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Subject Area: Literary Criticism
Abrams, Barbara Lise2009 0-7734-4663-X 168 pages
This book examines the background of our modern concept of marginality by focusing on Diderot’s materialist philosophy and his search for the origins of genius, and locating it within the French Enlightenment quest for truth.
Schorr, James L.
2022 1-4955-0977-X 320 pages
"The present edition is destined for the modern reader and has attempted a significant reading of the 1725-1726 edition. Substantive changes from the 1742 edition, that is, changes in word order that nay alter the meaning of the text, are indicated in footnotes as variants. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have been modernized, although I keep Van Effen's preference for capitalizing the deity. I also follow the 1725-1726 edition's use of italics, which serve a variety of functions, from indicating simple emphasis, to underscoring the author's use of irony, as well as indicating quoted materials, whether they be simple quotes, parts of a dialogue, or a quote within a quote."(xxxiv)
Vlad, Florian
2022 1-4955-1039-5 172 pages
"John Quinn is an American of the 20th and of the 21st centuries, though, in which what were once frontiers are now landscapes yet to be mapped by poetic imaginations. The poet roams and wanders from Alaska to Oregon, to the Far West and the Southwest, from Northern Iowa all the way to Henderson, Clark County, Nevada and further south. He also sharpens his individual sense of self and his sense of belonging to a collective American identity by definitions in relation to cultural alterity. " -from the Author's "Introduction"
Ku, Tim-hung
2013 0-7734-4307-X 308 pages
A first ever work on comparative genre papers covering several genres on materials drawn from Chinese and Western literary traditions. The ultimate goal of the book is to describe a general, semiotics-based poetics of comparative genres and of the literary reception process.
Arndt, Eve Marie
2001 0-7734-7410-2 312 pages
This first full-length critical study of Sean O’Faolain’s oeuvre in 25 years explores this neglected Irish writer and puts his achievement in historical and political context. Arndt’s theoretical framework uses primarily Foucault and Fanon. Though O’Faolain tried to convey a picture of himself as an internationalist, he also remained emotionally attached to his Irish roots. This study proposes that these fundamental points lie at the heart his often contradictory arguments on contemporary Irish issues such as the Gaelic heritage, Catholicism, nationalism, and the Anglo-Irish and English colonial presence in Ireland. Essential reading for those interested in cultural, political, historical and literary aspects of 20th century Ireland.
Atfield, Joy Rosemary
2007 0-7734-5391-1 168 pages
This book is a study of the poetry of Seamus Heaney collected in his volume Opened Ground, in which the poems are read in Jungian terms. Heaney had referred to himself as “Jungian in religion” and naturally used terms such as “initiation”, “individuation” and the “unconscious” in interviews and essays. Therefore, key Jungian terms are examined in relation to Heaney’s poetic expression of these and explored through at least one poem from each of the collections represented in Opened Ground. This allows for an exploration of the creative tensions involved in the poet’s presentation of personal, poetic and political concerns, while also allowing for further examination of the powerful physicality and musical qualities of the language in which he luxuriates.
Simmons, Robert E.
2014 0-7734-4269-3 296 pages
This book examines four of Blake's works that use a consistent fourfold imagery and structure based on the four "zoas", or aspects of Albion. Luvah as the zoa of "god" is the state of imgaination in England. Urthona as the zoa of "body" is the physical state of England. Urizen as the zoa of "soul" is the intellectual state of the people of England, and Tharmas as the zoa of "world" is the state of England's relationship to other countries.
Wagner, Eva
2016 1-4955-0440-6 312 pages
As the book title indicates, It is first of all a new theory of tragedy. In particular, it is an investigation of fate and guilt concepts as rationalisations of irrational tragic reality, reflected generally in Geistegeschichte, then in literary tragedies of the Western world and eventually in Storm and Stress dramas. Remarkably, they summarize, contradict, and to some extent predict all major “solutions” to tragic insolubility, as illustrated in the main sections: Greek, Christian, and Enlightenment world views.
Seeman, Chris
2018 1-4955-0659-2 128 pages
Dr. Seeman's book looks at the trial of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark (15: 1-15) and contacts the passage with the Parable of the Sower in the same Gospel. Mark's depiction of their interaction links Jesus' fate with that of the other messengers in the story -- past, present, and future. The especially close correspondence between the circumstances of Jesus' and John's deaths reveal an antithetical contrast between the coming kingdom of God and the existing regimes of Herod and Pilate.
Flota, Brian
2009 0-7734-3828-9 344 pages
This work examines how writers in the San Francisco Bay Area worked to develop a multiculturalist American literature. This study counteracts popular narratives of multiculturalism’s boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s by showing that a large group of culturally eclectic writers in the Bay Area were re-envisioning American identity through a multiculturalist looking glass many years earlier.
Shaul, Michele
2016 1-4955-0466-2 116 pages
This study critically examines the idea of culture from a perspective that extends beyond ethnicity. The contrast of metropolitan area and small town parallel experiences serves to underline the universality of Castillo’s characters as well as her topical relevance to our contemporary world.
Roblin, Ronald
1990 0-88946-368-9 534 pages
Essays which attempt to communicate to the reader some of the major contributions of Frankfurt School critical theory to aesthetics by means of secondary studies of such figures as Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Lukács, Collingwood, Foucault, and Habermas. Essayists include Eugene Lunn, Douglas Kellner, Sabine Wilke, Barry Katz, Richard Wolin, Rainer Nägele, Lambert Zuidervaart, Thomas Huhn, Ronald Roblin, Janelle Reinelt, David Ingram, Margaret Rose, Stephen White, and Thomas Dumm.
Ferencz, Gyözö
1998 0-7734-8355-1 196 pages
Weaver, Wesley J. III
2003 0-7734-6989-3 304 pages
This is the first monograph on the work of Álvaro Pombo, one of the five most important novelists writing in Spain today. He explores themes such as death, homosexuality, religion, gender, adolescence, and writing in his novels. Through a careful analysis of the diverse literary and philosophical undercurrents that inform Pombo’s narrative, this study analyzes in detail the novels within novels that chronicle the fascinating encounter of the I and the other. In Spanish.
Davidson, Phebe
2001 0-7734-7342-4 156 pages
Six wide-ranging essays which track the evolving representation and understanding of stories and themes, an exercise in seeing where a particular idea, image, or sequence of events will lead. For example, Chapter One traces the evolution of the black/white masculine friendship pair from James Fenimore Cooper through Die Hard to The Green Mile. Chapter four discusses Thelma and Louise and Leaving Normal as complementary cultural texts which serve to extend gender definitions found in earlier American literature and which continue actively to engage men and women in American culture today. “There’s nothing ordinary about Davidson’s always interesting insights throughout these six essays. . . . An engrossing, original look at film, energetic and lively. As a cultural observer, Davidson is sensitive and conscientious, and she reveals the American myths that both imprison and liberate.” – Book Reader
Millington, Mark I.
1993 0-7734-9340-9 220 pages
Presents a comprehensive analysis drawing on concepts from psychoanalytical theory and paying particular attention to the representation of gender. After an exploration of the main theoretical concepts deployed, the emerging thematic and textual features in the early stories are defined. The study then concentrates on the stories of the 1950s and 1960s. A repeating pattern in the analyses is the elaboration of a reading and then the discovery of how the coherence of that reading unravels as the stories' textuality disrupts any simple desire to `make sense'. The reading process itself is problematized via concepts drawn from psychoanalysis which help to elucidate the non-transparency of the texts and transferential effects in reading. The final chapter considers the nature of repetition in Onetti: the fact that the stories return again and again to certain ideas is viewed as disabling of a final resolution of the gender problems which are implicit in the stories. Conversely, the fact that these problems are not resolved is also enabling of further writing and invention.
Weaver, Brett E.
2018 1-4955-0633-9 216 pages
This work is an annotated bibliography of critical works, (articles and books in print and online), written about J.D. Salinger and his work between 1982 and 2016. Weaver's updated bibliography includes 97 sources on Salinger, and the newer scholarship continues to account for Salinger's enduring presence in twenty-first century literature and film.
March, Kathleen
1991 0-7734-9749-8 248 pages
A selection of a literary genre little known outside its geographical area is here represented to give the English-speaking public useful information about the work of some writers in this field, extending modern Galician literature beyond the confines of the Spanish State. It forms part of a growing awareness among Hispanists and Luso-Brazilian scholars of the other Iberian languages with their corresponding cultures: Galician, Catalan and Basque.
Burgess, Robin
2005 0-7734-6048-9 152 pages
This work is an important, but neglected, treatise of 18th century musical aesthetics. It belongs to that mid-century movement in the arts that saw a reaction against the artificiality and formality, as it came to seem, of the Baroque style and towards the naturalness of expression characteristic of the painting, literature, drama, even fashions in gardening in the latter part of the century. Algarotti was a man of wide interests and deep culture who himself assisted in opera productions in Berlin and Parma. In this essay, he sets out a program for the form of opera that bears remarkable resemblances with the first recognisably modern works in the form that are still performed today, the operas of Gluck. The essay attracted considerable attention in its day, being translated into several European languages. The new edition makes available once more the contemporary English translation, which is both accurate and has an attractive period quality.
Crist, Robert L.
2017 1-4955-0585-5 232 pages
An examination of the interrelationship of of poetry and theory shows that theoretical approaches to lyrical texts are not mutually exclusive but endlessly complementary. The application of of theories to poems in the twelve sections of the study demonstrates both the fecundity of theory and the openness of texts to exhaustless appreciation.
Banerjee, Amitava
2001 0-7734-7721-7 432 pages
Collects critical essays on Hardy’s poetry, from Edmund Gosse (1918) to Samuel Hynes (1997), which reflect not only the diverse nature of Hardy’s poetry but also show how critics of different generations have added to our understanding and appreciation of it. Some articles are concerned with Hardy’s relationship with other poets like Wordsworth, Housman, Yeats, and Larkin.
Martin, Graham
2003 0-7734-6735-1 312 pages
This study contributes to the discussion on the meaning of folktales, which are taken entirely as seriously as mainstream fiction, and are seen as a continuum with modern literary fantasy, arguing that ‘ultrafiction’ (fantasy fiction and science fiction) have a wider range than either modernism or realism. It discusses both well-known writers and those less often studied, questioning the established ‘canon.’ It seeks an overall view of fantasy and science fiction, addressing the great range of the subject, e. g. mythology and metaphysics, the supernatural, utopia/dystopia, scientific speculation, and social morality.
DeLio, Thomas
2017 1-4955-0592-8 380 pages
Over the past thirty years, Thomas DeLio, American composer and music theorist, has produced a highly original body of music and writings that have established his artistic and scholarly voice as unique amongst his peers. His writings have addressed music by a diverse collection of American and European composers including Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Arnold Schoenberg, Erik Satie and Luigi Dallapiccola.
Martínez-Dueñas, José Luis
2001 0-7734-7475-7 204 pages
This work provides a fresh and illuminating approach by combining close analysis and interpretation with a perspective that is not restricted to current post-colonial or even Caribbean readings of Walcott’s work. It explores his poetry in relation to the traditional canon, his departures from the canon and its authors, his critical position in relation to it. It examines the complex relations that his poetic discourse establishes with previous poetic registers, with its own problematic nature, and the interplay of poetic meaning, landscape, and history. Includes an interview with Derek Walcott.
Klein, Holger
1994 0-7734-9114-7 408 pages
These nineteen essays take a comparative approach, dealing with committed texts as literary works of art. Spanning three decades, they also contain theoretical reflections on the conditions of committed writing and on approaches and methods appropriate to their study by literary critics. Some are broadly theoretical, some offer surveys of larger areas, but most study a few significant texts, demonstrating ways in which literature that offers things besides aesthetic enjoyment may be fruitfully analyzed and appraised.
McDermott, James Dishon
2006 0-7734-5899-9 168 pages
Throughout literary history, committed writers have sought to rebuke the inauthenticity of excessively ‘full’ discourses by deploying a minimalist literary style. In their texts, these literary minimalists substitute absence for those linguistic structures that are critical to the authority and integrity of the full text. In the postmodern period specifically, writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver, and David Mamet have used this literary style of contextualized fearlessness as a means of criticizing and reforming philosophical, literary, social, or political practices perceived to be inauthentic by virtue of their wasteful foundationalism. Rather than merely diverting or reassuring the reader, each writer seeks to create edifying texts that not only raise doubts about essentialist platitudes but also alert the reader to the possibility of authentic self-transformation through a reckoning with contingency. In using an austere style to challenge a set of foundationalist discursive practices, Wittgenstein addresses metaphysical philosophy and its claims to logocentric Truth; Brautigan, the discourses of Beat writing and Abstract Expressionism and their claims to noncontingent selfhood; Carver, Reaganite propaganda and its claims to essentialist community; and Mamet, mass-media entertainment and its claims to cultural hegemony.
Legg, Olga
2019 1-4955-0772-6 120 pages
Dr. Legg's book adopts a semiotic approach in order to understand culture and society as a theatrical category and the way it functions as a dialogic discourse in the film Le Bal, also known as "O'Baille", directed by Ettore Scola.
Will, Frederic
2012 0-7734-2911-5 232 pages
These are poems describing the process of writing as integral to creating the self and to our experience of time. There are numerous poems in this text. Ranging from discussing distinctions between Modernism and Postmodernism, to being nervous, to the joy of reading, the goal is to deconstructively describe the process of writing.
Li, Ni
2023 1-4955-1057-3 384 pages
This work builds on the model which tries to answer the following critical questions: >What is meant by Barnes's dictum that memory is identity and identity is memory? >Do the biographical, fictional and historical narratives fit with one another? >Does Barnes intend to let his narrative art carry its religious/moral sense? >Does the narrative art help unravel the riddle and lead him and his contemporaries to sensible moral orientations?
Kérchy, Anna
2008 0-7734-4892-6 372 pages
This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. Through a corporeal narratological method—a close-reading interfacing of semioticized bodies in the text and of the somatized text on the body—the author deciphers how the ideologically disciplined, normativized-neutralized, ‘cultural’ body and its repressed yet haunting transgressive, corporeal, material ‘reality’ (are) (de)compose(d by) the Carterian fiction’s destabilizing discursive subversions and vibrations surfacing in narrative blind-spots, overwritings, textual ruptures or rhetorical manoeuvres.
Marti, Kevin
1991 0-7734-9764-1 220 pages
This book argues that discourse on the body in Western European literature must begin by considering how the body served as the most basic medieval matrix for understanding reality; the modern `rediscovery' of the body and the modern focus on interdisciplinary perspectives constitute a return to medieval ways of knowing.
Neumeyer, David
1987 0-88946-436-7 396 pages
Offers material unique in the Schenker literature. Argues for the acoustical foundations of Schenker's theory of music, gives a concise tabulation of elements of his theory, and provides annotated analytic sketches.
