ALBERT

Description: Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and for posterity.Writing for Immortality studies the lives and works of four prominent members of the first generation of American women who strived for recognition as serious literary artists: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Combining literary criticism and cultural history, Anne E. Boyd examines how these authors negotiated the masculine connotation of "artist," imagining a space for themselves in the literary pantheon. Redrawing the boundaries between male and female literary spheres, and between American and British literary traditions, Boyd shows how these writers rejected the didacticism of the previous generation of women writers and instead drew their inspiration from the most prominent "literary" writers of their day: Emerson, James, Barrett Browning, and Eliot.Placing the works and experiences of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson within contemporary discussions about "genius" and the "American artist," Boyd reaches a sobering conclusion. Although these women were encouraged by the democratic ideals implicit in such concepts, they were equally discouraged by lingering prejudices about their applicability to women.

Description: Originally published in 1960. In E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry, Norman Friedman argues that critics who have focused on what Cummings's poetry lacks have failed to judge Cummings on his strengths. Friedman identifies a main strength of Cummings as his being a "sensual mystic." The book unpacks Cummings's subject matter, devices, and symbolism, ultimately helping readers develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of Cummings's work.

Description: Honorable Mention winner in the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize competition for French and Francophone Literary StudiesA major figure in twentieth-century letters, Albert Cohen (1895–1981) left a paradoxical legacy. His heavily autobiographical, strikingly literary, and polyphonic novels and lyrical essays are widely read by a devout public in France, yet have been largely ignored by academia. A self-consciously Jewish writer and activist, Cohen remained nevertheless ambivalent about Judaism. His self-affirmation as a Jew in juxtaposition with his satirical use of anti-Semitic stereotypes still provokes unease in both republican France and institutional Judaism.In Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices, the first English-language study of this profound and profoundly misunderstood writer, Jack I. Abecassis traces the recurrent themes of Cohen's works. He reveals the dissonant fractures marking Cohen as a modernist, and analyzes the resistance to his work as a symptom of the will not to understand Cohen's main theme—"the catastrophe of being Jewish."For Abecassis, Cohen's diverse oeuvre forms a single "roman fleuve" exploring this perturbing theme through fragmentation and grotesquerie, fantasies and nightmares, the veiling and unveiling of the unspeakable.Abecassis argues that Cohen should not be read exclusively through the prism of European literature (Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust), but rather as the retelling—inverting and ultimately exhausting, in the form of submerged plots—of the Biblical romances of Joseph and Esther. The romance of the charismatic Court Jew and its performance correlative, the carnival of Purim, generate the logic of Cohen's acute psychological ambivalence, historical consciousness and carnal sensuality—themes which link this modernist author to Genesis as well as to the literary practices of Sephardic crypto-Jews. Abecassis argues that Cohen's best-known work, Belle du Seigneur (1968), besides being an obvious tale of obsessive love and dissolution, is foremost a tale of political intrigue involving Solal, the meteoric-rising Jew in the League of Nations during the period of Appeasement (1936), and his ultimate self-destruction. Providing close readings and imaginative analyses of the entire literary output of one of twentieth-century France's most important Jewish writers, Abecassis presents here a major work of literary scholarship, as well as a broader study of the reception and influence of Jewish thought in French literature and philosophy.

Description: In the 1790s, a single conversational circle—the Friendly Club—united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place—the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads—geographical, professional, and otherwise—of American literary and intellectual culture. Waterman argues that the relationships among club members' novels, plays, poetry, diaries, legal writing, and medical essays lead to important first examples of a distinctively American literature and also illuminate the local, national, and transatlantic circuits of influence and information that club members called "the republic of intellect." He addresses topics ranging from political conspiracy in the gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown to the opening of William Dunlap's Park Theatre, from early American debates on gendered conversation to the publication of the first American medical journal. Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized.

