Literature: history and criticism Books

Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit'or at least devalue'the importance of ""romance"" as a thematic and generic category of American fiction. In The Form of American Romance, he examines its evolution and meaning through...

Originally published in 1968. In The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, James Baird traces the process of Wallace Steven's Grand Poem and the total structure that it accomplished in language. In the words of Professor Baird,...

Originally published in 1972. This book tries to study the affinities in form and matter between the versified translation of the Psalms and George Herbert's lyrics. Coburn Freer reads Herbert's poetry by way of the metrical psalms that precede it,...

An accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These...

In the eighteenth century, antiquaries - wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians'used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently...

In the eighteenth century, antiquaries'wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians'used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently...

This essay in comparative literature represents the first extended attempt to relate Dante's major allegorical mode to classical and medieval interpretations of epic poetry rather than to patristic biblical exegesis. It also is the first comprehensive...

Thomas Weiskel investigates the concept of the sublime in the poetry of English Romantic writers. His work infuses elements of structuralism and psychological thought in his attempt to describe and demystify the sublime experience'or, in his words, to...

Despite his prolificacy, Washington Irving remained an underexamined figure among literary scholars at the time William L. Hedges published his definitive study of the author in 1965. Most contemporary scholars believed that Irving's central contribution...

Originally publihsed in 1977. This book presents a theory for the metaphoric construal of deviant sentences. The theory has two aspects. The first relates to metaphor considered as a productive process of language and describes the mechanisms that...

In E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry, Norman Friedman argues that critics who have focused on what Cummings's poetry lacks have failed to judge Cummings on his strengths. Friedman identifies a main strength of Cummings as his being a ""sensual mystic...

In Ishmael, Professor James Baird responds to the increasing secularization of Western civilization and the creation of what he calls ""authentic primitivism."" For Baird, the aesthetic austerity of Protestantism undermined the structure of symbols...

This book concerns the archetypal quality of Wordsworth's The Prelude, specifically the ways in which it develops and defines concepts of language, time, and narrative that influenced writers who came after Wordsworth. Frank D. McConnell sees the...

Literary scholars often acknowledge that Brecht borrowed from a variety of traditions, including Goethe, Schiller, expressionists, naturalists, and realists, all of whom affected his work. However, they tend not to address any single tradition as...

Stef+ín Einarsson covers almost a thousand years of Icelandic literature in tracing the influence of the sagas and eddic poems. The book begins with background on Icelandic literature, outlining its literary roots in Scandinavia. Following this,...

Professor Sachs shows the inner coherence of Samuel Johnson's thought by pointing out the interconnectedness of his remarks on religious, moral, aesthetic, political, and psychological subjects. Reason and imagination, the central concepts in the...

Sylvia Plath is one of the most controversial poets of our time. For some readers, she is the symbol of women oppressed. For others, she is the triumphant victim of her own intensity'the poet pursuing sensation to the ultimate uncertainty, death. For...

Originally published in 1971. In Mysteriously Meant, Professor Allen maps the intellectual landscape of the Renaissance as he explains the discovery of an allegorical interpretation of Greek, Latin, and finally Egyptian myths and the effect this...

For Sigurd Burckhardt, literary interpretation began with the discovery of an ""inconsistency"" in a text. Minimizing the possibility that the writer has ""unconsciously"" fallen into an inconsistency in the use of material, the true interpreter,...

The meaning and objectives of literature, argues David Bleich, are created by the reader, who depends on community consensus to validate his or her judgements. Bleich proposes that the study of English be consciously reoriented from a knowledge-finding...

Originally published in 1986. In The House of Death, Arnold Stein studies the ways in which English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined their own ends and wrote of the deaths of those they loved or wished to honor. Drawing on a wide...

Originally published in 1980. This book emphasizes the ideas that Wallace Stevens embeds in his poetry, providing the first study to provide an intellectual biography of Stevens. It examines Stevens' naturalism, his ideas of the self, and the...

Shakespeare and Loss explores how, in Shakespeare's late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), some of the most fundamental forms of understanding and life that bind human communities...

Shakespeare and Loss explores how, in Shakespeare's late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), some of the most fundamental forms of understanding and life that bind human communities...

Shakespeare and Loss explores how, in Shakespeare's late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), some of the most fundamental forms of understanding and life that bind human communities...

Shakespeare and Loss explores how, in Shakespeare's late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), some of the most fundamental forms of understanding and life that bind human communities...

Originally published in 1962. The rise of ""metaphoric"" criticism is a reaction against a previous critical preoccupation with psychology and time. Milton spatialized time, thoroughly mastering a metaphoric technique. Professor Cope, after discussing...

Mark Twain's literary criticism is a significant branch of his writing that is relatively less explored and appreciated than his other writing. Sydney Krause analyzes the full range of Twain's criticism, much of which has lain neglected in notebooks,...

This book is primarily a literary study of Rousseau's account of his diplomatic experiences in Venice, contained in book 7 of the Confessions and written in 1769. The author analyzes Rousseau's methods of achieving an artistic rendering of psychological...

Adultery is a dominant feature in chivalric literature; it becomes a major concern in Shakespeare's last plays; and it forms the central plot of novels from Anna Karenina to Couples. Tony Tanner proposes that transgressions of the marriage contract take...

Originally published in 1941. This book stresses the transcendental, rather than purely aesthetic, qualities of William Wordsworth's work. It argues that the unusual aspects of Wordsworth's mind are not isolated and did not seem to him fanciful or merely...

The Poetics of Jacobean Drama argues for a rediscovered approach to the study of Renaissance drama. Coburn Freer observes that most modern criticism of this drama treats the plays as if they were written in prose, thus overlooking whole areas of dramatic...

Originally published in 1970. The question of man's freedom to exercise his will'as active an issue among twentieth-century philosophers and theologians as it was in the Jesuit and Jansenist camps known to Pascal'is basic to this study. Pascal's...

The Work of Reform interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in Piers Plowman had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and...

Originally published in 1986. The ghastly fate of a drowned man brought to a lake's surface in Wordsworth's ""Prelude"" typifies a fundamental pattern in Romantic writing, argues Cynthia Chase. Disfiguration involves not only a departure from...

The first section of The Novel-Machine consists of five short chapters that rewrite Autobiography as an undisguised theory of realistic fiction, exploring its paradoxes while placing it in the context of mid-Victorian criticism. Chapters 6 and 7 survey...

This is a very interesting collection of topics that centers on critical methodologies and the central problems of medieval alterity.

This biographical history tells the story of an American family in conflict and four brothers' attempts to regain the prestigious position their family once held. Loaded with never-before-published photos and little-known facts, this probing character...

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Kemp Malone provides a guide to reading Chaucer's work that is intended for readers who are familiar with Chaucer's work but who are not Chaucerians. The first chapter places Chaucer in the historical and literary context of the fourteenth century. The...

The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that George Herbert is one of the great masters of lyric poetry. Stein discusses Herbert's diction, imagery, syntax, and rhythm in light of his organization of the imaginative materials of time and...

As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of...

As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of...

In an age when genteel women wrote little more than personal letters, how did Jane Austen manage to become a novelist? Was she an isolated genius who rose to fame through sheer talent? Did she draw strength from the support of her family or from women...

The book presents a commentary on Le Morte d'Arthur that illuminates Malory's literary aims and techniques. The author brings to bear several hitherto unused source materials on Malory's work and offers new analyses of his authorial purposes. Lumiansky...

The book presents a commentary on Le Morte d'Arthur that illuminates Malory's literary aims and techniques. The author brings to bear several hitherto unused source materials on Malory's work and offers new analyses of his authorial purposes. Lumiansky...