Wells, Jonathan
1988 0-88946-671-8 242 pages
A study that achieves special relevance because of the controversy lately reintroduced into public consciousness by the scientific creationists. Corrects the record regarding the actual nature of Hodge's response.
Hester, Karlton E.
2016 1-4955-0437-9 116 pages
This book is a study of both epigrams as a literary form and also a study of the poetic epigrams written by John Donne. Therefore, it is a contribution both to our understanding of literary genres themselves and, also of particular epigrams written by the great Seventeenth Century poet John Donne.
Hester, M. Thomas
2016 1-4955-0437-9 114 pages
Professor Hester is the world’s expert on the poetry of John Donne. In this book he delivers what he promises: an elucidation of the literary power of Donne’s epigrams as a genre.
Whitehead, John
1992 0-7734-9582-7 280 pages
While literary critics have given disproportionate attention to the work of Auden and MacNeice, this commentary gives equal attention to their contemporaries Day Lewis and Spender. The author brings fresh insights to their poetry, identifies undetected sources, and elucidates obscurities. By placing their poetry in its biographical and historical contexts, he demonstrates how four poets with similar social and educational backgrounds responded to the stresses of private life and uneasy times, while remaining continuously aware of each other's work. His chronological survey of their entire poetic output over sixty years dispels the notion that their chief interest is as representative writers of a single decade, "the thirties".
Abdulla, Adnan
2004 0-7734-6379-8 192 pages
This book investigates the similarities and differences between two critics, two books, and two concepts: Longinus’ “Sublime” in his On the Sublime (1st or 3rd A.D.) and al-Jurjani’s “Standard of Poetry” in his Mediation between al-Mutanabbi and his Adversaries (10th A.D.). Although much is known about al-Jurjani, his books and his times, almost nothing is known about Longinus: we are not sure who wrote that book, when and where it was written, and even how to translate the title. Al-Jurjani lived at least some seven centuries later and his ideas crystallize Arabic thought on great poetry.
Wang, Aixue
1999 0-7734-8157-5 256 pages
Compares three pairs of plays by the Irish playwright J. M. Synge and the Chinese playwright Cao Yu, discussing some provocative dramaturgical similarities as well as profound aesthetic differences and uncovering a number of instances of Cao Yu's appropriation of Western literary models that have not been recognized before.
Mei, Jennifer
2020 1-4955-0806-4 328 pages
Dr. Jennifer Mei and Dr. Xueqing Xu collect three short stories translated from Chinese into English written by Chinese women about their daily lives. The three stories are Nowhere to Say Goodbye by Chen Ran, Final Act of a Woman Poet by Jiang Zidan, and Pisces by Xu Xiaobin.
Youngkin, Betty R.
1995 0-7734-2277-3 156 pages
This volume examines two of Ong's contributions to the study of rhetoric: history and metaphor. His definitive work on Peter Ramus (1515-1572) filled a large gap in the history of rhetoric and established Ramus' work as a pivotal force in the division of the five parts of classical rhetoric. By using "interfaces of the word" as a metaphor for modern rhetoric, Ong reestablished the discipline of rhetoric as essential in all knowledge and communication. The study examines his work on Peter Ramus and analyzes Ong's book Interfaces of the Word and how the metaphor evolved in Ong's early, middle, and late work. Ong's work culminates in a paradigm of human history and consciousness: primary orality, writing, print, and secondary orality, and how rhetoric operates at each interface of these phenomena.
Willey, Nicole L.
2008 0-7734-5204-4 324 pages
This work examines the male characters presented in each of the following works: Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). These sentimental women authors presented masculine ideals in their literature and have played an important role in the construction of gender in America.
Stratton, R.E.
1991 0-7734-9743-9 91 pages
The purpose of the present edition of Cheuelere Assigne is to restore the text and free it from all but the most necessary modernizations. The work of earlier editors is taken into account. A full apparatus of textual and explanatory notes is provided as is a glossary of those words which might give trouble even to an experienced reader. The introduction seeks to provide background material for the study of the poem, and where appropriate, critical analysis and judgment.
d’Amiens, Girart
2004 0-7734-6611-8 392 pages
L’Istoire le roy Charlemaine is one of the very last still unpublished chansons de geste in French literature, since until recently scholars have neglected the genre of late medieval remaniements and compilations to which it belongs. This critical edition of the 23,348 line poem will be greatly appreciated by French and medieval scholars. Preface and introduction in English, text and notes in French.
d’Amiens, Girart
2004 0-7734-6609-6 340 pages
L’Istoire le roy Charlemaine is one of the very last still unpublished chansons de geste in French literature, since until recently scholars have neglected the genre of late medieval remaniements and compilations to which it belongs. This critical edition of the 23,348 line poem will be greatly appreciated by French and medieval scholars. Preface and introduction in English, text and notes in French.
Knittel, Frank
1995 0-7734-8994-0 136 pages
This edition marks the first time that Mankind has been deemed worthy of a full critical examination. It lays to rest the contention that the play is obscene and crude. The evidence presented in the critical introduction, the body of the play itself, and the opinions of current scholars demonstrate that Mankind, more than any other medieval drama, is a link to the Renaissance drama immediately following. With its intricate, well-developed metrical scheme and moral and philosophical themes, it represents an artistic achievement beyond that found in the typical drama of the Middle Ages. Its occasional humor as well as its high seriousness provide a happy combination of both wit and morality.
Mortenson, Barbara J.
1997 0-7734-8623-2 500 pages
The ballad collections, each significant in its own way, will fill major gaps in the history of the genre. This play represents a transition to the school of Lope de Vega. Includes Introduction, bibliography, reproduction of text with annotations, indexes (contents, onomastica, metrics, errata, authorship, glossary, etc.) In Spanish
Mortenson, Barbara J.
2006 0-7734-5781-X 512 pages
Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega (1558-1616?) was one of the major composers of ballads of his generation. However, while Lope de Vega and his followers were creating a “New Ballad” oriented towards the lyric, Lasso, a traditionalist, cultivated the heroic. Indeed, he wrote an epic poem he dictated to Hernan Cortes, generally known as La Mexicana (1588 and 1594), and in 1601 he published his Eulogies to three Spanish heroes, one of whom was again Cortes. An inveterate patriot, he favored a strong, centralized monarchy. His tragedy, The Destruction of Constantinople, the second of two in this collection, was a warning to the West with regard to the continued threat of Islam, and was aimed specifically at the problem of the moriscos of Spain (the descendants of Moors).
The collection consists of 76 selections devoted principally to the history of Spain, with a final tribute to King Philip II. Lasso also cultivated themes from antiquity and the pastoral genre, then in vogue. The historical subjects naturally required a style more eloquent than emotional, more Renaissance than Baroque.
Many of the poems were repeated with abundant variants in the two ballad collections which followed in 1601 and 1603, titled Manojuelo de romances (literally, “A Small Bundle of Ballads”). They are characterized by their introduction of a large number of satirical selections, a genre in which Lasso proved to be a master. Herein he was able to mock not only the foibles of contemporary society, but also his personal trials and tribulations.
Lasso de la Vega, like Cervantes, was at one and the same time an idealist and a realist – an advocate of strong moral fiber, but, without rancor, ever cognizant of its rarity.
Agerup, Karl
2022 1-4955-0958-3 204 pages
From the author's Introduction (pg. 7):
The concept of literary prizes appears simple and inoffensive. A writer has produced outstanding books and is awarded for that achievement. Society shows its appreciation and gratitude, encouraging the writing of more of the same. However, the Nobel Prize in Literature is not looked upon this way. Rather than being merely a literary prize, it is often viewed as an arbitrary exercise of power with far-reaching ethical consequences. Selections instigate nervous, angry, or bitter comments in local, national, and international media. The resentment is directed towards both the laureate and the prize jury, i.e., the Swedish Academy. The Prize is contextualized in various ways, and the criticism concerns human rights issues, national pride, and the collective memory of historical events.
Boland, Tom
2012 0-7734-4548-X 440 pages
What are the origins and purposes of social critique? Rather than use critique as a mode of investigating social phenomenon, this book analyses critique as a social phenomenon. Critique is both constitutive of modernity and exceedingly diverse, and not only that but widely taken for granted in scholarly communities. Herein, the resources of historical sociology and anthropology are used in order to gain perspective on critique as something culturally specific to modernity. Based on this, I analyze critique as moving force in history, part of the dynamic of capitalism and consumerism, a recurring trope in the media from all any political positions, and finally as a common-place even of popular culture. Finally, I turn to some key literary writers who have explored critique as a social phenomenon within their work, thus providing a reflexive perspective on critique as a lived experience.
Archer-Lean, Clare
2006 0-7734-5864-6 376 pages
Much has been written on the similarities between Canada, Australia and other Westernised English colonies in terms of the representation of Indigenous identity in fiction by white writers. This study addresses some very specific textual responses to this use of the ‘indigene’ by authors who are not from mainstream Anglo culture. The work makes an original contribution to knowledge and culture by comparing not only authors on far sides of the world, but also by comparing authors who do not easily fit into neat categories of identity themselves.
Macaree, David
1991 0-88946-590-8 164 pages
Concentrates on Defoe's relations with Scotland and with various Scotsmen to focus on the political relationship with England when the representative bodies of both countries were moving toward a union that would transfer the parliament to London. Deals with his immersion in Scottish politics as the agent of Robert Harley, the English Home Secretary; his focus on the Jacobite movement; his connection with Irish affairs and his confrontation with Jonathon Swift over Wood's Halfpence; and his interest in military biography as evidenced in his accounts of two junior officers and of the Duke of Marlborough and Charles XII of Sweden.
Arredondo, Isabel
1997 0-7734-2288-9 184 pages
This study uses a novel by Guatemalan writer Asturias, winner of the 1967 Nobel prize, to analyze the construction of Guatemalan identity at the end of the 1940s and to consider the factors involved in representing a Third World country. It contributes to the field of cultural studies by careful analysis of the factors that affect representation of other cultures, or the "other", by including information on how Third World countries represent themselves, in this case, an educated Guatemalan writer portraying the Mayan population of his own country. It also studies the theories and ideas that bought the change from Indigenism to Neo-Indigenism. It also considers how Asturias' work relates to that of other Guatemalan intellectuals, in particular to that of Carlos Samayoa Chinchilla, examining how they represent different countries, and the stand each novel takes on colonialism. De Brujos is a major contribution to the study of Latin American literature. It applies cultural studies theories that make the work of art an ideological construction where particular history can by studies. In Spanish throughout.
Austin, William J.
1996 0-7734-4222-7 300 pages
This study examines the deconstructive themes and methods which inform T. S. Eliot's prose and poetry, and demonstrates that, long before Jacques Derrida intervened in the area of literary analysis, Eliot had already developed the principles now enshrined as deconstruction. After a brief introduction, the initial chapter is devoted to an in-depth analysis of Derrida's major texts. Once this groundwork is laid, chapter two begins the analysis of Eliot by revisiting his dissertation of F. H. Bradley with particular attention to those theoretical pronouncements that anticipate the direction of Derrida's thought. Further chapters forge a link between Derrida, the dissertation, and Eliot's essays on literature; and extend the analysis into "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Waste Land, "Ash Wednesday," Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion.
Bartelt, Guillermo
2023 1-4955-1097-2 164 pages
"[I]t will be argued in the present study that Sandoz's so-called "Indian voice" should indeed be regarded primarily as a stylistic device which employs lexicalization, calquing, figurative language, and clause chaining to indulge in the creative impulse called "defamiliarization." This technique emboldens an author to select language structures to intentionally disrupt conventionalized or habitualized meanings and thus restore freshness to textual perception. First coined by Viktor Shklovsky, a critic of the Russian formalist tradition, defamiliarization was understood as the main goal in art and poetry that intended to transform the familiar or mundane into the unfamiliar and strange in order to offer new perspectives." -Guillermo Bartelt (Introduction)
Mose, Kenrick
1989 0-88946-387-5 350 pages
An original approach to the work of the Colombian Nobel laureate, painstakingly researched and documented to show the essential unity that underlies his works even when they differ in form.
Gathercole, Patricia M.
2008 0-7734-5014-9 140 pages
This work presents an overall picture of French medieval clothing. The illustrations contained in the volume are invaluable in providing a striking view of this apparel, and all that it demonstrated and connoted by the wearer to its observer. This book contains one color photograph and twenty-five black and white photographs.
Price, Thomas F.
1992 0-7734-9897-4 364 pages
Introduces a new general theory of dramatic form, together with a detailed, practicable method for the analysis and critical understanding of plays and screenplays. The author proposes that any play or screenplay can ultimately be understood as conforming to one of just seven dynamic types, and that knowledge of the kinetic and modal signatures of these skeletal `plots' provides the key for decoding the metaphorical significance of a drama's action and imagery. Examples range from ancient Greek drama to modern opera libretti to contemporary film, and from acknowledged dramatic masterpieces to more popular works. Will help drama professionals and students better grasp a work's conception and intention, and help the non-professional audience better understand a play or movie.
Walker, Sue Brannan
2013 0-7734-4499-8 296 pages
An intelligent and provocative study exploring how the dynamic between nature and humanity animates many of Dickey’s major works. Its aim is to show the ways in which Dickey seeks to understand how it is possible for beings “to be” and what this means in terms of self-realization. This intelligent study makes a major contribution to our understanding of a major poet and helps us to see James Dickey’s poetic and fictional corpus in an entirely new light.
Whaley, Annemarie Koning
2015 1-4955-0341-0 44 pages
Trotman, Tiffany Gagliardi
2009 0-7734-4712-1 212 pages
This work examines canonical works of the Spanish novela negra genre – Eduardo Mendoza’s El misterio de la cripta embrujada, El laberinto de aceitunas and La aventura del tocador de señoras. The author applies Bakhtinian theories to analyses of the carnivalesque, situating the novels within the broader tradition of Spanish carnivalesque literature.
Traditionally Mendoza’s crime novels have been examined in light of social critique common to the Spanish novela negra, but this study, explores folkloric elements within these novels to demonstrate that there is a pervading culture of carnival informing Mendoza’s parody of the traditional crime novel.
El-Meligi, Eman
2015 1-4955-0290-2 244 pages
This book analyzes how Edward Said’s critical and cultural theory, together with his practical criticism, dismantles the Myth of the Authenticity of canonical, Orientalist and imperialist discourse. Said’s interdisciplinary informs the multiple approaches of this present study. Therefore, the first chapter uses the theoretical and critical, while the second tends to use the textual, biographical and hermeneutical. The third chapter focuses on the historical, as related to phenomenological hermeneutics. Indeed the three chapters, like Said’s work, attempt to employ postcolonial notions and poststructuralist techniques, necessary for “deconstructing” the myth of authenticity of Western discourse and for offering a counter-narrative. The fourth and fifth chapters of this book lend themselves to cultural studies, exactly as Said did in the books discussed in these chapters.