Description: Originally published in 1992. In an age when genteel women wrote little more than personal letters, how did Jane Austen manage to become a novelist? Was she an isolated genius who rose to fame through sheer talent? Did she draw strength from the support of her family or from women writers who went before her? In Jane Austen among Women, Deborah Kaplan argues that these explanations are either misleading or insufficient. Austen, Kaplan contends, participated actively in a women's culture that promoted female authority and achievement—a culture that not only helped her become a novelist but also influenced her fiction.

Description: Originally published in 1966. In his lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins was known as a poet only by a small circle of his friends. More than any other major Victorian writer, he was recovered and presented as a poet to modern readers by editors and scholars of the first half of the twentieth century. This book analyzes how and to what extent the presuppositions of these critics have dictated the modern conception of Hopkins's work. Bender seeks to dispel, once and for all, the notion that Hopkins was a naïf poet. He provides an analysis of classical Greek and Latin rhetoric relative to the classical background of Hopkins's style and the structure in his poetry. He maintains that especially in Hopkins's more extreme work, such as "The Wreck of the Deutschland," there are precedents for the structure of the poem itself, the structure of the sentences within the poem, and its sensual and obscure imagery in the classical literature that Hopkins knew so well.Bender's study suggests two highly controversial positons: first, that although Hopkins is one of the most original voices in English, his poetry is within a tradition insufficiently recognized by modern critics; and second, that the effect of careful and sympathetic study of classical literature can induce quite the opposite of a neoclassical style in English.

Description: Originally published in 1968. In The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, James Baird traces the process of Wallace Steven's Grand Poem and the total structure that it accomplished in language. In the words of Professor Baird, "The full art of Stevens is organized with architectural precision. The shape of the mind becomes a building, the framework of which is founded in a willed symmetry of design." In The Dome and the Rock, James Baird exposes the capacity of Wallace Stevens to design his poetry in a manner similar to an architect, and he "reveals the craftsmanship of [Wallace's] acts as builder."

Description: This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means.The works at the center of this study—by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller—zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of The Pathos of the Real. Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis.Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics. Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order.In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, The Pathos of the Real advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century.

Description: Originally published in 1995. In The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, Ronald Paulson fills a lacuna in studies of aesthetics at its point of origin in England in the 1700s. He shows how aesthetics took off not only from British empiricism but also from such forms of religious heterodoxy as deism. The third earl of Shaftesbury, the founder of aesthetics, replaced the Christian God of rewards and punishments with beauty—worship of God, with a taste for a work of art. William Hogarth, reacting against Shaftesbury's "disinterestedness," replaced his Platonic abstractions with an aesthetics centered on the human body, gendered female, and based on an epistemology of curiosity, pursuit, and seduction. Paulson shows Hogarth creating, first in practice and then in theory, a middle area between the Beautiful and the Sublime by adapting Joseph Addison's category (in the Spectator) of the Novel, Uncommon, and Strange.Paulson retrieves an aesthetics that had strong support during the eighteenth century but has been obscured both by the more dominant academic discourse of Shaftesbury (and later Sir Joshua Reynolds) and by current trends in art and literary history. Arguing that the two traditions comprised not only painterly but also literary theory and practice, Paulson explores the innovations of Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith, which followed and complemented the practice in the visual arts of Hogarth and his followers.

Description: Originally published in 1994. In The Improvement of the Estate, Alistair Duckworth contends that understanding Mansfield Park is fundamental to appreciating Jane Austen's body of work. Professor Duckworth understands Mansfield Park as underscoring the central uniting theme in Austen's work—her concept of the "estate" and its "improvement." The author illustrates Austen's connection to the values of Christian humanism, which she conveys through the uniting theme of estate improvement. According to Duckworth, the estate represents moral and social heritage, so the manner in which individuals seek to improve their estates in Jane Austen's novels represents the direction in which she saw the state and society moving. Finally, Duckworth underscores Austen's awareness of the importance of a society of individuals whose behavior is socially informed.

