but, before everything else, in its poetics (that is, in its concepts or theories of itself)." In The Material of Poetry, Bruns considers the possibility that anything, under certain conditions, may be made to count as a poem. By spelling out such enabling conditions he gives us an engaging overview of some of the kinds of contemporary poetry that challenge our notions of what language is: sound poetry, visual or concrete poetry, and "found" poetry.Poetry's sense and meaning can hide in the spaces in which it is written and read, says Bruns, and so he urges us to become anthropologists, to go afield in poetry's social, historical, and cultural settings. From that perspective, Bruns draws on works by such varied poets as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Steve McCaffery, and Francis Ponge to argue for three seemingly competing points. First, poetry is made of language but is not a use of it. That is, poetry is made of words but not of what we use words to produce: concepts, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. Second, as the nine sound poems on the CD included with the book demonstrate, poetry is not necessarily made of words but is rooted in, and in fact already fully formed by, sounds the human body can produce. Finally, poetry belongs to the world alongside ordinary things; it cannot be confined to some aesthetic, neutral, or disengaged dimension of human culture.Poetry without frontiers, unmoored from expectations, and sometimes even written in imaginary languages: Bruns shows us why, for the sake of all poetry, we should embrace its anarchic, vitalizing ways.

    H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight.'' From Adam Gopnik's forewordRandall Jarrell was one of the most important poet-critics of the past century, and the poet who most fascinated and infuriated him was W. H. Auden. In Auden, Jarrell found a crucial poetic influence that needed to be both embraced and resisted. During the 1940s, Jarrell wrestled with Auden's work, writing a series of notorious articles on Auden that remain admired and controversial examples of devoted and contentious criticism. While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden's work. Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception.Jarrell's lectures offer readings of many of Auden's works, including all of his long poems, and illuminate his singular use of a variety of stylistic registers and poetic genres. In the lecture based on the article ''Freud to Paul, '' Jarrell traces the ideas and ideologies that animated and, at times, overwhelmed Auden's poetry. More precisely, he considers the influence of left-liberal politics, psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory, and the idiosyncratic Christian theology that characterized Auden's poems of the 1940s.While an admiring and sympathetic reader, Jarrell does not avoid identifying Auden's poetic failures and political excesses. He offers occasionally blistering assessments of individual poems and laments Auden's turn from a cryptic, feeling, impassioned poet to a rhetorical, self-conscious one. Stephen Burt's introduction provides a backdrop to the lectures and their reception and importance for the history of modern poetry.

    - 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- Introductory essay by Harold Bloom

    

    Jean Webster. Eleanor Porter, and L. M. Montgomery, John Seelye demonstrates that the reception of Bronte's Gothic romance in America was filtered through Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of the author, published shortly after her friend's death in 1855. A sentimental classic in its day, Gaskell's book promoted an image of Charotte as a long-suffering creative genius with high moral standards. Her biography necessarily overlooked Bronte's obsessive love for her Belgian professor. Constantin Hegar, an older, and married man. Though Heger did not return Charlotte's affection, he was the model for the lovers in Bronte's novels, including the passionate, adulterous Edward Rochester, who inspired censorious reviews questioning the moral character of the author when Jane Eyre was published in 1847, a reputation that Gaskell's biography successfully countered.

    But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The Most Dreadful Visitation.This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins's Basil, and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings—and fears—of mental degeneracy.

    Walker masterfully re-creates this dramatic year in London's life through quotations from his travel diaries and the testimony of his companions, as well as related material from his fiction. First published in 1966, at a time when London was still regarded by many as little more than a writer of stories for children, Walker's study was the first treating London's outstanding contributions to literature, and it remains a definitive study of a crucial phase of his career.

    From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food.The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics.

     The Oxford Dictionary of Plays provides essential information on the 1000 best-known, best-loved, and most important plays in world theater. Each entry includes details of title, author, date of composition, date of first performance, genre, setting, and the composition of the cast, and more. Asynopsis of the plot and a brief commentary, perhaps on the context of the play, or the reasons for its enduring popularity, follow. Around 80 of the most significant plays-- from The Oresteia to Waiting for Godot--are dealt with in more detail. Genres covered include: burlesque, comedy, farce, historical drama, kabuki, masque, melodrama, morality play, mystery play, No, romantic comedy, tragicomedy, satire, and tragedy. An index of characters enables the reader to locate favorite characters, and trace the trajectory of major historical and legendary characters--such as Iphigenia--through world drama, including in plays that do not have entries in the Dictionary. An index of playwrights, with dates, allows thereader to find all the plays included by a particular author.

    

    This collection of specially-written articles by world-class philosophers explores the contribution of romantic thought to topics such as freedom, autonomy, and subjectivity; memory and imagination; pluralism and practical reasoning; modernism, scepticism and irony; art and ethics; and cosmology, time and technology.While the roots of romanticism are to be found in early German idealism, Philosophical Romanticism shows that it is not a purely European phenomenon: the development of romanticism can be traced through to North American philosophy in the era of Emerson and Dewey, and up to the current work of Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty. The articles in this collection suggest that philosophical romanticism offers a compelling alternative to both the reductionist tendencies of the naturalism in 'analytic' philosophy, and deconstruction and other forms of scepticism found in 'continental' philosophy. This outstanding collection will be of interest to those studying philosophy, literature and nineteenth and twentieth century thought.

    In Reading Women, an esteemed group of new and established scholars provide a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston.Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, "Reading Women" brings together a rich array of subjects that sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation, not only of literary history, but of British and American culture. The contributors break new ground by focusing on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of books and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.

    This book examines a wide range of sources (legal and historiographical as well as literary) in order to reveal a -social construction- of Anglo-Saxon England that held a significant place in the literary and cultural imagination of the post-Conquest English. Using a variety of texts, but the Matter of England romances in particular, the author argues that they show a continued interest in the Anglo-Saxon past, from the localised East Sussex legend of King Alfred that underlies the twelfth-century Proverbs of Alfred, to the institutional interest in the Guy of Warwick narrative exhibited by the community of St. Swithun's Priory in Winchester during the fifteenth century; they are part of a continued cultural remembrance that encompasses chronicles, folk memories, and literature. Dr ROBERT ALLLEN ROUSE teaches in the Department of English, University of British Columbia.