To dismantle the Myth of Authenticity, Edward Said consecutively tackles five interrelated epistemological fields related to imperialism: literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, the media, and ideology and politics. The first two interrelated aspects, researched in the first and second chapters of this book, underline works like The Letters and Shorter Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1964) Beginnings (1975), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994). Cultural Studies is crystallized in his seminal work Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), a work accredited by various critics to have inaugurated the whole field of postcolonial studies. His achievement is highlighted in the third chapter of this book. Said extends his search afterwards from critical theory and literary texts and travelogues to the media, as in his Covering Islam (1981), discussed in Chapter Four of this study. This naturally leads Said to focusing on the ideological and political aspects in, for instance, The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), The End of the Peace Process (2000) and Culture and Resistance (2003). This aspect is surveyed in Chapter Five, which also links ideology and politics to hybridity and harmony as the only alternative, as is clear in his Parallels and Paradoxes (2002) and Freud and the Non-European (2003).
Martin Armas, Dolores
2013 0-7734-4478-5 172 pages
This book examines the classic struggle between daughters seeking their mother’s affection and how these behavioral patterns in young girls lead them to seek maternal love in other women. Four Spanish novels, with lesbian characters, provide the backdrop for this psychoanalytic exploration of Spanish literature.
Yanes-Fernandez, Inti
2023 1-4955-1088-3 624 pages
"The argument of the book demonstrates not only how Iberian and British authors adapt these two key historical figures as paradigmatic Christian heroes of historical importance. It also argues that both legends draw on tales and images of earlier iconic figures from the Greco-Roman tradition, the military saints of Byzantium." -Jennifer Goodman Wollock (Foreword)
Porrua, Enrique J.
2007 0-7734-5256-7 272 pages
This work is a study of the “Galician Trilogy” written by Camilo José Cela, consisting of his novels Mazurca para dos muertos (1983), La cruz de San Andres (1994), and Madera de boj (1999). In contrast to the treatment given by Cela to Galizia, his homeland, in some of his previous works, these three novels, all written in the last ten years of his life, he focuses on the three different environments (rural, urban and maritime) as well as in the traditional and modern cultural and idiosyncratic patterns that characterize Galizia, a culturally rich, folkloric and legendary province in northwestern Spain.
Aramu, Paola
2009 0-7734-3896-3 360 pages
This work analyzes, in a significant corpus of narrative and theatrical works, the several and chief manifestations of the maternal figure referable to the Great Mother’s images, also by using important studies about Psychoanalysis, Sociology and History of the religions.
Beierl, Barbara Hardy
2012 0-7734-2934-4 240 pages
Numerous tomes have been written about Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. This is the first one to talk about the dog Buck’s perspective in the novel. Beierl takes an empathetic approach to discussing the domestication of Buck in the story to use this novel as a platform for building empathetic relationships with animals. Very few scholarly works discuss literature from the perspective of an animal, and this one attempts to bring a fresh perspective at an old novel by theorizing empathetically with the characters, which plays a critical role in narrative-based responses to the novel. If characters can gain empathy from their audience there is a higher likelihood that the readers will have a positive response to the story. This book discusses how Jack London creates animal characters that form an empathetic bond with his readers. When readers can understand the inner, mental states of characters, they become motivated to form emotional attachments with them.
Mori, Maryellen Toman
2021 1-4955-0900-1 648 pages
Dr. Maryellen Toman Mori has collected this collection of erotic Japanese tales that have been translated into the English language for the first time. It is a collection of 17 stories, written by both male and female authors.
Quinn, Deirdre
2008 0-7734-4830-6 284 pages
The only collection of its kind to be produced with a single, cutting edge theme, and to gather recent and upcoming scholarship in the area of gender and sexuality. Literary analyses feature prominently in the collection but essays from the disciplines of English, Film and Media Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies help to widen the scope of the topic as well as provide genuinely interdisciplinary dialogue.
Connolly, Thomas E.
1999 0-7734-8143-5 156 pages
These essays deal with the compositional and literary scope of the authors, resulting from the author's personal interest in and teaching.
Licata, Thomas
2008 0-7734-5176-5 416 pages
A revealing look at the artistic and theoretical output of Thomas DeLio whose original compositions, books, and essays are innovative, wide-ranging and wholly provocative. Through essays written by and in tribute to this composer and theorist his contribution to music is more thoroughly appreciated and understood.
Ossers, Manuel A.
2009 0-7734-3888-2 196 pages
Juan Bosch (1909-2001), president of the Dominican Republic in 1963, was a politician and writer. This work is a compilation of essays on the short stories of Juan Bosch (1909-2001). They include studies on cenesthesia, hyperbole, expressionism, impressionism, time, magic realism, myths, female characters in a social, political, and historical context; and children characters with their vital thematic and structural roles.
Boucher, Teresa
2004 0-7734-6477-8 210 pages
Reference to Miguel Delibes as a novelist of authenticity has become an unexplored cliché of Delibean criticism. Grounded in a Heideggerian approach to (in)authenticity, this is a philosophical reading of three of his texts: Cinco horas con Mario [Five Hours with Mario], Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris [Lady in Red on a Gray Background], and Cartas de amor de un sexagenario voluptuoso [Love Letters from a Voluptuous Sexagenarian].
Davis, Philip
1995 0-7734-9060-4 204 pages
In Dubin's Lives, and some of his later short stories, Bernard Malamud began to experiment with the use of fiction as a way of thinking about writers and writing. This study takes Malamud's model and offers six short stories, about books and their effect upon the imagined lives of their writers and readers, as a means of thinking about the work of Bernard Malamud himself. The result is an experimental alternative to more conventional forms of literary criticism, an essay intermingling biography, autobiography, literary analysis and fiction, in an effort to broaden the means of literary thinking available within cultural studies today. It tells stories about imagined people reading Malamud - in particular The Assistant, A New Life, Dubin's Lives, The Fixer and The Natural. The author sees Malamud as an undervalued writer not yet safely established within an impersonal canon; a writer whose commitment to the richness of realism, whose secularized Judaism, and whose sheer power of language constitute a challenging involvement in the uncertainties of uncategorizable experience; and a man whose unfashionable concern for human personality, serious emotions, and ordinary efforts at better lives offer a testing-ground for the claims of literary humanism. This controversial book will be of benefit to students, teachers and general readers specifically interested in Bernard Malamud, and to all those concerned with the current theory and practice of literary study.
Tatum, Karen E.
2005 0-7734-5989-8 212 pages
Examines the causes of the abject response in canonical novels such as Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject’s primal, psychological relation to the mother. The author suggests that these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which are called “abject response”. By developing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection as a model for reading physical acts of violence against women, the book yields specific answers to its overriding questions: Why was a female body so threatening in nineteenth-century fiction? The answer lies in social constructions of women as powers of horror, which the male subject imbibes and which lead to domestic violence if improperly balanced.
Manson, Cynthia DeMarcus
2008 0-7734-5102-1 168 pages
Despite growing scholarly recognition of subversive social and political content in Victorian fairy tales, their significance in relation to the oft-cited Victorian “spiritual crisis” remains largely unexplored. This interdisciplinary study addresses the critical gap by examining three literary revisions of Sleeping Beauty from the early 1860s as pointed efforts to enter the intensified religious debate following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species. This book contains two color photographs.
Liu, Min
2022 1-4955-1021-2 168 pages
Dr. Liu analyzes Lin's rewriting in Famous Chinese Short Stories through the lens of his reinterpretation of xingling to explain how Lin Yutang stood at the crossroads between China and the west, between tradition and modernity. Liu suggests that Lin may be considered as a cultural ambassador, a liberal cosmopolitan, or a partial Orientalist. In his meditating role between China and the west, Lin engaged in a form of cultural diplomacy that generated what Liu calls the "soft power" of Chinese tradition.
Mathew, Mary T.
1996 0-7734-4236-7 242 pages
This book analyses the development of Tagore's heroines within the framework of the Bildungsroman, and also explores the ways in which the 'female Bildung' can be facilitated within a Hindu ideology. It examines gender development in Tagore in terms of both its privatized cultural context Western critical ideology.
Worley, Sharon
2012 0-7734-2583-7 364 pages
In the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” this study traces the origins of French feminism to Neoclassical theatre and the court of Louis XIV. Through feminist revisionist histories of French literature, the Neoclassical plots and female archetypes from Racine’s Phedre and Andromache, Voltaire’s Brutus (Catherine Bernard) and Marmontel’s Belisarius (Stephanie Genlis) were transposed by women writers and patrons onto actresses and the queens, empresses and mistresses of the French ruling dynasties from Louis XIV- to Napoleon at a time when women were denied the rights of citizenship. Women authors include Bernard, Genlis, Olympe de Gouges and Germaine de Staël, among others. Arguing that emerging feminism is a function of historicism that defines female identity through parallel constructs between regency and theatre, Neoclassicism and modernity, authors of an emerging body of French feminist writings ineluctably reconcile sadist and pacifist incongruities between gendered roles in tragedy.
Fendler, Susanne
1997 0-7734-8667-4 188 pages
Essays include: "The Conflict Betwixt Love and Honor" - The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett (Gabriele Rippl) Intertwining Literary Histories: Women's Contributions to the Rise of the Novel (Susanne Fendler) Charlotte Smith and the Romantic Sonnet Revival (Sylvia Mergenthal) The Transformation of a Genre - the Feminist Mystery Novel (Marion Frank) Journey and Gender - Diversity in Travel Writing (Karin Veit) Cyberpunk, Cyborgs and Feminist Science Fiction (Jenny Wolmark)
Condé, Lisa Pauline
1991 0-7734-9440-5 216 pages
These essays are a contribution to the ongoing debate on the interaction between feminism and hispanism. Writers examined include Calderón, Galdós, Valle-Inclán, Unamuno, Pardo Bazán, Rosa Chacel, Alfonsina Storni, Bombal, Luisa Valenzuela, and others.
Avril, Chloé
2008 0-7734-4969-8 220 pages
Challenges Gilman critics who reject the author’s sexual politics as no longer relevant to contemporary liberal ideals.
Grace, Nancy McCampbell
1995 0-7734-8998-3 312 pages
This study explores a character type who is neither androgynous nor feminine, presenting a critique of the way in which the term "androgynous" has been misapplied to the feminized male, and through the use of reader response theory, argues that this type of figure appeals to female readers because he reflects parts of themselves often ignored or outrightly ridiculed through male literary representation. The book presents new arguments about characters created by James Joyce (Ulysses), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, The Garden of Eden), Jack Kerouac (On the Road), and Saul Bellow (Humboldt's Gift), advancing a growing body of research rejecting the majority view of these four writers as antifeminine artists. The feminized male, whose male creator has intentionally endowed him with feminine as well as masculine qualities in an effort to explore the complexities of gender in a dialectically social (via literary) realm, presents a powerful technique to explore, challenge, and redefine gender, not only in fiction but in our everyday lives as well.
Craniford, Ada
1993 0-88946-018-3 180 pages
This study analyzes Richler's use of biblical and literary sources as ironic subtexts for his tales. Identifying hitherto unnoticed sources, it also shows that Richler uses them to compare and judge both the world he imitates and the one he creates. Another important aspect of the study of Richler's nine novels shows that even the first novel (now out of print) is cast in the same mold as the more successful ones where he fashions his protagonist on a biblical or literary mode only to blast holes in both his hero and the model he represents. Thus he achieves his own peculiar moral density by pushing accepted conventions and beliefs to their logically absurd extremes, while keeping the realistic level intact.
Lei, Min
2024 1-4955-1273-8 240 pages
This is an oversize (8.5 x 11 inch), softcover book. "This thesis investigates the traumatic internment experiences of Japanese-Canadian children during World War II in Canadian fictional writings. Specifically, this thesis examines the trauma these children have suffered as represented in three adult novels: Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field (1998), and Frances Itani's Requiem (2011) and two children's books: Shizuye Takashima's A Child in Prison Camp (1971) and Kogawa's Naomi's Road (2005)." -Dr. Min Lei
Pellow, C. Kenneth
1995 0-7734-9067-1 380 pages
This book shows how films are useful as literary criticism. From an examination of what will and will not "translate" into film from print, one learns much about a novel's structure and methodology, its themes, narratology, and other aspects of fictions. Novels/films include The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Sterile Cuckoo, Catch-22, Bang the Drum Slowly, A Room With a View, Ordinary People, more.
Golban, Petru
2013 0-7734-4508-0 488 pages
Book showcases the history of British literary criticism dating back to the Classical and Renaissance Periods, all the way up through to the Victorian Age. It covers figures as diverse as Philip Sydney, John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and even Henry James. Literary criticism is an event in the field of literature as much as literature provides an object upon which criticism can purvey its message. Yet, in recent years literary criticism has moved into the realm of a self-sustaining field detached from literature as its inspirational object. This book looks at literary criticism which was still responding to concrete poetry and literature.
Chishty-Mujahid, Nadya Q.
2021 1-4955-0927-3 116 pages
In this book Dr. Chishty-Mujahid expands her earlier works to focus on fraternal male twinship. She offers a helpful biobliography in the area of twin studies and a discussion about theories concerning twin relations.
Shynnagh, Frank
2009 0-7734-4766-0 312 pages
This book is a collection of six short fictions by Frederic Will, interspersed with commentaries by the book’s author, Frank Shynnagh, who is the alter ego (pseudonym) of Frederic Will.
Rodríguez-Henríquez, Rafael
2010 0-7734-1330-8 208 pages
This study examines four novels by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo. It reveals the fundamental sources used in these novels in constructing the concept of the “historical imagination”. The analysis shows that the traditional concept of “official history” is rejected to give rise to an eclectic view of the past that embraces scientific and philosophical knowledge, the voices of the marginalized “other”, folkloric manifestations, and the imaginative reflections of the characters and narrators. This book contains one color photograph.
Osborn, Peggy
1992 0-7734-9445-6 260 pages
This study comprises a critical edition of the complete text of Giraldi's Altile. (The play has been published only once before the present edition, in 1583, ten years after the author's death.) This edition also contains its narrative source, Giraldi's novella (Hecatommithi, II,3). Shows how Giraldi telescoped his unwieldy novella into the formal neo-classical structure of Renaissance tragedy, reinterpreting or even ignoring the precepts of Aristotle when they conflicted with his experience as a practical dramatist writing for the duke and court of Ferrara. He greatly developed the characters of his leading personages, adding an important new character-type to the cast: the first scheming and treacherous subordinate of modern tragedy. The study stresses the importance of the elements of suspense, pathos and maraviglia, and the pains Giraldi took to provide his audience with a lavish, well-staged spectacle. It also emphasizes the fact that the play was intended to convey a series of clearly-defined moral messages.