Description: In Mysteriously Meant, Professor Allen maps the intellectual landscape of the Renaissance as he explains the discovery of an allegorical interpretation of Greek, Latin, and finally Egyptian myths and the effect this discovery had on the development of modern attitudes toward myth. He believes that to understand Renaissance literature one must understand the interpretations of classical myth known to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In unraveling the elusive strands of myth, allegory, and symbol from the fabric of Renaissance literature such as Milton's Paradise Lost, Allen is a helpful guide. His discussion of Renaissance authors is as authoritative as it is inclusive. His empathy with the scholars of the Renaissance keeps his discussion lively—a witty study of interpreters of mythography from the past.

Description: Originally published in 1979. Carl Dawson looks at the year 1850, which was an extraordinary year in English literary history, to study both the great and forgotten writers, to survey journals and novels, poems and magazines, and to ask questions about dominant influences and ideas. His primary aim is descriptive: How was Wordsworth's Prelude received by his contemporaries on its publication in 1850? How did reviewers respond to new tendencies in poetry and fiction/ Who were the prominent literary models? But Dawson's descriptions also lead to broader, theoretical questions about such issues as the status of the imagination in an age obsessed by mechanical invention, about the public role of the writer, the appeal to nature, and the use of myth and memory. To express the Victorians' estimation of poetry, for example, Dawson presents the contrasting views help by two eminent Victorians, Macaulay and Carlyle. In Macaulay's opinion, the advance of civilization led to the decline of poetry; Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the poet as a spiritual liberator in a world of materialists. The fusion of the poet's personal and public roles is witnessed in a discussion of the two mid-Victorian Poet Laureates, Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson. In analyzing the relationship between the two writers' works, Dawson also highlights the extent of the Victorians' admiration for Dante. To give a wider perspective of the status of literature during this time, Dawson examines reviews, prefaces, and other remarks. Critics, he shows, made a clear distinction between poetry and fiction. Thus, in 1850, a comparison between, say, Wordsworth and Dickens would not have been made. Dawson, however, does compare the two, by focusing on their uses of autobiography. Dickens surfaces again, in a discussion of Victorian periodical publishing. Here, Dawson compares the Pre-Raphaelites' short-lived journal The Germ with Dickens' enormously popular Household Words and a radical paper, The Red Republican, which printed the first English version of "The Communist Manifesto" in 1850. In bringing together materials that have often been seen as disparate and unrelated and by suggesting new literary and ideological relationships, Carl Dawson has written a book to inform almost any reader, whether scholar of Victorian literature or lover of Dicken's novels.

Description: Between 1770 and 1800, transformations in the relationship between metropolitan British society and its colonial holdings, and in the concept of the nation itself, left Britons with a new sense of themselves. Over the same period, the consolidation of the middle classes was accompanied by growing social constraints on sexuality and family life. Staging Governance locates the intersection of these two trends in the representation of British India on the London stage. Theatrical productions, especially those representing colonial life, pushed the limits of public discourse on sexuality and colonialism even as the government made efforts to shape and narrow them. At the same time, official discourse on colonial practices, such as the public trials of Clive and Hastings, became theatrical events themselves. Exploring this rapidly shifting world through a series of original readings of dramatic texts and important moments of oratory, Staging Governance demonstrates how the perceived crises of imperial and domestic Britain joined these spheres in the popular imagination. The economics of political and sexual exchange not only became entwined but functioned as mutual supports during a period of social, cultural, and political readjustment.

