Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.   Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

    It has its origins in a mode of self-examination and even self-obsession - 'it is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts', writes Montaigne in his essay 'Of Practice' - but it is just as accurately defined by its vagrant and curious scope, its capacity to suborn any and every object to its elegant remit. It may not in fact be 'well made' at all, but a thing of fragments and unfinished apercus, or an omnium-gatherum like Robert Burton's capacious but recognizably essayistic Anatomy of Melancholy. The essay may not even be written, but instead a photo essay, film essay, radio essay or some hybrid of these and the literary archetype. It may belong to a self-conscious genre and have been written by an essayist who self-declares as such; or it might be conjured from a milieu where the labels 'essay' and 'essayist' would make no sense at all. The essay, in short, is a varied and various artefact. Its occasion might be scholarly - there are academic essays, though they tend to be essays to the extent that they wish to stop being academic - or it may be journalistic, institutional or 'creative'. The essay can be tethered to a specific (perhaps polemical) context or written with an ambition to timeless or universal import. Whatever its motivation or avowed theme, the essay possesses a style and a voice. Generic, structural and contextual definitions will vary, but the essay is at least recognizable by its having a certain texture - the essay alters or interferes to some degree with the language of non-fiction. Essayism is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together

    She covered civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, places where she lived, locations she traveled to, theater she had seen, and murder trials that gripped her. She wrote sketches for various occasions and countless essays about literature, her greatest passion. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor. The continuous attention to language, the structure of observations, the line of interpretation— Hardwick deserves to be read and reread for the clarity of her perceptions and her enduring assessments of literature and society, and simply for the beauty of her writing alone.Edited and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick gathers more than fifty essays for a retrospective of this writer or moral courage, as Joan Didion called her. Hardwick’s readings define literature itself.

    With a fierce, single-minded devotion to his work, Wright escaped the steel town of his Depression-era childhood in the Ohio valley to become a revered professor of English literature and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But his hometown remained at the heart of his work, and he courted a rough, enduring muse from his vivid memories of the Midwest. A full-throated lyricism and classical poise became his tools, honesty and unwavering compassion his trademark.Using meticulous research, hundreds of interviews, and Wright's public readings, Jonathan Blunk's authorized biography explores the poet's life and work with exceptional candor, making full use of Wright's extensive unpublished work--letters, poems, translations, and personal journals. Focusing on the tensions that forced Wright's poetic breakthroughs and the relationships that plunged him to emotional depths, Blunk provides a spirited portrait, and a fascinating depiction of this turbulent period in American letters.A gifted translator and mesmerizing reader, Wright appears throughout in all his complex and eloquent urgency. Discerning yet expansive, James Wright will change the way the poet's work is understood and inspire a new appreciation for his enduring achievement.

    The diversity of this much-loved genre is breathtaking, and so much greater than many critics have suggested. To illustrate this, the leading expert on classic crime discusses one hundred books ranging from 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' to 'Strangers on a Train' which highlight the entertaining plots, the literary achievements, and the social significance of vintage crime fiction. This book serves as a companion to the acclaimed British Library Crime Classics series but it tells a very diverse story. It presents the development of crime fiction-from Sherlock Holmes to the end of the golden age - in an accessible, informative and engaging style.Readers who enjoy classic crime will make fascinating discoveries and learn about forgotten gems as well as bestselling authors. Even the most widely read connoisseurs will find books (and trivia) with which they are unfamiliar-as well as unexpected choices to debate. Classic crime is a richly varied and deeply pleasurable genre that is enjoying a world-wide renaissance as dozens of neglected novels and stories are resurrected for modern readers to enjoy. The overriding aim of this book is to provide a launch point that enables readers to embark on their own voyages of discovery.

    R. R. Tolkien s classic, The Lord of the Rings. It is well known that Tolkien disliked allegory. Yet he acknowledged that his work is imbued with Christian symbolism and meaning.Based on the inaugural Hansen Lectureship series delivered at the Marion E. Wade Center by Philip Ryken, president of Wheaton College, The Messiah Comes to Middle-Earth mines the riches of Tolkien s theological imagination. In the characters of Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn, Ryken hears echoes of the one who is the true prophet, priest, and king. Moreover, he considers what that threefold office means for his service as a college president as well as the calling of all Christians. Guided by both Tolkien and Ryken, things of first importance come alive in a tale of imaginary prophets, priests, and kings.

    The biographer--so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts--here comes to the stage. James Atlas takes us back to his childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas's professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know the author's first subject, the "self-doomed" poet Delmore Schwartz; a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the "tall trees," as Mary McCarthy described them, cut down now, Atlas writes, by the "merciless pruning of mortality"); and, of course, the elusive Bellow, "a metaphysician of the ordinary." Atlas revisits the lives and work of the classical biographers: the Renaissance writers of what were then called "lives," Samuel Johnson and the "meshugenah" Boswell, among them. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the luminaries of contemporary literature and the labor of those who hope to catch a glimpse of one of them--"as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd." (With black-and-white illustrations throughout)

    Their either-or extremism has not become more popular in the last fifty to a hundred years since these stories were first published, but it has become more relevant to a twenty-first-century culture in which the lukewarm middle ground seems the most comfortable place to dwell. Giving the Devil His Due walks through all of O'Connor's stories and looks closely at Dostoevsky's magnum opus The Brothers Karamazov to show that when the devil rules, all hell breaks loose. Instead of this kingdom of violence, O'Connor and Dostoevsky propose a kingdom of love, one that is only possible when the Lord again is king."This is one of those rare books that should appeal to readers who love classic fiction and those with a strong interest in Christian theology. I admired Jessica Hooten Wilson's readings of both O'Connor and Dostoevsky—muscular, intelligent criticism, written with a passion for the worlds they conjure. It's splendid work, provocative, and deeply satisfying." –Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Jesus: The Human Face of God"How refreshing it is—and how necessary—to read criticism that gets us down to the real stakes of moral existence. Wilson brings us Dostoevsky and O'Connor in their full profundity of faith and recognition of evil. This is just the right approach for college students awash in the trivia of youth culture, reminding them that their own lives can have a richer meaning." –Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English, Emory University

    Virtually all have been gathered for this collection, which offers a panoramic view of modern fiction, ranging from well-known authors like Barth and Pynchon to lesser-known but deserving ones, many published by small presses. Moore also reviews dozens of critical studies of this fiction, and takes some side trips into rock music and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.The second half of the book reprints Moore’s best essays. Several deal with novelist William Gaddis — on whom Moore is considered the leading authority — and other writers associated with him (Chandler Brossard, Alan Ansen, David Markson, Sheri Martinelli), all of which have been updated for this collection. Others champion such writers as Alexander Theroux, Brigid Brophy, Edward Dahlberg, Carole Maso, W. M. Spackman, and Rikki Ducornet. Two essays deal with the late David Foster Wallace, whom Moore knew, and others treat such matters as book reviewing, postmodernism, the Beat movement, maximalism, gay literature, punctuation, nympholepsy, and the history of the novel.Steven Moore (PhD Rutgers, 1988) is the author and editor of several books on William Gaddis, as well as of The Novel: An Alternative History (2010, 2013). From 1988 to 1996 he was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction/Dalkey Archive Press.