Navarro-Tejero, Antonia
2005 0-7734-5995-2 188 pages
This book analyzes the intersections of gender, caste and the (re)telling of history in the narratives by two contemporary South-Asian women writers in English of Malayalam descent, Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan. The authors have chosen two novels: The Thousand Faces of Night (1992)– winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book– by Githa Hariharan; and The God of Small Things– winner of the Booker Prize in 1997– by Arundhati Roy. Githa Hariharan represents the reality for a considerable section of Indian womanhood inserted in a brahminical, high class environment, and Arundhati Roy depicts the fatal consequences of the inter-caste sexual relations in a supposedly caste-less Christian and at the same time communist community. The overall purpose of this study is to unravel, expose and analyze how these authors create new possibilities, using two main strategies: first, re-defining female subjectivity in the critical juncture of caste and gender, and second, by reinterpreting history. Telling stories, that is, creating history, is in itself a way of producing new entities, new identities. Consequently, from this angle, plotting family and lineage is very relevant. Roy’s and Hariharan’s stories call for a re-vision and transformation in the three main power structures–State, Religion and Family–subverting, thus, the canon and claiming the subalterns’ space in History.
Migiel, Marilyn
1993 0-7734-9392-1 204 pages
Using feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist approaches to Torquato Tasso's 1581 Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), this book argues that Tasso explored alternate modes of writing and reading by reflecting on the genealogical tales of his non-Christian women characters, Clorinda, Erminia, and Armida. They permit Tasso to explore what it might mean to ask an alternate series of questions about one's relation to the father. By examining the interpretive and ethical questions that rise from the problematic genealogies of Tasso's orphan daughters, we arrive at a better understanding of the relation between the poem's dominant ideology, on one hand, and the stories that it seeks to suspend and displace on the other.
Camus, Marianne
2004 0-7734-6334-8 108 pages
An attempt to re-read the construction of the mad female characters of Dickens’ novels. A main aim is to demonstrate how social rules and forces differentiate mental derangement gender-wise, as far as its causes and manifestations are concerned, within what could be called, in Dickens’ fiction, a general human tendency toward mental derangement. A further aim is to qualify Dickens’ reputation for misogynistic blindness and prejudice.
Owen, Hilary
1996 0-7734-8849-9 240 pages
These readings of modern Portuguese, Brazilian, and Portuguese African texts articulate a challenge by drawing on different theories of how gender, ethnicity and class relate to the production and reception of culture. Consequently, the collection juxtaposes and connects new readings of well-known literary figures such as Ariano Suassuna, Agustina Bessa Luís, Hélia Correia, Henrique Teixeira de Sousa and Clarice Lispector with readings of "popular culture" as represented by samba, circo-teatro, images of women in advertising and oral narratives from the southeast of Brazil. The diversity of the critical approaches adopted demonstrates both the potential for new "coalitional" connections and the demands imposed by deconstructing the Lusist canon.
Roberts-Camps, Traci
2008 0-7734-5235-4 212 pages
This book examines the various representations of the female body in four contemporary Mexican and Chicana novels written by women: Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963) by Elena Garro, Nadie me verá llorar (1999) by Cristina Rivera Garza, La piel del cielo (2001) by Elena Poniatowska, and Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros. This work also analyzes the depictions of the female body in these novels from the perspectives of space and violence, abjection and national progress, sexuality and sensuality, and visibility and invisibility.
Seed, David
1993 0-7734-9174-0 380 pages
The republication of the 1923 study The Handling of Words will help to confirm Vernon Lee's pioneering work in helping to design the method of close empirical analysis of texts which has become so important in Anglo-American criticism. It also makes available passages of stylistic analysis whose value has been partially recognized by their inclusion on some anthologies. Finally, it will show how strikingly Lee anticipates some of the developments in contemporary criticism, for instance the role of the reader as co-creator.
Klink, William
2014 0-7734-4296-0 392 pages
This remarkable and unique study explores women heroines in detective fiction written by women authors. These heroines subvert pop culture’s traditional stereotypes for women. The book further examines how this sub-genre has changed over time as does the popular culture it embodies.
Eriksson, Edward
2014 0-7734-4257-X 204 pages
Written as a companion piece to complement Professor Eriksson’s prior groundbreaking analysis, The Appearance of the Mythic Hero in the Twelve Seasons of Nature, this text, focusing on the heroine’s experience, does more than just provide the other half to the hero’s journey. Instead, The Heroine In Literature and Filam as Expressive of the Twelve Natural Seasons further develops Eriksson’s original insight in a thought-provoking analysis that comprehensively details the correspondences between the dramas of human relationships and the seasons of life that shape the feminine quest for fulfillment within a larger cosmological paradigm.
The heroine in literature and film is an expression of seasonal occurrence. Her behavior exhibits, symbolically, the response of the earth to the sun at a given time of the year, beginning at the March equinox and proceeding through twelve seasons. She assumes, then, twelve distinct characterizations. Her conflicts, successes, and failures reflect the natural conditions of Early Spring, Mid-Spring, Late Spring, and so on, in an aesthetic development that converts traditional mythic dynamics, based in agriculture, into story lines in ancient and modern configurations. Her character in a given season suggests the dynamism of that season as reinterpreted into the drama of human relationships.
Rich, Janet Bubar
2014 0-7734-0070-2 116 pages
This book honors Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. It fills the gaping void in exclusive scholarship on Hestia and explores her as a pop culture icon in a quest to grasp her relevance for people today. Thinking about Hestia as an archetype of focus and centeredness may offer soulful refuge from the e-chatter overload that people face in their daily lives. It may help fulfill contemporary yearnings for authenticity and wholeness within human hearts and souls by offering us a path homeward, back to connections with people’s inner selves.
Bulger, Thomas Francis
1993 0-7734-9342-5 216 pages
This study identifies the most important attitudes toward history found within the individual books of the poem. Second, it explores the relevance and function of these historical perspectives to the particular fictional episodes in which they arise. Third, it defines Spenser's concept of historical being. Unlike other treatments of The Faerie Queene's use of history, this study does not decipher the text for allusions to Spenser's historical contemporaries, nor does it reduce the poem to a specific philosophy of history. This inquiry explores the integrity of Spenser's polysemous presentation of historical existence as a totality.
Frye, Steven
2001 0-7734-7438-2 200 pages
This analysis provides a detailed review of historiographic theory in Europe and America from the Enlightenment through the 19th century, and using M. M. Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic discourse, explores the manner in which historiographic models are incorporated dialogically in the works of James Fenimore Cooper , William Gilmore Simms, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Whyte, James G.
2002 0-7734-7018-2 296 pages
For this study of the fiction of Irish writer McGahern, one of the prominent writers to follow the generation of James Joyce, White (Presentation College, UK) talked extensively with McGahern and studied all of his published novels and short stories. White finds a variety of themes in McGahern's work, including a sense of social fragmentation, the role of ritual in sustaining the hope of transformation, and the hierarchical structure of the family. Running throughout McGahern's work is the hope for a possibility of transcendence to an ideal world.
Tipper, Karen Sasha Anthony
2016 1-4955-0518-9 64 pages
Examines the parallel lives, beliefs, and artistic principles of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, with an analysis of representative verse of Poe from the viewpoint of Baudelaire as he undertook the task of artistic comparison. There is no denying, however, that both men did indeed possess superior analytical minds, extensive knowledge, and an extraordinary vocabulary, and in describing Poe Baudelaire could have been describing himself.
Warden, John
2013 0-7734-4503-X 196 pages
A succinct yet remarkable incisive study of the complex interplay between language, modes of reading it, and modes of thinking as observed in the surviving literature of classical Greece and the roughly contemporary corpus inherited from the age of Confucius in China.
Houston, Nainsi J.
2006 0-7734-5558-2 224 pages
The roles of men and women in Ireland have changed a great deal in the last fifty years and many of these changes can be attributed to the dual influence of the Irish Women’s Movement and Ireland’s inclusion in the European Community/Union. While these two influences affected many rapid legal changes toward equality for women and men in Ireland, Irish society has been slow to reflect these shifts. The novels examined in this book reflect the gap between these legal and societal changes.
Helder, William
2014 0-7734-4241-3 288 pages
This study is an attempt to consider Beowulf in its literary context. It shows how the typological perspective manifests itself throughout Beowulf in its structure and its imagery and so aims to foster an increased awareness of the rich allusiveness of its metaphorical language.
Luczak, Ewa Barbara
2010 0-7734-3748-7 336 pages
The book examines fictional responses of African American expatriate writers to Europe in the 1960s. It analyzes the change in the African American perception of Europe and seeks to reveal how African American writers of the 1960s responded in imaginative ways to the European scene.
Petruzzi, Paul Anthony
2017 1-4955-0593-6 124 pages
There is an influence of medical training and practice on the perspective and voice in the poetry written by physicians, " a medical perspective." This medical perspective requires keen skills of observation and synthesis, and, like poetry, results in the creation of new concepts from seemingly unrelated elements. This is the case with John Keats, William Carlos Williams, and a host of contemporary physician poets.
This work examines the poets and poetry through the lens of the medical perspective, the synthesizing element between medical practice and poetic imagination.
Shih, Yi-chin
2012 0-7734-2626-4 320 pages
Despite the confines of traditional notions of history and gender, Timberlake Wertenbaker uses her history plays to argue that history and gender should be reread to radically challenge these traditional notions. She uses her history plays to construct a new vision. This book discusses seven Timberlake plays from this new perspective of gender, focusing on how gender impacts history, showing the unstable power relations that exist between the sexes.
Staples, Max
1995 0-7734-9400-6 304 pages
This work studies the roles of ideology in the production of literature by linguistic and structural analyses of Boccaccio's Decameron. The repeated discursive structure of each novella is analysed to show Boccaccio's understanding of causality. Narrative outcomes are surveyed to show the treatment of characters according to gender, social class, and place of origin. Historical references are compared to their sources to show Boccaccio's political and narrative concerns. This comprehensive analysis produces a new explanation of Boccaccio's beliefs. The final chapters show that when combined with Boccaccio's aesthetic program and applied to his sources, these ideological beliefs generate the text.
Nascimento dos Santos, Daiana
2012 0-7734-2590-X 168 pages
This book analyzes the influence and importance of the political convictions from the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado in the most representative phase of his literary career. The works presented in this book deal with social and political themes found within Amado’s novels from 1930-1950. More explicitly the book examines how Amado was influenced by communist ideology and employed literary strategies to legitimize his thought. In addition the book compares Amado’s representations of Brazilian people’s lives with political speeches during Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo while providing a lumpenproletariat interpretation of socialist thought.
Brotemarkle, Diane
1993 0-7734-2214-5 176 pages
Seeks elements of self-definition in Keats's work, the quest for the poetical character. From both his poems and letters, an aesthetic emerges which locates the poetical character in terms of a responsible role in a creative process: a transcendent Imagination infuses Beauty into the material world; these particulars become a source of inspiration for the artist, the foundation of "the simple imaginative Mind." The readings of Keats's poems depend on these stages, on the two kinds of imagination and the mediation between them. This study is the first to yield this particular synthesis, and the importance of historicism to Keats's aesthetic has not before been weighted.
Francisco, Timothy
2007 0-7734-5390-3 132 pages
Examines the relationship between the military changes described in military manuals published in the latter half of the sixteenth-century and the portrayals of warfare and men who practice war in selected plays of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. The study argues that the sweeping technological and social changes that were part of the military revolution of the sixteenth century contribute to the negotiations of masculinity identified by many critics as a central concern of these plays, and that the effects of the military revolution of Elizabethan England were felt far beyond the confines of practice fields and military texts.
Jordan-Finnegan, Ryder
2006 0-7734-5753-4 288 pages
This study examines two primary plays: After the Fall by Arthur Miller and The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare, using a Jungian Analytical Psychological approach. By focusing on certain components of Jung’s theories of individuation, the development of personality, and the power of evil, the study provides evidence that the two main characters, Quentin and Hamlet, respectively, come to a place of moral differentiation.
This book emphasizes the components of the human condition and provides examples from the dramatic works of Shakespeare and Miller as evidence of the possibilities available to humanity. Significantly, the use of Jung’s ideas on individuation with Miller’s plays bring to the world of literary scholarship a contribution of understanding the work that Miller was doing and how vitally important his plays are to humanity as a touchstone of human development. The analytical bridge created between Jung and Shakespeare represents a clear statement of the importance of original and pioneering scholarship between two writers who seemingly have no reason to be connected.
This study will appeal to scholars in Renaissance and modern literary studies, as well as those interested in psychology and religion. The work provides a look into realms of literature, psychology, philosophy, and religion, which not only points to the theoretical analysis provided in scholarship but also to the more serious and eternal questions concerning evil and personality.
Influence of India on Leo Tolstoy and Tolstoy's Influence on India: A Study of Reciprocal Receptions
Balasubramanian, Radha2013 0-7734-4357-6 296 pages
Tolstoy’s fictional works reflect a connection with Indian religious texts even before he had actually read them. His quest to read and assimilate ancient Hindu writing earned Tolstoy great respect- even reverence – from Gandhi and other Indian intellectuals such that Tolstoy took his place as a pre-eminent writer, thinker, and sage in India. Yet, much remained unexplored in regard to Tolstoy’s relationship with India and this book addresses the gaps in that research. (From the Preface)
Lakatos, Jeanne I.
2015 0-7734-3535-2 412 pages
An illuminating study of Irish literature from a women’s perspective demonstrating the creative fervor of rebellion against imperialism that extended from the Enlightenment era into the Romantic nineteenth century. This insightful study of human rights and Owenson’s literary response to political changes in Ireland reveals how the author used pragmatic rhetorical devices to positively influence her readers.
2022 1-4955-0985-0 304 pages
The aim of this study is to make the case that Milton's Invocations should be recognized as central because, "they present most directly and most intimately the crucial event of man's spiritual life: responsive action taken to bring about renovation. The invocations involve us in the task of the poet's 'advent'rous Song,' for that action is a paradigm of our own 'advent'rous Song,' by which we create 'th' upright heart and pure.'"
Eliopoulos, Panos
2021 1-4955-0880-3 544 pages
From the authors' introduction: "Among the many losses which followed the philosophical domination of Plato and Aristotle, one is central to this introduction. Until Nietzsche, serious thought has been associated with, often defined as, systematic thought in prose. As a result, the profound moral and political insights embedded in poetry and tragedy have been neglected or relegated to imaginative speculation. ...In this book we try to extrude some of Euripedes's moral and political thought from Medea. ...[T]his great masterpiece has not been understood as completely as might be expected of a play so famous and so thoroughly examined over the last twenty-five hundred years."
de Zwaan, Victoria
2002 0-7734-7280-0 172 pages
This study argues that the often-noted resistance to interpretation by these authors’ experimental fiction has to do with the radical functioning of metaphor in their texts. After an introductory discussion about the contemporary debates about metaphor and narrative, she examines each author’s work in various theoretical contexts such as cognitivist models, deconstruction, modernism and post-modernism, concentrating on a number of narrative strategies which she groups under the term piracy. The conclusion situates the metaphoric narrative in relation to the competing literary critical paradigms of postmodernist fiction.
