Literature: history and criticism Books

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...

Two destinies intersect in Broken April. The first is that of Gjor, a young mountaineer who (much against his will) has just killed a man in order to avenge the death of his older brother, and who expects to be killed himself in keeping with the...

This volume recovers the allegory in Dante's Divine Comedy and presumes that readers' deficient knowledge of or interest in allegory have led to misinterpretations of Dante's poem. None of the dozens of commentaries on the Comedy published in the first...

When Scenes of Clerical Life appeared anonymously in 1853 the Saturday Review pictured its author, George Eliot, as a bearded Cambridge clergyman and the revered father of several children. When Anthony Trollope published Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel...

When Scenes of Clerical Life appeared anonymously in 1853 the Saturday Review pictured its author, George Eliot, as a bearded Cambridge clergyman and the revered father of several children. When Anthony Trollope published Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel...

Monsman undertakes a comprehensive critical analysis of Walter Pater's fiction, which presents the critic with numerous causes of frustration, not the least of which is a lack of both dramatic narration and description. Pater is rarely vivid and...

Originally published in 1994. In The Improvement of the Estate, Alistair Duckworth contends that understanding Mansfield Park is fundamental to appreciating Jane Austen's body of work. Professor Duckworth understands Mansfield Park as underscoring the...

Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the ""possible articulation"" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan examines that multifaceted...

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture...

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture...

This book details Lee's life from Gettysburg to his death just five years after the South's surrender at Appomattox. Rather than retreating bitterly from life, Lee sought to heal the nation, even meeting with his rival, Ulysses S. Grant, while the former...

This book contains four essays by Professor Charles Singleton: ""Allegory,"" ""Symbolism,"" ""The Pattern at the Center,"" and ""The Substance of Things Seen."" These four essays treat four dimensions of meaning essential to understanding the substance...

During these times of growing interest in spiritual life, in personal prayer, and in meditation, many people are asking questions about the inner life. The Inward Pilgrimage opens the way for readers to discover the riches of sixteen spiritual classics...

In recent decades, individualistic and secular ways of participating in the world have grown pervasive in Western society. This evolution has compelled shifts in Indian Country as well. In After the Theft of the Sacred, Native American literature scholar...

If the objective of the Romantic movement was nothing less than to redefine the meaning of life itself, what role did experiments play in this movement? While earlier scholarship has established both the importance of science generally and vitalism...

As Stalin lies dying, this novel records his last thoughts, which he renders as a movie about the people he believes envenomed his life, namely, Lenin and certain women. (A film devotee, Stalin so loved movies that some scholars have even suggested that...

Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth...

From "Mother Earth" to "Mother Nature," women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to...

Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are ''documents'' of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture...

In the eleventh Woods Cop Mystery, Conservation Officer Grady Service is on unpaid suspension until spring, but-stubborn as ever-continues to patrol the Mosquito Wilderness, along with his complicated past. Service is off-duty through July 4 following a...