    But it is every bit as fundamental to human nature as science, religion or art.Faced with the growing popularity of alternative healing, astrology and the New Age, people ask: "whatever happened to the Enlightenment?" They assume that "The Enlightenment" marked a break with a superstitious past; it was a forward leap for humanity after which any return to magical thinking would be regressive, or even impossible. It was a forward step, but it began by looking back two millennia to the Classical era, and re-discovering the foundations on which to build a culture of science and humanism that is considered to be the high point in human achievement.The classical era was itself a high point in human culture, but it only spanned five centuries. The following, Roman, era saw a resurgence of magical thinking and laid the foundations for alchemy, astrology, alternative healing, and much of today's magical ideas and practices. Pontius Pilate famously asked "what is truth?" and two thousand years later postmodernist philosophers are raising similar questions.Is the revival of magical thinking just a natural evolution of thought, to be expected after five centuries of rationalism?The author was brought up in the materialist 1950s and educated in that sceptical Enlightenment tradition to become a Cambridge mathematics graduate. Despite that, he became increasingly interested in magic and the occult and is now recognised as an authority on the subject. So how is it possible to shift from our knowledge of scientific reality to an acceptance of magic? The book describes the author's own subjective experience of how that evolved over his lifetime.Parts One and Two outline some of the important influences on his thinking and Parts Three and Four expand on CP Snow's idea of two cultures (Art and Science) to propose four cultures: Art, Science, Religion and Magic. Part Five looks at the conflicts and misunderstandings between cultures and reasons why magic gets a raw deal, or is simply denied as a culture.Part Six summarises the case and the Part Seven looks at contemporary trends and assumptions to show that the rise in magical thinking goes far deeper than just the visible popularity of astrology columns and alternative healing. A penultimate chapter provides practical suggestions for those willing to explore the value of magical thinking - or simply wanting to survive in a post-truth world.

    K. Rowling's series in order to introduce its readers to some of the great works of literature on which Rowling draws. Harry Potter's narrative techniques are rooted in the western literary tradition and its allusiveness provides insight into Rowling's fictional world. Each chapter of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter consists of an in-depth discussion of the intersection between Harry Potter and a canonical literary work, such as the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, Ovid, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson, and the novels of Austen, Hardy and Dickens. This approach aims to transform the reader's understanding of Rowling's literary achievement as well as to encourage the discovery of works with which they may be less familiar. The aim of this book is to delight Potter fans with a new perspective on their favourite books while harnessing that enthusiasm to increase their wider appreciation of literature.

    Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years challenges the prevailing, traditional view of Wilde as a broken, tragic figure, a martyr to Victorian sexual morality, and shows instead that he pursued his post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.After two bitter years of solitary confinement, Frankel shows, Wilde emerged from prison in 1897 determined to rebuild his life along lines that were continuous with the path he had followed before his conviction, unapologetic and even defiant about the crime for which he had been convicted. England had already done its worst. In Europe's more tolerant atmosphere, he could begin to live openly and without hypocrisy.Frankel overturns previous misunderstandings of Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the great love of his life, with whom he hoped to live permanently in Naples, following their secret and ill-fated elopement there. He describes how and why the two men were forced apart, as well as Wilde's subsequent relations with a series of young men. Oscar Wilde pays close attention to Wilde's final two important works, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, while detailing his nearly three-year residence in Paris. There, despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde attempted to rebuild himself as a man--and a man of letters.

    . . not just for food and shelter and pleasure, but also for the journey of the soul. There is a field of supernatural stories set in this “other” country, the country of the spirit . . .’ In A Country Still All Mystery, Mark Valentine explores how certain writers have used their fiction to convey the idea of numinous terrain, places where we might at any moment stray into the realms of the unearthly and uncanny. These essays continue similar literary and antiquarian themes to his well-received earlier volume, Haunted By Books (2015). When and where was the last wolf seen in England? Why were certain lonely houses left beyond parish boundaries? Is there a missing book by T.E. Lawrence? What was the secret history of Cope & Fenwick, liturgical publishers? What became of the original Tower of Moab? A Country Still All Mystery will be read with pleasure by those who enjoy the out-of-the-way, the obscure, the eccentric and the outré. It will appeal to anyone who has ever strayed into remote country which seems to be not quite fully in this world.

    Foremost among them, the fact that the very recent and “uniquely” human capability of near infinite expressive power arising through a combinatorial grammar is built on the foundations of a far more ancient animal brain. How have these two evolutionary systems become reconciled? Cormac expresses this tension as the deep suspicion, perhaps even contempt, that the primeval unconscious feels toward the upstart, conscious language. In this article Cormac explores this idea through processes of dream and infection. It is a discerning and wide-ranging exploration of ideas and challenges that our research community has only recently dared to start addressing through complexity science.—David KrakauerPresident and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems, Santa Fe Institute