Zuba, Sonja
2010 0-7734-3824-6 348 pages
This book analyzes the work of Iris Murdoch as a thinker concerned with conceptions of human good in contemporary Western cultures. Until now, Murdoch’s contributions to literature and the relationship between her philosophical work and her novels have received little comprehensive examination.
Murphy, Neil
2004 0-7734-6518-9 286 pages
This study situates three contemporary Irish novelists, Aidan Higgins, John Banville and Neil Jordan in the context of Modernist and Postmodernist literature. In order to map how these writers respond to the problems of epistemological doubt, their work is positioned beside that of other writers like Rushdie, Nabokov, Calvino, Garcia-Marquez and Robbe-Grillet. In addition, the opening chapter outlines a working position on the meaning and significance of Postmodernism, as it pertains to literary fiction, with particular reference to the work of Brian McHale, Ihab Hassan, Patricia Waugh, David Harvey, Richard Kearney and David Lodge. Although firmly rooted in Irish literary studies, this work represents a departure from recent critical work in Irish literature in that it seeks, responding to the specificity of the fictionalized concerns of these writers, to contextualize the fictions of Higgins, Banville and Jordan within Irish and international literary traditions, rather than in an Irish historical or political framework.
MacCarthy, Anne
2000 0-7734-7498-6 324 pages
This study considers a new evaluation of Mangan and Walsh, by referring to the problems of Irish literature in a more international context using the theories of Even-Zohar and Lefevere. The book highlights the fact that literary fame depends on ideological and cultural concerns and not solely on aesthetics. By appraising the achievements of Mangan and Walsh, it shows how ideology in Ireland affected their reputations, leading to their marginalization.
Colgan, Lesley-Ann
2016 1-4955-0463-8 356 pages
This work aims to take a chronological view of the changing limitations imposed on female characters, within various genres, using the work of writers/creators whose work has inspired a degree of public as well as critical interest. It provides the reader with a new and broader understanding of the evolution of gender representation within various genres in children’s literature.
Soos, Emese
2015 1-4955-0411-5 408 pages
This study focuses on the relationship of Balzac to alchemy as it applies to the analysis of La Peau de chagrin. His interest stems from family influences, extensive reading in his early student days and research he did to document his fictional works. In La Peau de chagrin the protagonist cast as a youthful hero formulates a plan to achieve his goals according to the alchemical process of transformation, and the organization of the novel parallels its principal stages. Alchemy thus serves as a paradigm that highlights the hero’s missteps and suggests the moral reflection missed by contemporaneous critics according to Balzac.
Derayeh, Minoo
2023 1-4955-1066-2 508 pages
"[This book] conveys how quest for justice daad is intertwined with patriotism (mihan doosti or parasti [love for the homeland]) and religions. I further show how this is depicted by Abulqasem Ferdowsi in stories since the establishment of the earliest mythological and historical dynasties in Iranshahr. Ferdowsi (tenth-eleventh century CE), the great Iranian poet, depicts many colorful stories of this nature in his everlasting epic the Shahnameh (The King's Letter). These stories have become a generative force for Persian literature." -From the author's introduction
Shen, Leah
2022 1-4955-1029-8 484 pages
From the Introduction: "The project investigates a poetics of creative kong (emptiness) by studying the philosophical origins of the notion of emptiness in Indian Buddhism as well as its development in China from ancient times through the 17th century. I argue for the philosophical and religious significance of kong in the Chinese context as being open-minded, non-obsessive, and creative. The poetics and aesthetics of kong owes a significant debt to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. The senses of kong enabled the writers and artists of the late Ming and early Qing to link with the immanent vividness of the world, and to evoke their creativity in literary and artistic practices when they tried to establish a close relationship to nature, instead of interfering with it." (pg. 2)
(Hardcover with color illustrations)
Medina, Sara Fernandez
2014 0-7734-4462-9 184 pages
“ The book adds new perspective and interpretation to Delibes’ realists novels. The author takes some of Delibes’ works which are otherwise classified as naturalist or as work of “tremendismo” and gives them a refreshing twist by analyzing them as realist works of fiction.”
-Dr. Ruben Rodriguez,
Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages,
Texas Woman’s University
Ossers, Manuel A.
2010 0-7734-1382-0 356 pages
The purpose of this work has been to study the narrative of Juan Bosch from the point of view of stylistic analysis. Such an analysis allows for an in depth examination of the sensorial dynamics as the means of expression of the author. By taking a stylistic approach to Juan Bosch’s short stories, I have drawn conclusions on the relationship between the expressive means selected by Bosch and his intent when making such selections.
In Part I, I have studied the expression in terms of sensorial experience. I hope to have established the degree of effectiveness with which the author is able to transmit his sensations (and those of his characters as he wishes the reader to perceive them) by means of the images produced through the word.
In Part II, I have studied the expression in terms of the intentional intensification of the word or phrase. I hope to have demonstrated the fidelity and originality with which Bosch interprets the existential reality of his characters and the natural or social milieu in which it takes place. This work will be of interest to scholars of the literatures of the Dominican Republic, the Spanish Caribbean, and Latin American in general.
Hortiguera, Hugo
2008 0-7734-5180-3 304 pages
This study analyzes seven novels by the Argentine author Osvaldo Soriano (1943-1997), in order to produce a critical reading of the ways in which his fragmentary writing works toward subverting hegemonic models of nationalism. The author examines and describes this type of Argentine narrative dynamic characterized by the amalgam of diversity and lack of hierarchy in the textual space.
Brooks, Douglas A.
2010 0-7734-3666-9 576 pages
This volume of the Shakespeare Yearbook brings together articles centered around the intersections between Lacanian Theory and the literary production of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
McAloon, Francis X.
2008 0-7734-5022-X 264 pages
Grounded in the investigative tools of interpretation theory, theo-poetic aesthetics, and literary criticism, this book proposes and employs an interdisciplinary methodology for the analysis of poetic prayer tests, focusing upon the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Interspersed throughout the text are brief interchapters, which offer practical illustrations of the sort of transformative reading this work proposes.
Weaver, Wesley J. III
2019 1-4955-0766-1 512 pages
Dr. Wesley Weaver considers the literary legacy of Spanish author, Alvaro Pombo. The text is written in Spanish.
Diboll, Mike
2004 0-7734-6267-8 369 pages
In Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in its Egyptian Contexts, Dr. Diboll argues that Durrell’s tetralogy is the most important English novel of the mid-nineteen-fifties, an historically significant period which has been much overlooked by literary scholars. It convincingly demonstrates the importance of the Alexandria Quartet as a "Janus text" which looks back to the lost world of the British Empire, yet anticipates many important aspects of later post-colonial and postmodern writing. Thus, the book insists, the Alexandria Quartet should be recognised as a colossal work of literature, standing astride the nexus separating the colonial and post-colonial moments, a paradigmatic text for scholars of Empire studies, late Modernism, literary postmodernity, orientalism and post-colonial literature.
This wide-ranging work explores the influence of all of the many strata of Egyptian history on the Quartet and in doing so offers a sustained meditation of the interaction of time, place and exile on the literary imagination. Its focus on exile is especially poignant, taking in the cultural and psychological alienation of this "third generation Anglo-Irish-Indian", an "English pied-noir" from a most unheimlich English "homeland", the effects of Durell's voluntary exile in Greece during the inter-war years on his literary sensibility, and psychological and existential impact of Durrell's flight from the Nazi occupation of Greece and his four years as a refugee in war-time Alexandria, which he experienced as an "Oriental" Other starkly juxtaposed to his "free Hellenic world". This work does not neglect to examine Egyptian responses to the Alexandria Quartet, and it examines with a forensic thoroughness the way in which the "public life realities" of emergent Egyptian nationalism are subtly embedded in what for too long has been considered to be a work of fantasy. Seeking to go beyond the Saidian Orientalist paradigm, the book proposes that aspects of Bhabhaian hybridity theory, combined with a rigourous socio-historical analysis, offer the most effective theoretical insights into Durrell's seething Alexandrian cosmopolis.
Hafez-Ergaut, Agnès
2000 0-7734-7772-1 328 pages
This study deals with the notions of the sordid and nihilism and explores their rapport with the works of Huysmans, Céline, and Sartre. This study argues that the three writers are lined in their philosophical or spiritual quest, and aims at demonstrating that the sordid is used as a metaphor to describe the trauma that modern times inflict on modern man. In French.
Selinger, Bernard
1988 0-7734-2006-1 185 pages
Synthesizes the work of "identity-theorists" such as Norman N. Holland, Heinz Lichtenstein, Bruno Bettelheim, Hans Loewald, and Margaret Mahler in an attempt to formulate a non-essentialist theory of identity formation that can be fruitfully applied to literature. The working conclusion of the synthesis is that the artist constantly works creative variations on a kind of identity theme that was established during the autistic phase of childhood development. The book then melds identity theory with more contemporary critical theory. Theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva are clearly summarized and flexibly applied to Le Guin's major fictional works, yielding fresh insights into LeGuin's work and the nature of fiction in general. This book dramatically changes the direction of scholarship on LeGuin - moves the criticism away from the usual mythological, Jungian, and thematic readings to readings which focus much more closely on the texts, aided by contemporary critical theory.
Thiel-Janczuk, Katarzyna
2006 0-7734-5550-7 196 pages
This book, by making reference to a theoretical reflection on themes of mythocriticism, the philosophy of language and the individual, places the work of this modern author within the context of two metaphors – the mythical labyrinth and its postmodernist variant, Deleuze’s rhizome – treated as figures of identity and otherness. They express two contrary tendencies in Modiano’s writing. The labyrinth signifies the breakdown of the historical paradigm of identity and the crisis of the referential functioning of literature, characteristic of structuralist thought. An attempt to recover the reliability of narration outside historical time leads the author towards archaic images which allude to the traditional idea of the sacred. The imagination, however, dictates images which are not grounded in history and are thus a parody of the mythical reversion. The rhizome, as a metaphor for opening, not only breaks down the traditional dichotomy between reality and fiction, but also, by making reference to the contemporary idea of nomadism inspired by Jewish tradition, carries a reflection on identity and otherness in the field of ethics. In the context of biographical narration, the co-existence of the labyrinth and the rhizome signifies on one hand a vain attempt to recreate faithful events from the character’s life, and on the other a restoration of the intersubjective relationship of the author with the Other, whether real or imagined, within the space of the text. This makes it possible to treat the autobiographical and autofictional dimension of Modiano’s work not as an attempt to create the author’s fictional or real identity, but as the coming into being of his ethical identity. In French
Cairns, Lucille
2002 0-7734-7110-3 504 pages
Cairns's focus on post-1968 literature allows for a detailed analysis of the texts she examines. She stresses the cultural erasing of lesbians and lesbian writers in French society and argues convincingly for the importance of including the social and cultural context in the analysis of this body of literature.
Atkinson, Damian
2013 0-7734-4365-7 772 pages
This edition of the extant four hundred and sixty-four surviving letters from the editor and man of letters W.E. Henley (1849-1903) to the classical scholar Charles Whibley (1859-1930) cover the period late 1888 to June 1903 and give an insight into the workings of an editor and his major contributor and also their firm friendship, with Whibley replacing Robert Louis Stevenson in Henley’s life.
Tripp, Raymond P. Jr.
1992 0-7734-9162-7 316 pages
This lively collection of essays aims at freeing the poem from the burden of its critical past - and future. It begins with a balanced yet unsparing review of the uses and abuses of contemporary criticism, and continues with new answers for particular questions familiar to students of the poem: the Christian/Pagan dilemma, the connection with the Grettis Saga, the value of treasure, the role of drinking, the identity of the messenger, the poet on poetry, the poet's rhetoric, the events in Heorot, the notorious gifstol crux, the importance of wordplay, and the poet's understanding of fate. Other essays also engage a wide range of general topics: the poet's lively sense of humor, use of the Liber Monstrorum, the poet's scatology and canonical parody, sartorial anticipation of Carlyle, and more.
Vlad, Florian
2022 1-4955-1040-9 168 pages
"This volume examines post-9/11 literary texts having a direct relation to that event.... [It] places the chosen literary texts in what are thought to be relevant contexts offered by historical, political and geopolitical coordinates, as well as by theoretical frameworks meant to shed light on the problematics of the characters themselves and on what they represent in the real world for real readers in real environments." -from the Author's "Introduction"
Nangia, Shonu
2011 0-7734-1488-6 204 pages
This book is a study of male-female relations in two acclaimed novels by contemporary Maghrebi Francophone author and French intellectual, Tahar Ben Jelloun. The problematic of male-female relations in the Maghreb, especially as represented by Tahar Ben Jelloun--with its extensive and overarching implications and possibilities within and beyond the realm of literary enquiry--has not received due scholarly and critical attention up until now. This study responds to the need for a holistic understanding of these male-female relations.
Pitruzzello, Rosy Maria
2022 1-4955-0937-0 110 pages
From the author's Abstract: "This study of comparative literature focuses its attention on a selection of literary works written by two Sicilian female writers who lived between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, maria Messina and Elvira Mancuso.
"...this book analyzes and describes the literary and existential voices of the two pro-femininst writers through their heroines and characters, who fought against or humbly accepted and surrendered to the patriarchal restrictions and chauvininst society they belonged to. This is shown in the works Ragazze Siciliane and L/amore negato by Maria Messina and Una vecchia storia...inverosimile by Elvira Mancuso.
Dawes, Greg
2008 0-7734-5202-8 300 pages
This is an original collection of criticism on Mario Benedetti’s work covering his literary works, the major themes of his writing, cinematic interpretations of his works, and his political commitments. Consisting of ten essays, two homages, and two interviews by the most renowned critics on the author, this volume aims to bring Benedetti the international attention he richly deserves. In Spanish
Mei, Jennifer
2020 1-4955-0809-9 316 pages
Dr. Jennifer Mei and Dr. Xueqing Xu collect five short stories translated from Chinese into English written by Chinese women about their marriages. The five stories are An Agreement between Two Women by Bi Shumin, When the Clouds Disperse by Chi Li, Darling Potatoes by Chi Zijian, White Broth by Pan Xiangli, and Kitchen by Xu Kun.