Description: Originally published in 1984. The Sage in Harlem establishes H. L. Mencken as a catalyst for the blossoming of black literary culture in the 1920s and chronicles the intensely productive exchange of ideas between Mencken and two generations of black writers: the Old Guard who pioneered the Harlem Renaissance and the Young Wits who sought to reshape it a decade later. From his readings of unpublished letters and articles from black publications of the time, Charles Scruggs argues that black writers saw usefulness in Mencken's critique of American culture, his advocacy of literary realism, and his satire of America. They understood that realism could free them from the pernicious stereotypes that had hounded past efforts at honest portraiture, and that satire could be the means whereby the white man might be paid back in his own coin. Scruggs contends that the content of Mencken's observations, whether ludicrously narrow or dazzlingly astute, was of secondary importance to the Harlem intellectuals. It was the honesty, precision, and fearlessness of his expression that proved irresistible to a generation of artists desperate to be taken seriously. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance turned to Mencken as an uncompromising—and uncondescending—commentator whose criticisms were informed by deep interest in African American life but guided by the same standards he applied to all literature, whatever its source. The Sage in Harlem demonstrates how Mencken, through the example of his own work, his power as editor of the American Mercury, and his dedication to literary quality, was able to nurture the developing talents of black authors from James Weldon Johnson to Richard Wright.

Description: Originally published in 1968. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that George Herbert is one of the great masters of lyric poetry. Stein discusses Herbert's diction, imagery, syntax, and rhythm in light of his organization of the imaginative materials of time and self-consciousness and in light of his development of a rhetoric through which he could master the intimacies of personal failure and (what is far more difficult) express in language convincingly sincere states of positive religious achievement.

Description: The epic calls to mind the famous works of ancient poets such as Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. These long, narrative poems, defined by valiant characters and heroic deeds, celebrate events of great importance in ancient times. In this thought-provoking study, Christopher N. Phillips shows in often surprising ways how this exalted classical form proved as vital to American culture as it did to the great societies of the ancient world.Through close readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Sigourney, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, as well as the transcendentalists, Phillips traces the rich history of epic in American literature and art from early colonial times to the late nineteenth century. Phillips shows that far from fading in the modern age, the epic form was continuously remade to frame a core element of American cultural expression. He finds the motive behind this sustained popularity in the historical interrelationship among the malleability of the epic form, the idea of a national culture, and the prestige of authorship—a powerful dynamic that extended well beyond the boundaries of literature.By locating the epic at the center of American literature and culture, Phillips’s imaginative study yields a number of important finds: the early national period was a time of radical experimentation with poetic form; the epic form was crucial to the development of constitutional law and the professionalization of visual arts; engagement with the epic synthesized a wide array of literary and artistic forms in efforts to launch the United States into the arena of world literature; and a number of writers shaped their careers around revising the epic form for their own purposes. Rigorous archival research, careful readings, and long chronologies of genre define this magisterial work, making it an invaluable resource for scholars of American studies, American poetry, and literary history.

Description: The question of man's freedom to exercise his will—as active an issue among twentieth-century philosophers and theologians as it was in the Jesuit and Jansenist camps known to Pascal—is basic to this study. Pascal's theological thinking, which Professor Miel demonstrates to be the source of unity and coherence in virtually all phases of his thought, is preoccupied by a concern for man's limitations. In his analysis of Pascal's theology, Miel is concerned not only with characterizing Pascal's theological position but also with evaluating it in terms of the history of the church. In a concise and lucid review of the Christian doctrine of grace from the pre-Augustinians through the Renaissance, the author identifies the intellectual-theological atmosphere that created the need for Pascal's strong defense of Augustinian theology. Miel considers Pascal's Écrits sur la grâce, Lettres provincials, and Pensées as well as shorter compositions and correspondence. He establishes the content of Pascal's vision of grace and free will, noting both its originality and its sense of history. Most importantly, he asserts that Pascal's affirmation of Jansenism predated his association with Port Royal and, indeed, was basic to all his adult thought and work. The author finds in the writings of Pascal a style that anticipates twentieth-century theology, a sophistication that belies charges of Pascal's theological naïveté, and a concern to uphold rather than to undermine doctrinal traditions of the church.