    The Real Reader's Quarterly

    R. R. Tolkien was a profoundly metaphysical thinker, and one of the most formative influences on his imagination, according to this new study of his works, was the great thirteenth-century theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas. Structured around Tolkien's Middle-earth creation myth, the Ainulindale, The Flame Imperishable follows the thought of Aquinas as a guide in laying bare the deeper foundations of many of the more familiar themes from Tolkien's legendarium, including such notions as sub-creation, free will, evil, and eucatastrophe. More than merely using Aquinas to illuminate Tolkien, however, this study concludes that, through its appropriation of many of the philosophical and theological insights of Aquinas, what Tolkien's literary opus achieves is an important and unique landmark in the history of Thomism itself, offering an imaginative and powerful contemporary retrieval, interpretation, and application of Thomistic metaphysics for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."McIntosh's comprehension of Tolkien's Legendarium is masterly; his appropriation of Aquinas is superb; his knowledge of the most important works in recent theology is staggering. A first-rate work of scholarship on a rarely explored aspect of Tolkien's work--the metaphysics of Faërie."--RALPH C. WOOD, author of The Gospel According to Tolkien "The Flame Imperishable is a most valuable addition to Tolkien scholarship. Jonathan McIntosh explores Tolkien's implicit metaphysics of Middle-earth in the light of Thomism with skill and restraint, developing productive lines of argument. His focus on the creation story within the larger Silmarillion, combined with his attention to Tolkien's views on creation and sub-creation, allows him to develop a careful and insightful analysis that will greatly enrich our understanding of Tolkien's work."--HOLLY ORDWAY, author of Tolkien's Modern Sources: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (forthcoming from Kent State University Press) "While many scholars have explored Tolkien's literary and philological influences, his philosophical and theological sources have attracted far less scrutiny--apart from general religious motives and themes. Jonathan S. McIntosh shines a brilliant light into this lacuna, revealing Tolkien's debts to St. Thomas Aquinas, and along the way situating Tolkien among the line of theological philosophers extending from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and on into Tolkien's own day. The Flame Imperishable is surely the most thorough study to date of Tolkien's most cosmological works, and especially of his creation myth, the Ainulindalë. In a tour de force for religious and non-religious readers alike, McIntosh illuminates Tolkien's own metaphysical thought and how it pervades the entire fictive world of his legendarium."--JASON FISHER, editor of Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays "Breathtakingly original, this book deserves to be a landmark. McIntosh makes a compelling case for the cosmological depth of Tolkien's world, arguing not only that it is a world founded on St. Thomas Aquinas, but that it is also a significant contribution to metaphysics in its own right. With a boldness supported closely by a wealth of reasoned argument, McIntosh highlights the singularity and magnitude of Tolkien's achievement both as an artist and as a speculative thinker."--MARK SEBANC​, co-author of the Legacy of the Stone Harp series "In this scholarly study of the philosophical basis of Tolkien's Middle-earth, Jonathan McIntosh demonstrates that metaphysics can be exciting. Far from detracting from the beauty and originality of Tolkien's writing, approaching it through the thought of Thomas Aquinas serves to all the more fully reveal its power over the reader. We know that, however deeply we engage with these stories, there is always more to discover. This is a trustworthy guide to the radiant sense of being in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, which truly illuminates the realism of Tolkien's project."--ALISON MILBANK, author of Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians "In this exciting and lucidly written study, Jonathan McIntosh flings open a door that has remained all but sealed, bringing together the doctor of creation, Thomas Aquinas, with the artist of creation, J. R. R. Tolkien. In uncovering the influence of Aquinas on Tolkien's mythmaking, McIntosh lights up Tolkien's major themes--including the relationship between creation and sub-creation, the independence and 'otherness' of created reality, and the unity of world myth and fairy tale. Most importantly, he helps us recover the vision of a world made meaningful and whole by its Creator."--CRAIG BERNTHAL, author of Tolkien's Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle Earth "There have been many good books on Tolkien. There have even been several very good books on the philosophy of Tolkien. This book, however, is something else, something more, delving deeper. To borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis, it goes further up and further in. Within these densely packed and brilliant pages, we journey to the core of Tolkien's Thomistic heart and mind. Reading this book engenders an unshakable conviction that one can no more separate Tolkien from Thomas than one can Dante from Thomas. Without Aquinas, there would have been no Divine Comedy. Without Aquinas, there would have been no Middle-earth. In short, and in sum, this book is absolutely essential reading to anyone who takes Tolkien seriously enough to want to understand him more deeply."--JOSEPH PEARCE, author of Tolkien: Man & Myth and Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning of The Hobbit "One does not merely dip into The Flame Imperishable. Rather, one immerses oneself in the very love McIntosh so vividly shares and radiates. Indeed, it is clear that the author holds a special place in his soul for Tolkien and Lewis as well as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas. Gloriously, McIntosh invites us to enter the art as well. The Flame Imperishable is not just another in a long line of books about J.R.R. Tolkien, but a truly seminal book that will be remembered as such long after the ephemera surrounding Peter Jackson's work has come and gone. It will be canon."--BRADLEY J. BIRZER, author of J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth

    Now, The Essential Poet’s Glossary gleans the very best from that extraordinary volume. ​Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work compiles poetic terms spanning centuries and continents, including forms, devices, movements, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore. Knowing how a poem works is crucial to unlocking its meaning — entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter. Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem so beloved, this Essential edition is the book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to again and again.

    

    When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create new interpretations of the text that would not otherwise be possible. In your own reading and writing, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. It allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of literature, but also about the core themes - concepts such as gender, sexuality, the self, race, and class - which a text might explore.Literary theory gives you an almost limitless number of texts to work into your own response, ensuring that your interpretation is truly original. This is why, although literary theory can initially appear alienating and difficult, it is something to get really excited about. Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circular room, with a whole set of doors laid out around you. Each doorway opens on to a new and illuminating field of knowledge that can change how you think about what you have read: perhaps in just a small way, but also perhaps dramatically and irrevocably. You can open one door, or many of them. The choice is yours. Put the knowledge you gain together with your own interpretation, however, and you have a unique and potentially fascinating response. Each chapter in Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction covers a key school of thought, progressing to a point at which you'll have a full understanding of the range of responses and approaches available for textual interpretation. As well as focusing on such core areas as Marxism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, this introduction brings in recent developments such as Eco and Ethical Criticism and Humanisms.

    As a retrospective summation of his essays and interviews, it is essential reading in tandem with Roth’s novels, both for the discussions of his own books and as a record of his profound engagement with other writers: Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, and the leading figures of Cold War–era Czechoslovakia among them.Divided into three sections, Why Write? begins with Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, first published in 1975 and expanded for a second edition ten years later. It opens with the remarkable hybrid story-essay, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” a critical evaluation that yields to a fictional imagination of Kafka as young Roth’s Hebrew School teacher in 1940s Newark, the first of the provocative forays into speculative alternative realities that would take shape in novels like The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America. In the essays and interviews given in the wake of the explosive release of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth clarifies how he sought to “raise obscenity to the level of a subject,” provides sharp-edged insights into an America wracked by political turmoil and sexual revolution, and defends the imaginative freedom of writers and readers alike.The volume’s second section presents in its entirety the 2001 book Shop Talk, a series of conversations with writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Primo Levi, and Edna O’Brien, as well as essays on Malamud, Bellow, and the artist Philip Guston. The collection highlights Roth’s skill as an astute literary interlocutor, engaged with writers whose traditions, assumptions, and experience can differ markedly from those of the American world of his own fiction.The concluding section, “Explanations,” comprises fourteen later pieces collected here for the first time, six of them never before published. Among the essays gathered are “My Uchronia,” an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy”; “Errata,” the unabridged version of the “Open Letter to Wikipedia” published on The New Yorker’s website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia’s egregious errors about his life and work; “Forty-Five Years On,” Roth’s absolute last word on Portnoy; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that evokes the Newark of Roth’s childhood and examines the “refractory way of living” of Sabbath’s Theater’s Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth’s retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work: “Morning after morning for fifty years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation.”

    Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre’s historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory.Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror’s ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror’s semiotics within their own imaginary.Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sycorax (of The Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.

    L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.

    The Ninth Edition introduces new General Editor Robert Levine and three new-generation editors who have reenergized the volume across the centuries. Fresh scholarship, new authors―with an emphasis on contemporary writers―new topical clusters, and a new ebook make the Norton Anthology an even better teaching tool and an unmatched value for students.

    As a result, she is often seen as a one-dimensional character. But there is more to her story. By examining popular works of more than 20 authors over the last one thousand years, The Once and Future Queen shows how Guinevere reflects attitudes toward women during the time in which her story was written, changing to suit the expectations of her audience. Beginning in Celtic times and continuing through the present day, this book synthesizes academic criticism and popular opinion into a highly readable, approachable work that fills a gap in Arthurian material available to the general public.Nicole Evelina has spent more than 15 years studying Arthurian legend. She is also a feminist known for her fictional portrayals of strong historical and legendary women, including Guinevere. Now, she combines these two passions to examine the effect of changing times and attitudes on the character of Guinevere in a must-read book for Arthurian enthusiasts of every knowledge level.