MacCornack, Katharine
1996 0-7734-8815-4 184 pages
This study illustrates the usefulness of using contemporary philosophies of literary criticism to elucidate old texts. Mental Representation theory propounded by Umberto Eco, Gilles Fauconnier, and other contemporary scholars lends itself well to the interpretation of dream allegory. This study provides a breakdown of the mental components of the dream text and shows how they fit together to form a cohesive whole. Providing a new way to read these texts, The Romance of the Rose, The Dream of Hell, The Tournament of the Antichrist, and others, Mental Representation theory interprets interpretation in a new, clearer, more complete fashion by looking at the dream, the cosmic nature of allegory, and its linguistic and mental structures.
Hardy, Robert
2015 1-4955-0286-4 256 pages
A new narrative on the writers who paved the way for the modern goddess movements. Utilizing themes of both the occult and magic as well exposing previously undiscovered parallels between the three writers, this book identifies how the advent of the feminine divine enabled men to confront their woman centered rage through embracing a modern form of goddess worship in order to soothe their psychological wounds.
This book locates a literary study of the goddess in Lawrence, Fortune and Hughes within a narrative in which some modern men try to confront their yearning anger toward women by embracing goddess religion. The author argues that his chosen writers each helped this narrative to emerge, The book (a) offers Lawrence readers a new angle on his preoccupation with the goddess; (b) introduces Dion Fortune (virtually unknown outside her cult following) as an important twentieth century writer on marginality and sexuality; and (c) shows how Ted Hughes’ narratives of the suffering goddess (in Gaudete and Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being especially) relate forwards to his own Birthday Letters and backwards to Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The author also takes magic and the occult as a theme linking the three writers. In doing so he aspires to place his book in the company of other texts which have also taken the occult in modern literature for their subject.
Davies, Ann
2004 0-7734-6343-7 304 pages
While many scholars have approached Don Juan in terms of myth, this study argues for the understanding of Don Juan as a discourse of gender relations, changing over time. Using examples from the plays by Tirso de Molina, Molière, Mozart, Zorrila, Shaw and Frisch, it argues that Don Juan’s entire identity as a male individual is constructed around women, but that over time – reflecting a growing sense of crisis in the male individual – the women appear more and more pathological in their desire for Don Juan. In contrast with early modern works where women fend for themselves in a positive manner, the heroines of later Don Juan works actively prey on the individual male. This book argues that these changes in approach to the female characters, and, in tandem, the developing identity of the male protagonist, suggest Don Juan as dischronic discourse rather than myth. Don Juan is not the eternal seducer, but one of a variety of discourses through which gender relations are negotiated. This book will interest not only Don Juan scholars but also scholars and students of European literature, theatre and gender discourses in literature and culture.
Ito, Michio
2018 1-4955-0688-6 124 pages
This work offers the first complete translation of an autobiographical talk the dancer and choreographer Michio Ito gave in Japanese in 1955, which was originally transcribed and published in 1965 as "Omoide wo kataru: Taka no i shutsuen no koto nado" (Reminiscences: On Appearing in At the Hawk's Well and Other matters). Ito's memorable account of an important interlude in the history of early twentieth-century Anglophone modernism has been recognized as a significant primary source in the scholarship of Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Modernist studies more generally. This translated text includes 8 color photos.
Pyle, Sandra J.
1997 0-7734-8480-9 284 pages
Demonstrates though textual analysis of seven dramas Shakespeare's adaptation of a medieval character type - the holy fool. Fundamentally, the holy fool's mission is to promote harmony and good will by correcting those personality flaws that impede human community. The identification and development of the holy fool as a viable literary device has led to the discovery of a new motif in Shakespeare's drama - the salvific element of play inherent in the role of holy fool as spiritual physician. They demonstrate how art, particularly drama, proves an indispensable tool for illustrating how personal moral choices impact on a society.
Khorrami, Mohammad Mehdi
2002 0-7734-6935-4 184 pages
This book describes and analyzes contemporary Iranian fiction through the technical components of Persian literary tradition. Texts examined include: Tuba va Ma’na-ye Shab; Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s “Dadresi”; Ayenehha-Ye Dardar; and the short stories of Shahriyar Mandanipur.
Jones, Susanne Lenné
2013 0-7734-4292-8 352 pages
The incorporation of photography into German literary texts dealing with the years between 1933 and 1945 is an important innovative technique that offers insights relating to questions of truth, authenticity, and opportunities for personal engagement in the visual and textual representations of the catastrophe that still haunts us today.
This book fills a void in contemporary scholarship by providing an in-depth analyses of three major German-language writers and their literary reflections of the Holocaust. It examines important insights into the limits of memory on the effects of this historical catastrophe on those born afterwards and the blending of text and image in the search for truth and authenticity.
Smith, Evans Lansing
2003 0-7734-6700-9 380 pages
This book presents the most comprehensive study currently available of the myth of the descent to the underworld in postmodern literature. It develops a theory of necrotypes – archetypal images consistently evoked by the myth of the nekyia – and applies it to close readings of selected works by major authors of the period, from Alejo Carpentier and Octavo Paz to Thomas Pynchon and Ken Kesey. In addition, the study shows how these works exemplify the postmodern practice of ludic syncretism, the playful fusion of materials from a wide variety of multicultural sources, including Classical, Biblical, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Native American, Nordic, Celtic, and Hermetic mythologies. Finally, it shows how ludic syncretism evolved from High Classical Modernism, in a manner analogous to the evolution of Hellenistic from Classical art, or of Baroque from that of the High Renaissance.
Martin, Laura
2000 0-7734-7809-4 224 pages
This study shows how the works in question (Goethe’s “Die pilgernde Törin”; Kleist’s “Die Marquise von O. . .”, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and James’s Daisy Miller) can appeal to the reader who identifies a message friendly towards woman and her plight, whether this ‘message’ can be considered a part of the author’s intention or not. These works, through mere description of the impossibility of women characters’ situations without any prescription for change, can often be found to carry meanings more critical of the status quo than at first may seem the case. Such an interpretation often goes against the tradition of criticism that has built up around the works, but it is based on concrete evidence in the text.
Kelly, Dermot
1988 0-7734-1994-2 138 pages
This books tackles the central stylistic problem of Ulysses -- the fact that many of Joyce's experiments seem to be divergences from the novelistic story. By tracing key words, images and voices through the labyrinth of the later episodes, it develops new proof of the novel's formal unity. There are revealing observations about the way Joyce transforms parody into a mode of celebratory lyricism. Brings a fresh perspective to the puzzle of Joyce's styles, linking character and discourse in a humanistic appreciation of the author's artistry.
Kawashima, Shigenari
2014 0-7734-0057-5 204 pages
This unique and fresh interpretation of an enigmatic classic provides a better understanding of the play’s religious and political undertones with an innovative and focused examination which proposes an earlier recognition than previously assumed of the whole truth by Jocasta. This will become an indispensable reference book for Classical scholars in this first ever English translation.
McGlynn, Cathy
2007 0-7734-5363-6 236 pages
This book combines twelve essays derived from the proceedings of the New Voices in Irish Criticism Conference of 2005, which took place at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, all of which concentrate on the intersection between text and theory in the field of Irish Studies. All of the contributors to this volume have an interest in developing novel ways of reading both traditional and conventional Irish texts through various theoretical contexts, which include postcolonialism, feminism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. The development and subversion of traditional critical approaches to Irish texts evidenced by these essays emphasizes the necessity for a theoretical thrust in Irish Studies, in order for conceptions of Irishness to avoid stagnation through constant critique, expansion and re-invention.
El-Meligi, Eman
2014 0-7734-4297-9 244 pages
A fascinating analysis of postmodernist metafictional writers offering a unique juxtapositioning of authors from distinct cultural worlds with their varied fictional narrative techniques. A must read for comparative literature, postmodernist fiction and cultural studies interests.
du Plessis, Eric H.
2013 0-7734-4498-X 200 pages
Provides in-depth evaluations of forty-five French novels chosen as the most representative of nineteenth-century classic fiction. Selected titles are given succinct plot overviews followed by a thorough textural analysis. The evaluations provide a social, historical and literary context in order to capture both the readers’ interest and their curiosity in order to entice them to discover these classic novels in their entirety.
Sánchez-Conejero, Cristina
2009 0-7734-5104-8 316 pages
This book represents a comprehensive study on a marginal genre that reveals key elements of Spanish culture and invites a a better understanding of humanity as a whole. The body of work on the topic of Spanish science fiction is severely limited and, of the few sources that exist, most focus on literature of a historical perspective. The text of the book is in Spanish.
Arieti, James A.
1985 0-88946-554-1 294 pages
A translation which refers the reader to related usages, additional readings of interest, and parallel examples of the various rhetorical constructions in the works of such authors as Shakespeare, Bacon, Sterne, and T. S. Eliot.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's Poetic Science: His Visionary Enterprise and the Crisis of Self-Consciousness
Protopapas, Argyros2012 0-7734-3060-1 384 pages
An epistemologically oriented analysis of Shelley’s verse explores the poet’s visionary enterprise and the emergence of the Shelleyan self. Shelley, once a candidate to become a physician, gave scientifically sound descriptions of the workings of the eyes and nervous system.
The author, after surveying the literature, gives descriptions of Shelley’s psychological and physiological features recorded by the poet himself. The operations of the poet’s eyesight are seen to be linked to his imagery and use of language.
Nijibayashi, Kei
2003 0-7734-6544-8 232 pages
The two Romantic poets have such similar biographies that most comparative studies of them draw heavily on the few biographical differences and neglect a careful analysis of how their actual work differs. He aspires to correct the imbalance and so offer a general appreciation of these authors.
Crowder, Ashby Bland
1993 0-7734-9268-2 228 pages
This volume begins with an argument that poetry has a job to do: it is one of man's basic tools for keeping himself in touch with the world. The next essay confronts one of the enduring problems of interpretation: how do you know your interpretation is "correct"? Other essays represent different approaches to literature that add to the reader's understanding of the texts. They attempt to sort out dramatic relationships, clarify the role of imagery, identify prosodic accomplishments, or understand the reasons for poet's revisions of his manuscript. Two of the essays discuss the critical methods of two famous 19th-century critics, Poe and Ruskin.
Burger, Patrick R.
2001 0-7734-7631-8 164 pages
Orero, Pilar
2007 0-7734-5358-X 392 pages
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and Edward Lear’s limericks and nonsense writings have never been out of print since they first appeared and have gone through numerous editions and translations in all major languages. The reality of this universal appeal is perplexing due to the fact that the nonsense literatures of both of these men are filled with historical allusions to and parodies of Victorian England. Without an understanding of their historical background, one would assume that these works lose a considerable amount of their original appeal. Full of Victorian whimsy, these books have nevertheless found an international readership both in English and in translations into many, even non-European, languages. The purpose of this enquiry then is to explore the many different ways in which nonsense has been translated. Once this is done, differences among translations of the same source text have to be observed and noted. At this stage it may be appropriate to bring in external considerations of history, culture and publishers’ intentions, which can suggest motivations for existing differences in approaches and techniques of translation.
Powell, Anna
2003 0-7734-6831-5 316 pages
This book explores the uncanny modalities of eroticism in vampire literature and film. It critiques the predominant approaches to a body of texts which depict sovereignty and the will to power, and considers the shortcomings of the overwhelming focuses on sexuality in current Gothic studies, present the vampire instead as a popular cultural version of transgressive human sovereignty. The theoretical trajectory interfaces literary, cinematic, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, and engages with psychoanalysis, and proposes a metaphysics of vampire fantasy.
Gorton, Kristyn
2007 0-7734-5559-0 236 pages
This book explores the concept of desire through psychoanalytic theory, namely in the work of Freud and Lacan, in Feminist theory and in contemporary critical theory and literature. Wide ranging in its pursuits, the book examines what Gorton terms ‘critical scenes of desire’ in literary and artistic examples in order to argue that desire, as a concept, allows for moments of production and transformation. Unlike theorisations that situate desire as ‘lack’, Gorton argues that desire can be reconceived as progressive and multiple. She also suggests that there is a desire on the part of the reader or critic which creates a second ‘scene of desire’ in which the reader tries to ‘solve’ the enigma of the text. In other words, there is a tendency on the part of the critic and reader to want to fill in the gaps that desire creates in the narrative. This book does not seek to be comprehensive in its theorisation of the concept of desire, nor does it attempt to offer a history of the concept within cultural theory. Instead, it examines the way we read for desire and argues that the concept of desire can be found in these readings as progressive and transformative.
Converse, Terry John
1999 0-7734-8207-5 268 pages
In addition to a comprehensive Jungian analysis of the play, this study provides a psychological definition of the grotesque which may be used as a critical model for other literary works that involve a grotesque vision.
Coffin, Arthur
1991 0-7734-9903-2 340 pages
Fulfills the need for a carefully selected group of supplementary readings in the study of Tragedy. Begins with the premise that any reading of tragedy can be stimulated and enriched by supplementary critical texts which have been selected for precisely those qualities that would enhance one's response to tragedy. Attempts a reconstruction of the canon of the criticism of tragedy through a critical overview of traditional classical commentary, Russian Formalism, Reader Response Theory, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstructionism, and Marxist criticism. Includes selections from the writings of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Georg Lukacs, Arthur Miller, Karl Jaspers, Max Sheler, Laurence Michel, Henry Alonzo Myers, Northrop Frye, Albert C. Outler, and others. Arranged chronologically, supplemented by selective bibliography.
Evans, Charlene T.
2023 1-4955-1056-5 696 pages
Hermansson, Casie
2001 0-7734-7394-7 332 pages
This study offers a new theory for feminist intertextuality based on strategies at work in rewritings of the Bluebeard fairy tale. The book asserts that feminist intertextuality revises one coercive intertext in particular: that of intertextuality theory itself. Rewritings of the fairy tale accordingly can be seen to privilege either the embedded narrative or the escape from it, subscribing either to monologic or dialogic intertextuality. The work examines the original Bluebeard tale group (Perrault, Grimm, variants); historical and modern Bluebeards; and then other writers, including Jane Austen, William Godwin, Margaret Atwood, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, Gloria Naylor, Emma Cave, Max Frisch, Stephen King, Méira Cook, and Donald Barthelme.
Pitcher, Edward William
2002 0-7734-7046-8 248 pages
Oakley, Helen
2002 0-7734-7013-1 236 pages
Dhuicq, Bernard
2017 1-4955-0628-2 608 pages
This collection discusses the literary and social of achievements of Aphra Behn (1640-1689), considered to be the first female writer of English literature. It is also a collection of articles, written in both English and French, of Aphra Behn scholar Bernard Dhuicq.