Description: Originally published in 1964. The book presents a commentary on Le Morte d'Arthur that illuminates Malory's literary aims and techniques. The author brings to bear several hitherto unused source materials on Malory's work and offers new analyses of his authorial purposes. Lumiansky argues that Malory wrote a single unified book rather than eight separate tales. The source of Malory's story is an Old French romance known as the Suite du Merlin. Lumiansky traces Malory's originality through Malory's treatment of the main generic features of the Suite du Merlin.

Description: Honorable Mention, 2012 Joe A. Callaway Prize in Drama and TheaterFirst Place, Large Not-for-Profit Publisher, Typographic Cover, 2011 Washington Book Publishers Design and Effectiveness AwardsLess than twenty years after asserting global dominance in the Seven Years' War, Britain suffered a devastating defeat when it lost the American colonies. Daniel O'Quinn explores how the theaters and the newspapers worked in concert to mediate the events of the American war for British audiences and how these convergent media attempted to articulate a post-American future for British imperial society.Building on the methodological innovations of his 2005 publication Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, O’Quinn demonstrates how the reconstitution of British imperial subjectivities involved an almost nightly engagement with a rich entertainment culture that necessarily incorporated information circulated in the daily press. Each chapter investigates different moments in the American crisis through the analysis of scenes of social and theatrical performance and through careful readings of works by figures such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Cowper, Hannah More, Arthur Murphy, Hannah Cowley, George Colman, and Georg Friedrich Handel. Through a close engagement with this diverse entertainment archive, O'Quinn traces the hollowing out of elite British masculinity during the 1770s and examines the resulting strategies for reconfiguring ideas of gender, sexuality, and sociability that would stabilize national and imperial relations in the 1780s. Together, O'Quinn's two books offer a dramatic account of the global shifts in British imperial culture that will be of interest to scholars in theater and performance studies, eighteenth-century studies, Romanticism, and trans-Atlantic studies.

Description: Originally published in 1968. Professor Dryden sees Melville's novels both as metaphysical processes and as technical forms. The novelist is not a reporter but a creator, and what he creates from his experience is his vision of truth. Herman Melville saw the function of the novelist in terms of his ability to expose the reader to truth while simultaneously protecting him from it or, in other words, to enable the reader to experience reality indirectly and, therefore, safely. In Melville's own writing, however, this function became more difficult as his nihilism deepened. He became increasingly sensitive to his own involvement in the world of lies, and when he could no longer protect himself from the truth, he could no longer transform it into fiction. Melville's struggle to maintain the distinction between art and truth was reflected in the changing forms of his novels.Dryden traces Melville's evolving metaphysical views and studies their impact on the craftsmanship of this acutely self-conscious artist from his early novels—Typee, Redburn, and White Jacket—through Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man to the posthumously published Billy Budd and the closely related Benito Cereno, and he concludes that "all of Melville's narrators are in some way portraits of the artist at work." Dryden's study is a unique contribution to Melville scholarship and an important journey through the world of the novelist's vision. As such, it has significant implications for the novel as a genre and for understanding its development in America.

Description: Originally published in 1989. In Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance the eminent scholar O. B. Hardison Jr. sets out "to recover the special kinds of music inherent in English Renaissance poetry." The book begins with a thorough and wide-ranging survey of the development of prosodic theory from the ancient ars metrica tradition to the sixteenth century, with special emphasis on such issues as the relation of verse form and genre, the relation of syntax to prosody, and the role of language reform in shaping Renaissance prosody. The second part of the book considers the impact of prosodic traditions on specific literary works and verse forms, among them Surrey's Aeneid, Heywood's translation of Seneca's Thyestes, Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, and the dramatic and epic verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Throughout, Hardison examines not only how poets crafted their verse but why. He explores authorial purposes ranging from technical attempts to match sound and genre to the lofty aims of improving the vernacular or ennobling culture, from the dramatist's practical search for verse forms suited to the stage to Milton's quest for a meter fit to convey divine relation.