    In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology.These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian theology: for them, religion involved intellectual and emotional assent, doctrinal articulation, and ritual practice. Domestico reveals how an important strand of modern poetry actually understood itself in and through the central theological questions of the modernist era: What is transcendence, and how can we think and write about it? What is the sacramental act, and how does its wedding of the immanent and the transcendent inform the poetic act? How can we relate kairos (holy time) to chronos (clock time)?Seeking answers to these complex questions, Domestico examines both modernist institutions (the Criterion) and specific works of modern poetry (Eliot's Four Quartets and Jones's The Anathemata). The book also traces the contours of what it dubs "theological modernism" a body of poetry that is both theological and modernist. In doing so, this book offers a new literary history of the modernist period, one that attends both to the material circulation of texts and to the broader intellectual currents of the time.

    E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan); and sings the praises of unjustly neglected masters (Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Cox). He also turns the spotlight on himself in several short, delightful memoirs, covering such subjects as his obsessive CD collecting, the eerie effects of San Francisco fog, and the terrible duty of selling of his childhood home.

    The song s title refers to a literary device the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses that is echoed in the construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri Baraka s poem Epistrophe alludes slyly to Monk s tune. Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of innovation in black art.Epistrophies explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. From James Weldon Johnson s vernacular transcriptions to Sun Ra s liner note poems, from Henry Threadgill s arresting song titles to Nathaniel Mackey s Song of the Andoumboulou, there is an unending back-and-forth between music that hovers at the edge of language and writing that strives for the propulsive energy and melodic contours of music.At times this results in art that gravitates into multiple media. In Duke Ellington s social significance suites, or in the striking parallels between Louis Armstrong s inventiveness as a singer and trumpeter on the one hand and his idiosyncratic creativity as a letter writer and collagist on the other, one encounters an aesthetic that takes up both literature and music as components of a unique and uniquely African American sphere of art-making and performance."

    The Beat writers stand out as prophets who made a valiant effort to speak the truth in the face of the establishment values of the American post-WWII period, and the fact that so much of their work has stood the test of time is testimony to their importance. The Beat movement was at heart, according to Robert Inchausti, a spiritual enterprise, and the writings compiled in this anthology provide convincing evidence for that claim. Using his broad knowledge of Beat literature, he has created this treasury excerpts from the writings of such figures as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, but also of lesser-known Beatniks--arranged in a way that gives a shape and significance to their spiritual quest. Included are Kerouac's dialogues with Ginsberg and Burroughs on writing as a form of religious resistance and revelation, along with accounts of their experiments with psychedelics and visionary practices, which will then include their shared thoughts on meditation and psychedelic experimentation as visionary practices. This is considerably more than a collection of Beat spiritual writings. It's a kind of introduction to Beat spirituality, presented systematically in the Beats' own words.

    45 is today considered one of the most significant feminist cult films of the 1980s. Straddling mainstream, arthouse, and exploitation film contexts, Ms. 45 is a potent case study for cult film analysis. At its heart lies two figures: Ferrara himself, and the movie's star, the iconic Zoe Lund, who would further collaborate with Ferrara on later projects such as Bad Lieutenant. This book explores the entwining histories and contexts that led to Ms. 45's creation and helped establish its enduring legacy, particularly in terms of feminist cult film fandom, and the film's status as one of the most important, influential, and powerful rape-revenge films ever made.

    

    

    O'Connor and Ferrante. Franzen, McCarthy, Brian Allen Carr. Kathy Acker and Wallace -- MYSTERY AND MORTALITY is a collection of essays about literature. Paula Bomer focuses on the hardest things in life that inspire great writing, like the pain of loss in death, loss in love, loss in memory. Kierkegaard writes of the poet whose tortured screams from the dungeon sound like beautiful music to the king, so far removed. Here, Bomer's essays bring us back to what we're supposed to derive from literature: compassion.

    

    Chander demonstrates the importance of Romantic notions of authorship to such poets as Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), and Henry Lawson (Australia), using the work of these poets, each prominent in the national cultural of his own country, to explain the crucial role that the Romantic myth of the poet qua legislator plays in the development of nationalist movements across the globe. The first study of its kind, Brown Romantics examines how each of these authors develop poetic means of negotiating such key issues as colonialism, immigration, race, and ethnicity.-- "Modern Language Review"

    

    

    To bring readers back to Milton's masterpiece, John Carey has shortened it to a third of its original length. In this fascinating reinterpretation, Carey reveals new insights about Milton's sources of inspiration, while exploring divided readings of the work's key characters.The Essential Paradise Lost presents the epic's greatest poetry, with linking passages that preserve its cosmic sweep - from the superhuman defiance of a ruined archangel to a pair of tragic lovers, bewildered to find themselves responsible for the fate of the whole human race.

    He ranks seventh among the most frequently reprinted English-language poets, surpassed only by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, and Wordsworth. Yet when the English Jesuit priest died of typhoid fever at age forty-four, he considered his life a failure. He never would have suspected that his poems, which would not be published for another twenty-nine years, would eventually change the course of modern poetry and influence such poets as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Like his contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Hopkins revolutionized poetic language. And yet we love Hopkins not only for his literary genius but for the hard-won faith that finds expression in his verse. Who else has captured the thunderous voice of God and the grandeur of his creation on the written page as Hopkins has? Seamlessly weaving together selections from Hopkins's poems, letters, journals, and sermons, Peggy Ellsberg lets the poet tell the story of a life-long struggle with faith that gave birth to some of the best poetry of all time. Even readers who spurn religious language will find in Hopkins a refreshing, liberating way to see God's hand at work in the world.

    Born to a deeply literary and spiritual household, she went on to study at Cambridge, where she met Jacob Bronowski, William Empson, and Malcolm Lowry. A dedicated Neoplatonist, she studied and presented the works of Thomas Taylor and wrote seminal books on William Blake. With Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble, and Philip Sherrard, she founded, in 1981, the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, its journal Temenos, and, later, the Temenos Academy Review. HRH The Prince of Wales became the patron of the academy in 1997.For our new selection, That Wondrous Pattern, Raine offers sixteen essays that range from “The Inner Journey of the Poet” and “What Is Man?” to essays on Blake, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and several others. The centerpiece, “What Is the Use of Poetry?,” is a rigorous defense of the great art. Editor Brian Keeble himself contributes a fascinating introduction to Raine’s work, and Wendell Berry, a colleague and friend of hers, offers a preface.All who spend time in the presence of this wonderful writer will leave newly entranced with the art and use of the beautiful, convinced that “it is only in moments when we transcend ourselves that we can know anything of value.”

    Yet the text itself can be difficult to understand, and the scholarship devoted to it is often highly technical. This comprehensive introduction to the basic methods and current state of historical-critical Qur'anic scholarship covers all of the field's major questions, such as: Where and when did the Qur'an emerge? How do Qur'anic surahs function as literary compositions? How do the Qur'an's main themes and ideas relate to and transform earlier Jewish and Christian traditions?Reading this book will give you the tools needed to work with and understand this vital but complex text.