Sellin, Eric
1993 0-7734-9361-1 172 pages
Analyzes the aesthetic thrust of the three most important avant-garde movements in the twentieth century, defining both similarities and differences in their poetics. In compelling essays like "A Will to Art," "Modern Drama and Nonverbal Poetics," "Le Chapelet du hasard: Ideas of Order in Dada-Surrealist Imagery," "Three Modes of Semantic Accrual," and "The Aesthetics of Ambiguity," Sellin explores the inner workings of the creative impulses and the resulting poetic structures which inhere in the creative works of these early avant-garde movements.
Jones, Thomas O.
1995 0-7734-9027-2 188 pages
Shows how the magical language and occult methods of the Italian Renaissance are the key to understanding the mysteries of the Shakespeare sonnets, both as a cycle and as individual poems. It explores how the influence of Giordano Bruno's Heroic Enthusiasms, Plato's Symposium, Trismegistus' Corpus Hermiticum, emblem books, and Italian "magic" in its various overlapping forms provided the foundation and content of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Ford, Edward
2007 0-7734-5459-4 156 pages
It has long been assumed that F. Scott Fitzgerald was inspired by American and British sources, however, this study takes the first look at continental literature as a possible source of Fitzgerald’s writing and finds that there was massive borrowing. Most saliently, the vast the influence of Alain-Fornier’s Le grand Meaulnes on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is demonstrated in detail for the first time, while other chapters consider the influence of Tolstoy, Ibsen and Strindberg on Fitzgerald’s fiction. Though largely focused on The Great Gatsby, this study does cover the full life and work of this important American author who continues to draw in new readers every year with his Roaring Twenties version of the American Dream.
Grove, Dana
1990 0-88946-929-6 404 pages
Dana Grove's A Rhetorical Analysis of "Under the Volcano"- Malcolm Lowry's Design Governing Postures is a valuable volume-length close reading of Lowry's magnum opus, a useful primer on the intricacies of this dark text for the uninitiated. Grove's is an astute and lucid study that explicates Lowry's text on a chapter-by-chapter basis for its techniques, themes, and sources, while providing a useful synthesis of the best that has been thought and said about the novel. In particular, Grove's bibliography of other critical studies (including the original book reviews) of Under the Volcano is comprehensive and current.
Siegl, Karin
1996 0-7734-4210-3 86 pages
Examines Defoe's Robin Crusoe as prototype, then compares the Ballantyne and Golding novels. Includes short examinations of the lives of the authors.
Ramos, Lilian
2015 0-7734-0077-X 220 pages
The often ignored literary treasures of Austrian Poet, Peter Rosegger, have been rediscovered for the resurgent reader’s interest in this inspiring book. Once relegated as a poet of ‘mere’ rural literature we discover now a poet who transcends the genre of rural literature with considerable prophetic insight into the socio-political infrastructure of his day with a profound understanding of the challenges facing a futuristic directed society.
Norrell, Robert J.
2015 1-4955-0403-4 104 pages
This multi-sited, transnational dissent from the widely acclaimed book, Alabama in Africa by Andrew Zimmerman challenges Zimmerman’s argument, evidence, and conclusions about the details and import of the Tuskegee Institute’s impact on the history of West Africa.
No study of transnational work has gained more attention than Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. It instantly rose to broad influence in 2011, but Robert J. Norrell contends that Zimmerman is wrong on virtually all his major claims. Norrell insists that Alabama in Africa often relies on shallow or tendentious argument. An American black man, Zimmerman claims, is in large part responsible for the maltreatment of Africans in a German colony and therefore bears guilt for the brutality that Germans showed throughout Africa and that carried over to all their international relations afterward. The leading social scientists brought into Zimmerman’s story – Gustav von Schmoller, Max Weber, and Robert Park – are also extracted from their real circumstances and cast into contexts more of Zimmerman’s making than reflections of reality.
Makolkin, Anna
1992 0-7734-9570-3 260 pages
Examines the fictional worlds of Chekhov and Maugham (with their enormous resistance to abandoning the traditional myths about women) as symbolic responses to the changing culture. The purpose of this semiotic enterprise is to disclose the regrettably simplistic interpretation of the Other and the potential for violence that the seemingly innocent fictional signs carry. It is also to challenge the pervasiveness of the dangerous myth that involves interpreters of culture, myth and song.
Biberman, Matthew
2011 0-7734-3730-4 328 pages
This work assembles a composite picture of Shakespeare’s afterlives in media and cultural imagination. Each essay in this collection provides new insight about how our understanding of Shakespeare has changed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Brooks, Douglas A.
2011 0-7734-3730-4 328 pages
This work assembles a composite picture of Shakespeare’s afterlives in media and cultural imagination. Each essay in this collection provides new insight about how our understanding of Shakespeare has changed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Morris, Thomas F.
2021 1-4955-0920-6 212 pages
Three studies pertaining to Shakespeare's Henriad plays.
Chopoidalo, Cindy
2014 0-7734-4309-6 76 pages
This monograph is a fresh investigation of both the sources for and adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Dr. Chopoidalo notes that Shakespeare adapted many of his works from existing historical or literary sources, in this case, Saxo Grammaticus’legendary Amleth in Historiae Danicae, Bellforest’s Histoires Tragiques, and Seneca with the subsequent Elizabethan and Jocabean revenge dramas, the first of these being Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.
Bellis, Clive
2011 0-7734-3663-4 228 pages
This collection deals with the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes, with Rabelais as their common predecessor. This work presents the Shakespeare-Cervantes relation not only from a purely textual perspective, as scholars have tended to do, but also from a theatrical perspective, since both shared the condition of playwrights.
Szatek-Tudor, Karoline
2015 1-4955-0418-2 280 pages
This ground breaking work is a comprehensive study that applies art, dramatic, and literary theory to examine the shaping effects of negative/positive space in English Renaissance pastoral drama from 1590-1640. This innovative approach to a genre long overlooked includes both major and minor plays which are examined to show how dramatists used the theory of negative/ positive space to write and dramatize their plays.
Saur, Pamela S
2015 1-4955-0358-5 228 pages
Addresses Adalbert Stifter's view of human relationship to material substances as well as proper ownership and use of possessions in individuals of the middle and higher classes. It builds on past scholarship in two main areas, namely Stifter and nature and the domestic ideal of the "Biedermeier" movement with which he is identified.
Wiegmann, Mira
2003 0-7734-6891-9 312 pages
This study employs Jungian and post-Jungian hermeneutics to address psychological, social and political perspectives in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, M. Butterfly, and Kiss of the Spider Woman. These plays and their Broadway productions contain mythic narratives and dreams that Jung described as visionary drama. Peter Brooks’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages Jungian archetypes that bridge modern and postmodern production sensibilities and aesthetics. David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly deconstructs patriarchal personae and stages projection and introjection. Terrence McNally’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, an adaptation of Manuel Puig’s novel, demonstrates the fluidity of meaning in postmodern archetypes. This book will engage theatre scholars and practitioners as well as scholars of popular culture and interdisciplinary studies. It models archetypal hermeneutics as a useful analytical tool for postmodern performance criticism. Illustrated with production photographs.
Young, William H.
1996 0-7734-8918-5 552 pages
This is the first book-length study to investigate the phenomenon of this enormously popular genre. Employing hitherto closed access to the histories of several pioneering publishing companies, the book initially chronicles the rather chaotic rise (and fall) of small enterprises that saw the commercial potential in such an approach to fiction. Focusing first on the innovative creations of author Don Pendleton, the text traces the remarkable achievement of his thirty-eight book series, The Executioner. It examines the continuing success of the series under a growing number of writers, and includes a running commentary on the many Mack Bolan imitators that have sprung up. This book fills a gap in contemporary literary criticism on a genre that warrants extended analysis.
Flores, Ralph
1996 0-7734-8792-1 264 pages
This study moves against the grain of both traditional allegories and contemporary critical theory. The first section proposes hypotheses about existing theoretical work in the field. It shows how Pali Buddhist texts context 'metaphysics' many centuries before Nietzsche and Derrida, providing a distinct outlook on the problem of figurative language. The second section examines four texts, ranging from Plato to Dante, to indicate the difficult assumptions of 'life-giving' allegory. The third section deals with texts from Spenser onward that illustrate ghost-effects in the displacement of medieval allegory. The various chapters examine differing yet related inflections: economics in Plato, theatricality in the Buddha's texts, failing communication in Augustine, 'unreading' in the Roman de la Rose, marginality in Dante, doubtful signatures in Spenser, decapitation in Hawthorne, blindness in Baudelaire. The study is culturally far-reaching, and takes issue with the relatively truncated theories of allegory in our time. By scrutinizing other texts than the usual, it discloses new possibilities for investigation.
Massengale, James
2016 1-4955-0458-1 520 pages
The folklore theorist Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) laid the foundation of a syntagmatic (sequential structural) model for complex oral narratives known as wondertales. His central work, Morphology of the Folktale, was published in 1928 and translated into English in 1958, thereafter becoming a cornerstone of structural folktale theory. The ideas in this study constitute a point-by-point review of central aspects of Proppian analysis of his ground-breaking work .
Jawad, Abdul Sattar
2014 0-7734-0074-5 304 pages
The book sheds new light on the revolutionary influence of Eliot’s poetry on the free verse movement in Iraq and Lebanon, especially on the mythical poets: Al-Sayyab, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Yusuf Al-Khal, Khalil Hawi and Adonis known as the Tammuzi Poets. The writer is one of Eliot’s best translators and who personally knew all five of the modern mythical poets.
Warren, Charles
1991 0-7734-0992-6 140 pages
This is the first book to survey all of Eliot's writing about Shakespeare. In addition to the well-known essays, it includes unreprinted articles for periodicals, talks for the BBC, contributions to books that are now out of print, and most importantly, a set of lectures given in 1937 and 1941 which were never published and exist only in typescript. It shows the unfolding of Eliot's ideas on Shakespeare and their relation to important general issues in Eliot's literary criticism. It also deals with the issue of Shakespeare in Eliot's poetry. Includes an appendix describing the Shakespeare-related articles and reviews by other writers which Eliot published as editor of the Criterion; a complete bibliography; and an index of names and critical topics.
Jaidka, Manju
1997 0-7734-8658-5 184 pages
This unconventional study of T. S. Eliot is based on the conviction that Eliot is not just a "difficult" poet who wrote for intellectual readers, but also a writer for the common man. This volume focuses on three popular sources: nonsense poetry of the sort written by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, detective fiction and the music-hall/vaudeville tradition. The study makes use of unpublished material from rare book libraries (including the New York Public Library, the Houghton at Harvard, the Beinecke at Yale, and the Harry Ramson Center at Austin). The theoretical premises are derived from critics like Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin.
Boyle, Louis J.
2009 0-7734-4814-4 200 pages
Explores the complexities of unstable signification in the Arthurian work of T H White and his source, Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur". This study demonstrates that the unstable signification so important to Malory's Arthurian world informs White's handling of his own version of the story.
Finas, Lucette
2003 0-7734-6756-4 364 pages
This book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of literary criticism, literary theory, especially those interested in modern critical theory and 18th- and 19th-century French fiction. The five readings of these French short stories are preceded by a translator’s introduction on Finas’s work; two short pieces by Finas herself in which she describes her approach; and Roland Barthes’s preface to Le Bruit d’Iris (a selection of essays by Finas). The Appendix includes the complete text in English translation of two of the five short stories: Sade, Florville and Courval, translated by Lowell Bair, and Villiers de l’lsle-Adam, The Brigands, translated by Hamish Miles, both excellent translations, now out of print.
Golban, Petru
2013 0-7734-4510-2 256 pages
Golban offers an interdisciplinary perspective involving literary theory, criticism, and literary history which will be useful to scholars and students. The main concern of the book is the British critical discourse which originates in the Renaissance and continues its developmental process until the rise of the formal approach to literature in the twentieth century. Some of these author critics, like Sidney and Dryden, develop critical ideas based on a respectable classical tradition; others, like Coleridge and Ruskin, were more original and innovative in their critical theories. Among them, there were those who used or materialized their own artistic or literary theories in their literary texts, such as Wordsworth reifying his theory of the origin of poetry, or Pater exemplifying the principles of aestheticism. For some, criticism was a means of defending the aesthetic value of literature; for others, criticism represented the instrument to be used in an attempt to found a new genre, or even introduce into the contemporary culture and to validate a whole new literary movement, such as for Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Tipper, Karen Sasha Anthony
2017 1-4955-0603-7 324 pages
In this study, Dr. Tipper observes that there is a striking resemblance between both the lives and works of Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. The study compares the philosophical, artistic, and social backgrounds of the two writers and the personal aspects of their lives which caused them to live and to write in similar ways. Such resemblances naturally enhance the influence a writer has on a successor and this led Wilde to conceive of Baudelaire as a fellow genius and noble sufferer from whom he could borrow some ready-made splendor.
Mehrabian, Houman
2024 1-4955-1196-0 176 pages
"In this book, I draw insights from textbooks in the history of rhetoric to analyze the diverse applications of amplification, with a specific emphasis on the rhetorical figures of meiosis and paradiastole. I investigate the mechanism and relevance of these applications in the context of William Shakespeare's tragedies, illustrating how Shakespeare dramatizes his understanding of these rhetorical strategies through plot and character." -Dr. Houman Mehrabian
Georgopoulou, Xenia
2011 0-7734-1602-1 280 pages
Examines the attempts of Shakespeare’s male characters to fashion female identity in a way that ensures their own self-definition.
Carneiro, Carlos
2022 1-4955-1011-5 348 pages
This is an oversized (8x10), softcover book. The author: "The development of the churlish headless challenger and his variations does ...seem indeed to be a process about which we have quite clear indications due to the literary evidences. Headless figures which retain their conscience post-decapitation are not exclusive to the beheading-game narratives or other medieval narratives involving some form of decapitation, however. Even in hagiographic tradition we have a similar figure in the form of the cephalophore, a headless saint, and to this day there are creatures sound in Irish folk traditions such as the Dullahan: a headless horseman sharing many characteristics with the churlish challengers we have focused on."
Young, Barbara Ann
2006 0-7734-5614-7 400 pages
The Irish literary child has its nascence in earliest Celtic mythology and flourishes as an emblem of the Irish nation throughout Irish literature to the present day. This book concentrates on the development of this symbolic figure in twentieth century Irish poetry and prose and juxtaposes the figure of the literary child at any given point in the century with political and social conditions of Ireland at the time. The result of this pairing over the course of the century is the revelation of the paradigmatic nature of the child in Irish literature. As the nature of and challenges before this child evolve in literature, so does the nation of Ireland.
Markham, Jacquelyn K.
2014 0-7734-4259-6 632 pages
This volume brings together for the first time nearly five hundred poems by Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman, one of the most influential thinkers of her time. It represents the significant poetry this writer, lecturer, feminist, and pioneer sociologist chose to publish during her lifetime.