    Known for his poetry, plays, and social activism, the importance of religion in Hughes' work has historically been ignored or dismissed. This book puts this aspect of Hughes work front and center, placing it into the wider context of twentieth-century American and African American religious cultures. Best brings to life the religious orientation of Hughes work, illuminating how this powerful figure helped to expand the definition of African American religion during this time.Best argues that contrary to popular perception, Hughes was neither an avowed atheist nor unconcerned with religious matters. He demonstrates that Hughes' religious writing helps to situate him and other black writers as important participants in a broader national discussion about race and religion in America.Through a rigorous analysis that includes attention to Hughes's unpublished religious poems, Langston's Salvation reveals new insights into Hughes's body of work, and demonstrates that while Hughes is seen as one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance, his writing also needs to be understood within the context of twentieth-century American religious liberalism and of the larger modernist movement. Combining historical and literary analyses with biographical explorations of Langston Hughes as a writer and individual, Langston's Salvation opens a space to read Langston Hughes' writing religiously, in order to fully understand the writer and the world he inhabited.

    Cantor first probed Shakespeare’s Roman plays—Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra—in his landmark Shakespeare’s Rome (1976). With Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community. Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds. More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare’s plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare’s works. In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman Plays.

    By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a Hamlet unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended.This book establishes that life in Elsinore is measured not by virtue but by the deceptions and grim brutality of the hunt. It also shows that Shakespeare most vividly represents this reality in the character of Hamlet: his habits of thought and speech depend on the cultures of pretence that he affects to disdain, ensuring his alienation from both himself and the world around him.Lewis recovers a work of far greater magnitude than the tragedy of a young man who cannot make up his mind. He shows that in Hamlet, as in King Lear, Shakespeare confronts his audiences with a universe that received ideas are powerless to illuminate--and where everyone must find their own way through the dark.A major contribution to Shakespeare studies, this book is required reading for all students of early modern literature, drama, culture, and history.

    Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present--from a type of absence they do not dispel. Joining a growing multidisciplinary conversation that rejects an understanding of images as lifeless objects, this book offers a theological meditation on the ways images convey presence into our world. Just as Christ negates himself in order to manifest the invisible God, images, Natalie Carnes contends, negate themselves to give more than they literally or materially are. Her Christological reflections bring iconoclasm and iconophilia into productive relation, suggesting that they need not oppose one another.Investigating such images as the biblical golden calf and paintings of the Virgin Mary, Carnes explores how to distinguish between iconoclasms that maintain fidelity to their theological intentions and those that lead to visual temptation. Offering ecumenical reflections on issues that have long divided Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, Image and Presence provokes a fundamental reconsideration of images and of the global image crises of our time.

    The perception of Africans as subhuman-lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion-and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the "genocidal gaze," an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists.Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust-concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endl?sung (final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology-concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children-in both instances.While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer's book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts-by German Uwe Timm, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, and installation artist William Kentridge of South Africa-that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Careful reading of texts and attention to the narrative deployment of the genocidal gaze-or the resistance to it-establishes discursive similarities in books written both during colonialism and in the post-Holocaust era.The Genocidal Gaze is an original and challenging discussion of such contemporary issues as colonial practices, the Nazi concentration camp state, European and African race relations, definitions of genocide, and postcolonial theory. Moreover, Baer demonstrates the power of literary and artistic works to condone, or even promote, genocide or to soundly condemn it. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

    Drawing on theories of Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, Aby Warburg, and Jacques Derrida, Boym presents the off-modern as an eccentric, self-questioning, anti-authoritarian perspective with roots in the Russian avant-garde, now developed in surprising ways by contemporary artists, architects, and curators around the world. She illustrates the off-modern in discussions of (and with) figures as diverse as architect Rem Koolhaas, Albanian artist-turned-mayor Edi Rama, an art collective in Delhi, and the creator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Both a manifesto and a memoir, The Off-Modern often returns to themes of travel and immigration, exploring issues of diasporic intimacy and productive estrangement amid nostalgic landscapes of urban ruins.

    In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic.Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom--an "aesthetic liberalism"--not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made.Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

    In The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the poem. Is Beowulf the product of unitary or composite authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition and preservation?Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic and metrical regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the poem's transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that pervade Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems, that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca. 1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa 700. Of course, during the poem's written transmission, several hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal practice. Neidorf's analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly attempted to standardize and modernize the text's orthography, but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes resulted in frequent errors. The Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien's Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien's general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his position on various textual issues.

    The author of many memorable works of fiction—including Dusk and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award—he is also celebrated for his memoirs and many non-fiction essays. In her preface, Kay Salter writes,“Don’t Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim’s non-fiction—articles published but never collected in one place until now. Though those many boxes were overflowing with papers, in the end it’s not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim’s endless interest in the world and the people in it… One of the greatest pleasures in writing non-fiction is the writer’s feeling of exploration, of learning about things he doesn’t know, of finding out by reading and observing and asking questions, and then writing it down. That’s what you’ll find here.” This collection gathers his thoughts on writing and profiles of famous writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe and Asia which first appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, People Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, and many other publications.

    It is the most widely read and frequently adapted story of all time, on stage and on film. But why is Les Misérables the novel of the century? David Bellos's remarkable new book brings to life the extraordinary story of how Hugo managed to write his epic novel despite a revolution, a coup d'état and political exile; how he pulled off the deal of the century to get it published, and set it on course to become the novel that epitomizes the grand sweep of history in the nineteenth century. Packed full of information about the background and design of Les Misérables, this biography of a masterpiece nonetheless insists that the moral and social message of Hugo's ever-popular novel is just as important for our century as it was for its own. The Novel of the Century is a book as rich, remarkable and long-lasting as the novel at its heart.Les Misérables is available as a Penguin Classic, in an acclaimed new translation by Christine Donougher, with an introduction by Robert Tombs.

    This subgenre features works from many of America's best-known authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor. Authored by leading experts in the field, the introduction and sixteen chapters explore the American Gothic chronologically, in relation to different social groups, in connection with different geographic regions, and in different media, including children's literature, poetry, drama, film, television, and gaming. This Companion provides a rich and thorough analysis of the American Gothic tradition from a twenty-first-century standpoint, and will be a key resource undergraduates, graduate students, and professional researchers interested in this topic.

    Author Philip Mann dispels the myth that dandyism centers upon vanity through portraits of the first dandy—Regency England’s Beau Brummell—and six twentieth-century figures: Austrian architect Adolf Loos, the Duke of Windsor, neo-Edwardian couturier Bunny Roger, eccentric writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp, French film producer Jean-Pierre Melville, and New German Cinema savant and “inverted dandy” Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He chronicles their style, identity, influence, melancholy, and often untimely demise, using a mélange of photography, biography, and anecdote. Weaving their stories into an extensive and entertaining history of tailoring and men’s fashion, he offers incisive perspective on the dandy’s aesthetic concerns, pensive nostalgia for the golden Edwardian era, and nonchalant persona. He contextualizes the relationship of dandyism to homosexuality and to modernism, while simultaneously portraying the cultural development of a century punctuated by two world wars and social upheaval.

    By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.

    She's alive. She’s modern. She's also a fiction.Played by a boy actor in 1599, Rosalind is a girl who gets into men's clothes so that she can investigate the truth about love. Both male and female, imaginary and real, her intriguing duality gives her a special role.This book is for everyone who has ever loved Shakespeare. Rosalind, his most innovative heroine, can never die. There is no clock in the Forest of Arden where Rosalind finds herself and applies her mercurial wit to teach her lover, Orlando, how to become her perfect partner, issues which consume men and women today.This highly original biography of Rosalind contains exclusive new interviews with Juliet Rylance, Sally Scott, Janet Suzman, Juliet Stevenson, Michelle Terry, award-winning director Blanche McIntyre, as well as insights from Michael Attenborough, Kenneth Branagh, Greg Doran, Rebecca Hall, Adrian Lester, Pippa Nixon, Vanessa Redgrave, and Fiona Shaw.Exploring the fictitious life and the many after-lives of Rosalind, Angela Thirwell delves into the character’s perennial influence on drama, fiction and art. For any fan of the theater, this book ranges far and wide across the Elizabethan world, sexual politics, autobiography, and filmography, bringing Shakespeare's immortal heroine to new and vivid life.

    Coetzee’s essays from 1986 to 1999 was followed by Inner Workings, which contained those from 2000 to 2005. Late Essays gathers together Coetzee’s literary essays since 2006.The subjects covered range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane. There are essays too on Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto.J.M. Coetzee, a great novelist himself, is a wise and insightful guide to these works of international literature that span three centuries.

    M. Spackman was also a literary critic of formidable power and slashing wit. Gathered here are all the essays and reviews he published, including those that appeared in his 1967 book of essays On the Decay of Humanism. Ranging from ancient Greek and Latin literature to the latest poetry and novels, these brilliant essays argue that a work of literature should be evaluated on its artistry and craftsmanship, not on its content or ideas. Spackman quotes, with approval, Nabokov’s belief that, “Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are a lot of hogwash,” and insists “aesthetic assessments… must come before everything else.” On those grounds, he finds such celebrated masters as Leo Tolstoy and Henry James inferior to lesser-known artists like Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett. His iconoclastic views are supported with close technical analyses, but in a relaxed style that delights as it instructs.

    The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators.In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being "village explainers" (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption.Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.

    With such a barrage, it can be tough to sort them all out. Yet here's the list, from Absurdity to Zeugma, all defined through the clever wordplay of Hamilton. In fact, musicals use all the rhythm and rhyme patterns of history's top poets, and the literary skill of crafting characters and straddling genre. Further, the rap battles reveal a list of logical fallacies and top argumentation strategies that could empower lawyers or speech writers at the level of this famed Founding Father. Going deeper, the book lists the themes, motifs, allusions, and so on of the show, revealing sneaky foreshadowing and subtle symbols. For die-hard fans of the show, or those mastering rhetorical terms, logic, and the power of words, it's a delightful geek guide.

    In Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith offer a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary literature through the lens of neoliberalism's economic, social, and cultural ascendance. Bringing together accessible and provocative essays from top literary scholars, this innovative collection examines neoliberalism's influence on literary theory and methodology, literary form, literary representation, and literary institutions.A four-phase approach to the historical emergence of neoliberalism from the early 1970s to the present helps to clarify the complexity of the relationship between neoliberalism and literary culture. Layering that history over the diverse changes in a US-Anglo literary field that has moved away from postmodern forms and sensibilities, the book argues that many literary developments--including the return to realism, the rise of the memoir, the embrace of New Materialist theory, and the pursuit of aesthetic autonomy--make more coherent sense when viewed in light of neoliberalism's ever-increasing expansion into the cultural sphere.The essays gathered here engage a diverse range of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gary Becker, and Eve Sedgwick to address the reciprocal relationship between neoliberalism and conceptual fields such as biopolitics, affect, phenomenology, ecology, and new materialist ontology. These theoretical perspectives are complemented by innovative readings of contemporary works of literature by writers such as Jennifer Egan, Ben Lerner, Gillian Flynn, Teju Cole, Jonathan Franzen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salvador Plascencia, E. L. James, Lisa Robertson, Kenneth Goldsmith, and many others. Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.

    Crusoe is ‘terrify’d to the last degree’. He builds a wall, and fortifies it with guns.Written following the 2016 referendum in which the UK voted to quit the European Union, Robinson is in part a record of the disfiguring influence of Defoe’s novel on British education and culture. The latter-day Robinsons of Kafka, Céline, Patrick Keiller and others are surveyed, and Robinson himself as a fictional character – more ‘a sort of ghost’ – makes known his opinion of the author.

    Looking at intimidating mega-novel masterpieces from The Making of Americans to 2666, David Letzler explores reader responses to all the seemingly random, irrelevant, pointless, and derailing elements that comprise these mega-novels, elementsthathe labels cruft after the computer science term for junk code. In The Cruft of Fiction, Letzler suggests that these books are useful tools to help us understand the relationship between reading and attention.While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation, allowing one to subtly distinguish between text requiring focused attention and text that must be skimmed or even skipped to avoid processing failures. The Cruft of Fiction shows how the attentional maturation prompted by reading mega-novels can help manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes contemporary life."

    These rare and quirky totems of Canadiana, collected over the last three decades, form a travel diary of sorts, through books instead of maps. Covering over one hundred books, and peppered with observations on the Canadian writing and publishing scenes, Busby’s work explores our cultural past from a unique slant, questioning why certain works, rightfully or otherwise, are celebrated and others ignored.

    Particularly since September 11th, this paradox has shaped deeply the lives of border-crossing subjects such as the queer, the refugee, and the activist within and beyond Canadian frontiers. In search of creative ways to engage with the conundrums related to how borders mould social and bodily space, Libe García Zarranz formulates a new cross-border ethic through post-9/11 feminist and queer transnational writing in Canada. Drawing on material feminism, critical race studies, non-humanist philosophy, and affect theory, she proposes a renewed understanding of relationality beyond the lethal binaries that saturate everyday life. TransCanadian Feminist Fictions considers the corporeal, biopolitical, and affective dimensions of border crossing in the works of Dionne Brand, Emma Donoghue, Hiromi Goto, and Larissa Lai. Intersecting the genres of memoir, fiction, poetry, and young adult literature, García Zarranz shows how these texts address the permeability of boundaries and consider the ethical implications for minoritized populations. Urging readers to question the proclaimed glamours of globality, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions responds to a time of increasing inequality, mounting racism, and feminist backlash.

    Through that voice, the reader is given an opportunity to gain new inspiration, motivation and the clarity of purpose needed to move forward to make change in a world much in need of it. Just as Pirkei Avot, the rabbinic commentary written by rabbis in the 2nd century, C.E., provided an ethical road map for the community of its day, Pirkei Imahot provides an ethical road map written by and for contemporary women today. Through the authors' own unique experiences as women, mothers, leaders and teachers in their community, and those of the many women who contributed their own words of wisdom to this book, the reader will gain wisdom on how to live morally within her community, how to participate in tikkun olam, [the repair of the world] and how to strengthen her leadership roles to make a difference. The probing questions found throughout the book provide a further opportunity, through introspection and self-examination, for the reader to learn the lessons found within the covers of this thought provoking book!