Spedaliere, Jody
2018 1-4955-0700-9 200 pages
This study demonstrates how William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac used autobiographical elements in constructing their fiction. Both Kerouac and Saroyan used writing about childhood experiences and striking out to find their places in the world as means of create ideas about who they were and what they could be.
Davis, Viola
2015 1-4955-0402-6 332 pages
This work examines the dramatic oeuvre of Derek Walcott in order to make the case that he is engaged as a playwright, in creating a “Creole” drama- a drama that bears the special marks of its Caribbean origin and setting and that embodies the hybrid nature of Caribbean history, culture and personality. This Creole reality is the result of the historical coming together of European and African values within the physical location of the Caribbean islands. The idea of “Creole” is being used to describe the result of the fusion of these three realities and this result is seen to contain a multi-cultural plentitude that is “Characteristic” of the cultural and intellectual reality of the Caribbean.
Moore, Steven Troy
2020 1-4955-0819-6 208 pages
This monograph is an expanded edition of Dr. Steven Moore’s The Cry of Black Rage in African American Literature, expanding the scholarly developments to the Age of Trump.
Thompson, Helen
2006 0-7734-5971-5 376 pages
This collection of essays examines Ireland’s literary canon in light of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and Irish identity at the turn of the century, contextualizing its readings within the understanding that The Field Day Anthology has crystallized discussions of literary value, canonicity, political agency and Irish identity because of its agenda and the ensuing controversy surrounding its publication. Yet, while The Field Day Anthology constitutes the occasion for writing, the collection also moves beyond it to suggest new models for reading and evaluating Irish literature and identity in the new century. The essays in the collection examine the canonical status of writers such as Joyce, Yeats and Beckett; how postcolonial theory and criticism have reshaped the boundaries of Irish studies; and how women’s writing has challenged canonicity as a concept.
Boos, Florence Saunders
1991 0-88946-933-4 592 pages
Examines The Earthly Paradise as the first mature poetic expression of Morris' view that a poet is also a historian who bears the immense responsibility of creation and narration. Details one of the longest and most complex single poetic narratives in the English language along several lines: systematic use of multiple narrators and audiences which deepen the poem's sense of shared experience and impose a coherent structure on its temporal and other discontinuities; the alterations of confession, description, and retrospection in the frame and inner tales that enabled Morris to complete one of the fullest Victorian meditations on the creation of identity through frustrated love and sorrow; the flexibility and subtlety of the poem's various allegorical resonances and narrative levels; and the "stoic," aesthetic, and political implications of Morris' evolving ideal of friendship.
Gauss, Aaron Valdis
2022 1-4955-1041-7 544 pages
(8x10 softcover, 2-volume set) From the Author's Introduction: "The primary objective [of this study] is to anthologize and collate the first-ever comprehensive mythography of the Formosan deluge Myths. This includes the creation of a corpus with multiple variations of the flood myths sourced from all of Taiwan's officially recognized tribes. [This study also] classifies the deluge myths according to narrative theme. ...[It] offers a comparative exploration of the deluge texts by classifying the salient themes and motifs of the Formosan oral flood literatures. ...Volume II of this work represents the first of its kind to offer hundreds of texts collected by ethnographers, linguists, missionaries, government agency-appointed investigators, and adventurers since the turn of the twentieth century."
Weaver, Brett E.
2018 1-4955-0638-X 152 pages
This new annotated bibliography review provides the best mechanism for reviewing and studying that which we do know about Salinger. It is a readable work which places each entry within the context of that scholarship and it meaningfully places individual works of criticism within the context of the whole.
Kelly, Gary M.
2021 1-4955-0922-2 264 pages
From the Abstract:
"...this book aims to integrate the thematic question of who man is and the disciplinary question of how man knows, treating the Essay in its own right, standing on its own feet. The book will maintain that the Essay delivers an audial self combining the thematic who and the disciplinary how, a self whose reason links sense to soul through originating the activities of speaking, listening and hearing. These activities are grounded in an audial self whose internal reasoned operations include contemplation, anticipation and suspension, not only delivering sense to soul, but recalling and ratifying the self in man to self."
Lewis, Ethan
2008 0-7734-5777-5 280 pages
This critical anthology features fourteen relatively unknown poets from Sangamon, Illinois examining their impact on one another and their importance in establishing a context for understanding the work of more noted poets. The importance of reading poets in relation to one another for the study of literary history is emphasized in the interpretations of the poets included herein.
Rogal, Samuel J.
2022 1-4955-0984-2 296 pages
From the author's Prefatory Note (pgs.1-2):
"The subject of this biography concerns a woman of centuries past, and while the pages of the chapters that folow turn and the thoughts and actions of the subject unfold, the reader will be asked to judge the overall value of the labors of this biographer. This writer had never come across the name of Mary Anne Galton Schimmelpenninck until, while at work on another project, she abruptly appeared for two or three sentences, then as quickly faded from further sight. Nothing beyond pure curiosity and a wish to share this exercise in self-education with others motivated and then produced this volume."
Azouqa, Aida O.
2019 1-4955-0718-1 248 pages
While Adaptations register the Arabian Nights' resiliency to fit numerous literary modes, the book demonstrates that understanding the spirit of their hypertext has merited their magical realist novels in achieving their fictional purposes. Accordingly, the novels examined in this book use the varied elements of the Arabian Nights to break away from conventions of realism. The categories of the Arabian Nights in general, and its marvelous in particular, invariably suggests that novelists used to them either to subvert the discourses of colonial archives of discovery, or the transgression of institutionalized censorship.
Mc Elroy, James
2019 1-4955-0768-8 556 pages
This book provides a comprehensive and critical review of Derek Mahon's poetry and criticism from the 1960s to the present day (2019). As well as providing one of the very few detailed studies of Mahon's work in English, French, and more, it provides an entirely new approach to reading, more properly re-reading, his various publications in accordance with the belief that a specifically symptomic reading - lecture symptomale - might help us to better elicit, and identify, those gaps, lapses, and silences, that give Mahon's writing its unique characteristics as part of a literature that has been, and is, largely determined by the unusual circumstances and colonial realities that continue to prevail in Northern Ireland.
Stanwood, Paul G.
2021 1-4955-0897-8 368 pages
Dr. Paul Stanwood combines the long and distinguished academic career on the subject of John Donne.
Kaye, Bradley
2018 1-4955-0651-7 172 pages
This book is a English translation of a classical Chinese Taoist text, the Tao te Ching, which is considered a fun-damental text in Taoist philosophy and religion. It was written by Lao Tzu, a mysterious figure whose actual identity is heavily debated. The text of the Tao te Ching is included alongside Dr. Kaye’s commentary.
Miller, R. Baxter
2021 1-4955-0853-8 252 pages
Professor Miller traces the development of African American poetics from the jazz modernist Langston Hughes to his later contemporary Gwendolyn Brooks. Along the way, the critic accounts for social and historical developments within each new generation of African American verse from the Harlem Renaissance to the new millennium.
Liberman, Anatoly
2018 1-4955-0652-5 148 pages
The book seeks to uncover roots of the Icelandic Sagas, considered to be the among the great masterpieces of of world literature. Dr. Liberman looks into their origin, possible authorship, and status as historical documents.
Majumdar, Robin
2019 1-4955-0699-4 152 pages
Dr. Majumdar reevaluates the Southern critics', especially the Agrarians' significance in the postmodern world. The Southern Agrarians and their spiritual descendants are out of fashion these days. They are either dismissed or at most marginalized as socially and culturally irrelevant. But an objective appraisal of their work tells a different story. The social, cultural, and moral issues the Agrarians, discussed, the questions they asked, and the values they fought for, in spite of their excesses and even aberrations, neither irrelevant nor meaningless in the modern age as their detractors would have us believe.
Hand, Felicity
2010 0-7734-1428-2 232 pages
This book is the first full-length study of the literary output of South African-born, Mauritian-based novelist, Lindsey Collen. This study tackles these aspects of her writing from a cultural studies standpoint, encompassing both a socio-anthropological reading that identifies the creative energies that forge new connections and a literary analysis of the metaficitional potential of her novels as vehicles for the reassessment of social, cultural and historical conventions.
Jha, Smita
2024 1-4955-1183-9 288 pages
This book has been awarded the Adele Mellen Prize for its distinguished contribution to scholarship. "It is rather difficult, indeed delicate, to think of and to try to consider the theme of self-perpetuation in the novels of E.M. Forster, for we come across several other themes in them, ones more prominent, more attractive and more interesting. Nevertheless, this theme of self-perpetuation has a kind of subtlety that is challenging in nature." -Dr. Smita Jha
Kazak, Ihar [Igor Gregory Kozak]
2021 1-4955-0834-X 156 pages
Dr. Kozak collects 13 short humorous stories by Russian author, Arkady Averchenko. They make light of the sad and hard conditions of post World War I Europe and Russia.
Rebholz, Ronald A.
2006 0-7734-5731-3 308 pages
With the exception of the three parts of Henry VI, which are examined in one chapter, each chapter is devoted to the critical analysis of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Each analysis begins with a central idea or question that shapes the entire chapter. Background issues, like the plays’ sources and secondary materials, are introduced only when relevant to the author’s analysis. Taken together, the separate chapters make a larger, coherent whole that reveals the major facets of Shakespeare’s creation in comedy, history plays, tragedy, and romances.
Donaldson, Aidan
1996 0-7734-8742-5 348 pages
This work provides the first comprehensive and detailed exposition of the entire oeuvre of the important 20th-century philosopher and social researcher, Lucien Goldmann. His entire range of study, including his writings on literature, political theory and philosophy, as well as his methodology, are examined and assessed in full.
Potter, Martin
2009 0-7734-3854-8 320 pages
The only study to focus on these three novels. The argument departs from previous scholarship by emphasizing the ambivalence and even, to some extent, hostility, evinced by each of the authors to aspects of modern social conditions, and by examining their discontents in detail. Also shows a portrayal by the authors of a gradual increase in the tensions they detect in social and artistic conditions during the modern period.
Morrissey, Ted
2016 978-1-4955-0485-3 268 pages
This study examines the cultural factors that have caused writers to create narratives bearing the marks of postmodernism sometimes centuries before the postmodern era demarcation of WWII that demonstrate the characteristics which have becomes associated with postmodernism – namely, intertextuality, repetition, fragmentation, and language experimentation.
Chishty-Mujahid, Nadya Q.
2019 1-4955-0754-8 116 pages
This monograph examines a dozen British and American novels that focus on identical (monozygotic) twins, and attempts to determine how the complex relationships between twin siblings are perceived via the lens of modern English fiction.
Van Cleve, John W.
2018 1-4955-0647-9 260 pages
Along with G.E. Lessing, and the famous pair, Goethe and Schiller, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) is a member of the pantheon of German eighteenth-century writers. The plays of Wieland's youth have not appeared in English translation until now.
Van Cleve, John W.
2022 1-4955-0986-9 280 pages
These two plays by F.M. Klinger were written during the "Sturm und Drang" or "Storm and Stress" German literary movement (from the 1760-s to 1780). A friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Klinger is remembered for his early tragedies, especially for Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) of 1776, the work that gave the movement of young writers its name" (pg. iii).
Oarska, Magdalena
2014 0-7734-4325-8 220 pages
A critical analysis of the form of the Romantic travelogue, making use of material that comes from two women writers from two different parts of Europe, but refers to the same subject matter- i.e. mid-19th century travels in Italy.
A gem to attract a wide readership. This book will interest researchers in nineteenth-century literature as well as comparative literary scholars and appeal to the non-specialist readers and enthusiasts of Romantic travel writing and women’s literature.
McCormick, Kathleen
1991 0-88946-493-6 196 pages
The first critical study to link recent reader-response theory, cognitive analysis, psychoanalysis, and ideological theory to a complex modernist text. Combines theory and practical application in the areas of modernist literature, specifically James Joyce's Ulysses, and literary theory, particularly theories of reading.
Johnson, Kathleen R.
2000 0-7734-7735-7 176 pages
This study examines the content and structure of 59 children’s realistic animal stories for ideological expressions of anthropocentrism. It concludes that the texts send ambivalent and contradictory messages: while children’s stories may serve to inform the reader about actual and potential connections to other animals, they also contain elements that continue to privilege the dominant view.
De Bary, Cécile
2014 1-4955-0270-8 148 pages
The Oulipo’s evolution towards the status of a literary group was gradual. Constraints were key to defining specific collaborative practices. They put language and literature into play. They are based on intertextuality and therefore on erudition. Oulipian literature is open to all forms of written expression, whether literary or not.
Rowe, Anne
2002 0-7734-7288-6 236 pages
Reveals the visual arts as vital inspiration for many thematic and formal aspects of Iris Murdoch's fiction. It relates the paintings that appear in the novels to her experimentation with form, her attempts at rendering consciousness and to her philosophy. Finally, a study of characters who experience spiritual revelations in front of famous paintings endorses the centrality of the sublime in Murdoch's fiction and demonstrates how painting serves to liberate characters and readers alike from an illusory fantasy world. With illustrations.
Manista, Frank C.
2006 0-7734-5522-1 240 pages
This book is a study of the weaving and unweaving of particular subject positions within James Joyce’s major works (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake) through representations of voice, which necessarily negotiates identity, authority, and subjectivity. In the narrowest sense, voice reveals itself as a portion of the narrative which in turn stands as part of the discourse of a particular work. A movement to a more broadly conceived view of voice has it supersede the narrative and function throughout the discourse. Permutations of these concepts locate voice at nearly all levels of Joyce’s fiction. This work explores the myriad of ways that Joyce portrays and negotiates identity through voice and the conceptualization of boundaries that exist “in between” different and distinct subjectivities. The author explores those negotiative identities and subjectivities from within the conceptualization and representation of voice. More often than not, however, a study of voice reveals the inevitability of specific identities to merge and flow into one another, despite futile attempts to retain individuality. The space existing between two seemingly distinct voices blurs in Joyce’s fiction in the din of conversation and in the fuzziness of representation.
Owen, David
2015 1-4955-0382-8 224 pages
This critical edition coincides with the broader critical movement towards promoting a better understanding of the development of British literary fiction through women’s writing, an understanding that breaks free of the old story of ‘canonical writers and grand texts’. It contains an introductory study (biographical, wider historical and literary contexts), a short re-assessment of Porter’s writing and a more fully engaged re-assessment of the literary value of Walsh Colville.
Dureau, Yona
2018 1-4955-0636-3 260 pages
This book examines the scholarly research and investigations into the life of English Playwright William Shakespeare. Dr. Dureau sets to out show that writing an accurate and factual biography of Shakespeare is troubled by contradictory sources that use various names with varied political agendas. The book includes 21 color photos.
Kundu, Gautam
2023 1-4955-1045-X 120 pages
Essays on two creators of America's Modern Literary Style