    Hensley shows how the modern state's anguished relationship to violence pushed writers to expand the capacities of literary form.The Victorian era is often imagined as an "age of equipoise," but the period between 1837 and 1901 included more than two hundred separate wars. What is the difference, though, between peace and war? Forms of Empire unpacks the seeming paradoxes of the Pax Britannica's endless conflict, showing that the much vaunted equipoise of the nineteenth-century state depended on physical force to guarantee it. But the violence hidden in the shadows of all law --the violence of sovereign power itself--shuddered most visibly into being at the edges of law's reach, in the Empire, where emergency was the rule and death perversely routinized.This book follows some of the nineteenth century's most astute literary thinkers--George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, A.C. Swinburne, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert Louis Stevenson among them--as they wrestled with the sometimes sickening interplay between order and force, and generated new formal techniques to account for fact that an Empire built on freedom had death coiled at its very heart. In contrast to the progressive idealism we have inherited from the Victorians, the writers at the core of Forms of Empire moved beyond embarrassment and denial in the face of modernity's uncanny relation to killing. Instead they sought effects--free indirect discourse, lyric tension, and the idea of literary "character" itself--that might render thinkable the conceptual vertigoes of liberal violence. In the process, they touched up to the dark core of our post-Victorian modernity.Drawing on archival work, literary analyses, and a theoretical framework that troubles the distinction between "historicist" and "formalist" approaches, Forms of Empire links the Victorian period to the present and articulates a forceful vision of why literary thinking matters now.

    Don't fall prey to the lies your teachers taught you. Learn about the mysteries of the symbolism. Never-before-revealed secrets are exposed. And what about the followers? Who did what to whom? Some of them remain with us today. They use crosses as important -even magical- emblems. This book reveals both occult and cult knowledge. Explore the ideologies in these cryptic pages. Widely proclaimed a classic work of historical scholarship, "Hitler Christ" has been hailed as the most eloquent of Ian Tinny's many books. The fruit of many years of reflection and research, it is a dramatic and moving recounting of the darkest chapters survived by humanity. A penetrating study of the personification of evil. This landmark work provides revealing looks at the megalomania, delusions of grandeur, and schizophrenia. All the monstrous parts are dissected in this autopsy. Drawing on previously unseen papers and a wealth of recent scholarship, Tinny explores Professor Rex Curry's research to shine important new light on all the cadavers. For too long the world has tried to grasp how it was possible. This riveting biography brings us closer than ever to the answer. Many previous books have focused only on larger social conditions to explain these historical topics. With his customary insight and irreverence, Tinny interprets the evidence and describes events not only in historical perspective but also in exciting and contemporary terms -- seeing in calamities both modern parallels and timeless lessons. His thoughtful, probing analysis provides new insight into well-known episodes. An appealing blend of philosophy, history, and philological exegesis, from the most-loved American historical leader of the twenty-first century, "Hitler Christ" has long been a source of inspiration and guidance. For those seeking to better understand the mixed messages of the ages, this vivid review is a must-read. "...author Ian Tinny recalls Dr. Rex Curry's love of history, his insatiable curiosity and academia's unwavering belief in his prodigious talent. Dr. Curry's neologistic side, with regard to the fashioning of modernity and the influence and effluence of totalitarian culture are often elided by critics and thus lost in translation. Paradoxically, it is Dr. Curry's very act of exposing so many misrepresentations that conjures a positive corporeal valence between the historian and our sense of self or identity." - Philological Foundation of America "Dr. Rex Curry is a pop-culture icon by being a pop-culture iconoclast. This holds true regarding Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ in 'Hitler Christ' and its biographical critiques." - Blue Teapot Review "All anarchists can unite behind this fascinating book. It should be required reading each day in all schools ...right after the Pledge of Allegiance." - Anarchist Book Society Did Stalin, Mao, Hitler and their ilk prove that there is no God?

    Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a "dead" language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote "some Greek upon the margin—lady's Greek, without the accents." Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing, Greek. Mediating between professional philology and the popularization of classics, these passionate amateurs became an important medium for classical transmission.Combining archival research on the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy, Prins demonstrates how women turned to this genre to perform a passion for ancient Greek, full of eros and pathos. She focuses on five tragedies—Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae—to analyze a wide range of translational practices by women and to explore the ongoing legacy of Ladies' Greek. Key figures in this story include Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, Janet Case and Jane Harrison, Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer, and A. Mary F. Robinson and H.D. The book also features numerous illustrations, including photographs of early performances of Greek tragedy at women's colleges. The first comparative study of Anglo-American Hellenism, Ladies' Greek opens up new perspectives in transatlantic Victorian studies and the study of classical reception, translation, and gender.

    We also have a new pulp serial, Hard Moon from David Hallquist as well as an article by Pulp expert Jeffro Johnson. Please join us in travelling to Astounding Frontiers!

    What is particularly interesting is that Thoreau’s creative mind took him deeper into the argument, as he concluded that this legitimate opposition really wasn’t enough. In Thoreau’s opinion, anyone who believed something to be wrong had a duty to resist it actively.These ideas were completely at odds with the prevailing opinions of the day – that it was the duty of every citizen to support the state. Thoreau connected ideas and notions in a novel manner and went against the tide, generating new hypotheses so that people could see matters in a new light. It is a mark of the success of his creative thinking that his views are now considered mainstream, and that his arguments are still deployed in defence of the principle of civil disobedience.

    In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western― or Christian Platonist―tradition, he argues, tells us that man is an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism born of Edmund Burke's jeremiad against the French Revolution as an effort to preserve the West's vision of man and the cosmos as ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that vision and its tradition, Wilson offers an extended study of the nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and logos, in order to rejoin the two.Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form―a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson's book invites its readers to a renewal of the West's intellectual tradition.

    Three novels, The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse and A Pass in the Grampians as well as a volume of poetry, In the Cairngorms, all published between 1928 and 1934 while she was still only in her thirties, established her reputation as one of the most highly respected members of the Scottish modernist movement. Then, much later, and immediately declared a masterpiece, came The Living Mountain, her meditation on mountains - the Cairngorms in particular, and it has become a classic.Nan Shepherd was an intensely private woman. But the author, Charlotte Peacock, in this first biography, has been as successful in finding her way into the life of her subject as Nan herself was in “finding her way into the mountains”. The writer has had unparalleled access to all Nan’s archives and to all her remaining friends and acquaintances. The book unravels the mysteries, dispels some of the rumours and gives insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer.The result is a beautifully written biography that will surely become the standard life of Nan Shepherd.The author, Charlotte Peacock, is a writer, photographer and poet. This is her first book.

    In this brief book, Wood, himself one of the most gifted writers among contemporary critics, explores Empson as a writer, a distinguished poet whose criticism is a brilliant literary performance--and proof that the act of reading can be an unforgettable adventure.Drawing out the singularity and strength of Empson's writing, including its unfailing wit, Wood traces the connections between Empson's poetry and criticism from his first and best-known critical works, Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, to later books such as Milton's God and The Structure of Complex Words. Wood shows why this pioneer of close reading was both more and less than the inventor of New Criticism--more because he was the greatest English critic since Coleridge, and didn't belong to any school; and less because he had severe differences with many contemporary critics, especially those who dismissed the importance of an author's intentions.Beautifully written and rich with insight, On Empson is an elegant introduction to a unique writer for whom literature was a nonstop form of living.

    By attending to a series of novels, Paul Lakeland proposes serious fiction as an antidote to the failure of the religious imagination today and shows how literature might lead the secular mind at least to the threshold of mystery.

    Which words can help us to veer conceptually along with drastic environmental flux? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert asked thirty brilliant thinkers to each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and global climate change.Some verbs are closely tied to natural processes: compost, saturate, seep, rain, shade, sediment, vegetate, environ. Many are vaguely unsettling: drown, unmoor, obsolesce, power down, haunt. Others are enigmatic or counterintuitive: curl, globalize, commodify, ape, whirl. And while several verbs pertain to human affect and action—love, represent, behold, wait, try, attune, play, remember, decorate, tend, hope—a primary goal of Veer Ecology is to decenter the human. Indeed, each of the essays speaks to a heightened sense of possibility, awakening our imaginations and inviting us to think the world anew from radically different perspectives. A groundbreaking guide for the twenty-first century, Veer Ecology foregrounds the risks and potentialities of living on—and with—an alarmingly dynamic planet.Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Joseph Campana, Rice U; Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Lara Farina, West Virginia U; Cheryll Glotfelty, U of Nevada, Reno; Anne F. Harris, DePauw U; Tim Ingold, U of Aberdeen; Serenella Iovino, U of Turin; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Scott Maisano, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Tobias Menely, U of California, Davis; Steve Mentz, St. John’s U; J. Allan Mitchell, U of Victoria; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Laura Ogden, Dartmouth College; Serpil Opperman, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Daniel C. Remein, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Margaret Ronda, U of California, Davis; Nicholas Royle, U of Sussex; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Christopher Schaberg, Loyola U; Rebecca R. Scott, U of Missouri; Theresa Shewry, U of California, Santa Barbara; Mick Smith, Queen’s U; Jesse Oak Taylor, U of Washington; Brian Thill, Golden West College; Coll Thrush, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College; Julian Yates, U of Delaware.

    Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and saw the world through the lens of value's many hidden and untapped meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace's fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies.As Severs demonstrates, the concept of value occupied the intersection of Wallace's major interests: economics, work, metaphysics, mathematics, and morality. Severs ranges from the Great Depression and the New Deal to the realms of finance, insurance, and taxation to detail Wallace's quest for balance and grace in a world of excess and entropy. Wallace showed characters struggling to place two feet on the ground and restlessly sought to "balance the books" of a chaotic culture. Explaining why Wallace's work has galvanized a new phase in contemporary global literature, Severs draws connections to key Wallace forerunners Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, as well as his successors--including Dave Eggers, Teddy Wayne, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith--interpreting Wallace's legacy in terms of finance, the gift, and office life.

    Even though almost every English department in the United States housed some version of a creative writing program by the time of its publication, literary scholars had not previously considered that this institutional phenomenon was historically significant. McGurl’s groundbreaking book effectively established that “the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history,” forcing us to revise our understanding not only of the relationship between higher education and literary production, but also of the periodizing terminology we had previously used to structure our understanding of twentieth-century literature.After the Program Era explores the consequences and implications, as well as the lacunae and liabilities, of McGurl’s foundational intervention. Glass focuses only on American fiction and the traditional MFA program, and this collection aims to expand and examine its insights in terms of other genres and sites. Postwar poetry, in particular, has until now been neglected as a product of the Program Era, even though it is, arguably, a “purer” example, since poets now depend almost entirely on the patronage of the university. Similarly, this collection looks beyond the traditional MFA writing program to explore the pre-history of writing programs in American universities, as well as alternatives to the traditionally structured program that have emerged along the way. Taken together, the essays in After the Program Era seek to answer and explore many of these questions and continue the conversations McGurl only began. CONTRIBUTORS Seth Abramson, Greg Barnhisel, Eric Bennett, Matthew Blackwell, Kelly Budruweit, Mike Chasar, Simon During, Donal Harris, Michael Hill, Benjamin Kirbach, Sean McCann, Mark McGurl, Marija Rieff, Juliana Spahr, Stephen Voyce, Stephanie Young

    This involves not just the exploration of those properties in comics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures that has hitherto been overlooked. This research monograph is, then, not an application of narratology in the medium and art of comics, but a revision of narratological concepts and approaches through the study of narrative comics. Thus, while narratology is brought to bear on comics, equally comics are brought to bear on narratology.

    The allure of many modern aesthetic experiences, this book argues, is that artworks trigger and provide ways to make sense of this oscillating, in-between place. John Plotz focuses on Victorian and early modernist writers and artists who understood their work as tapping into, amplifying, or giving shape to a suspended duality of experience.The book begins with the decline of the romantic tale, the rise of realism, and John Stuart Mill’s ideas about social interaction and subjective perception. Plotz examines Pre-Raphaelite paintings that take semi-detached states of attention as their subject and novels that treat provincial subjects as simultaneously peripheral and central. He discusses how realist writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James show how consciousness can be in more than one place at a time; how the work of William Morris demonstrates the shifting forms of semi-detachment in print and visual media; and how Willa Cather created a form of modernism that connected aesthetic dreaming and reality. Plotz concludes with a look at early cinema and the works of Buster Keaton, who found remarkable ways to portray semi-detachment on screen.In a time of cyberdependency and virtual worlds, when it seems that attention to everyday reality is stretching thin, Semi-Detached takes a historical and critical look at the halfway-thereness that audiences have long comprehended and embraced in their aesthetic encounters.

    This engaging study examines how the social, urban, sensory and historical characteristics of these playhouses affected dramatists, audiences and actors. Each chapter provides new interpretations of seminal King's Men's works written as the company began to perform in both settings, including The Alchemist, The Tempest and Henry VIII. Presenting a rich and compelling account of the two early modern theatres, the book also suggests fresh insights into recent contemporary productions at Shakespeare's Globe, London and the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

     Alan Nadel explores influential non-fiction books, magazine articles, and public documents in conjunction with films such as Singin’ in the Rain, On the Waterfront, Sunset Boulevard, and Sayonara, to examine how these films worked through fresh anxieties that emerged during the 1950s.

    This, however should surprise no one, for Milton himself despised philosophers. He associated philosophy with deceit in his theological writings, and made philosophizing into one of the activities of fallenangels in hell. Yet, in this book, philosopher and literary critic Tzachi Zamir argues that Milton's disdain for their vocation should not prevent philosophers from turning an inquisitive eye to Paradise Lost. Because Milton's greatest poem conducts a multilayered examination of puzzles thatintrigue philosophers, instead of neatly breaking from philosophy, it maintains a penetrating rapport with it. Paradise Lost sets forth bold claims regarding the meaning of genuine knowledge, or acting meaningfully, or taking in the world fully, or successfully withdrawing from inner deadness. Othertopics touched upon by Milton involve some of the most central issues within the philosophy of religion: the relationship between reason and belief, the uniqueness of religious poetry, the meaning of gratitude, and the special role of the imagination in faith. This tension-disparaging philosophy onthe one hand, but taking up much of what philosophers hope to understand on the other-turns Milton's poem into an exceptionally potent work for a philosopher of literature. Ascent is a philosophical reading of the poem that attempts to keep audible Milton's anti-philosophy stance. The picture ofinterdisciplinarity that emerges is, accordingly, neither one of a happy percolation among fields ('philosophy', 'literature'), nor one of rigid boundaries. Overlap and partial agreement clash against contestation and rivalry. It is these conflicting currents which Ascent aims to capture, if not toreconcile.