Description: Originally published in 1979. Eric Sundquist takes four representative writers—James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—and considers the way in which each grapples with the crucial issues of genealogy and authority in his works. From all four a common pattern emerges: the desire to revolt against the past is countered by the need to invoke or even repeat it. Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.

Description: Originally published in 1967. Professor Sachs shows the inner coherence of Samuel Johnson's thought by pointing out the interconnectedness of his remarks on religious, moral, aesthetic, political, and psychological subjects. Reason and imagination, the central concepts in the Johnsonian ethos, are elucidated with reference to "vacuity," "attention," "novelty," "diversity," and other words to which Johnson attached special significance. Johnson emerges as an original thinker of the English Christian-humanist heritage; he "is to be read in the same spirit as Pascal." Primarily concerned with the relation between Johnson's ideas and the long tradition of which they are the culmination, Sachs also emphasizes the relevance of Johnson's thought to the twentieth century.

Description: In The House of Death, Arnold Stein studies the ways in which English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined their own ends and wrote of the deaths of those they loved or wished to honor. Drawing on a wide range of texts in both poetry and prose, Stein examines the representations, images, and figurative meanings of death from antiquity to the Renaissance. A major premise of the book is that commonplaces, conventions, and the established rules for thinking about death did not prevent writers from discovering the distinctive in it. Eloquent readings of Raleigh, Donne, Herbert, and others capture the poets approaching their own death or confronting the death of others. Marvell's lines on the execution of Charles are paired with his treatment of the dead body of Cromwell; Henry King and John Donne both write of their late wives; Ben Jonson mourns the death of a first son and a first daughter. For purposes of comparison, the governing perspective of the final chapter is modern.

Description: Originally published in 1980. The first section of The Novel-Machine consists of five short chapters that rewrite Autobiography as an undisguised theory of realistic fiction, exploring its paradoxes while placing it in the context of mid-Victorian criticism. Chapters 6 and 7 survey the manifestations in Trollope's novels of what his theory sets down as the primary difference of realism: its way of telling its readers how to read. Chapter 8 is a close reading of He Knew He Was Right, a neglected novel that, in Kendrick's estimation, deserves to stand in much higher critical esteem than it does. Kendrick shows how deeply woven into the texture of Trollope's writing the rhetoric of realism is. Kendrick's reading is a departure from the usual method of criticizing Trollope—surveying the whole of his work a novel at a time, saying a little about every novel and always too little about each.

Description: Originally published in 1941. This book stresses the transcendental, rather than purely aesthetic, qualities of William Wordsworth's work. It argues that the unusual aspects of Wordsworth's mind are not isolated and did not seem to him fanciful or merely personal; they were, for him, so many paths, difficult to find and harder to follow, yet leading to the great central truth that is the goal of all humankind's loftier strivings.

Description: Originally published in 1979. Sylvia Plath is one of the most controversial poets of our time. For some readers, she is the symbol of women oppressed. For others, she is the triumphant victim of her own intensity—the poet pursuing sensation to the ultimate uncertainty, death. For still others, she is a doomed innocent whose sensibilities were too acute for the coarseness of our world. The new essays of this edited collection (with a single exception, all were written for this book) broaden the perspective of Plath criticism by going beyond the images of Plath as a cult figure to discuss Plath the poet. The contributors—among them Calvin Bedient, Hugh Kenner, J. D. O'Hara, and Marjorie Perloff—draw on material that most previous commentators lacked: a substantial body of Plath's poetry and prose, a moderately detailed biographical record, and an important selection of the poet's correspondence. The result is an important and provocative volume, one in which major critics offer an abundance of insights into the poet's mind and creative process. It offers insightful and original readings of many poems—some, like "Berck-Plage," scarcely mentioned in previous criticism—and fosters new understandings of such matters as Plath's comedy, the development of her poetic voice, and her relation to poetic traditions. The serious reader, whatever his or her initial opinion of Sylvia Plath, is sure to find that opinion challenged, changed, or deepened. These essays offer insights into a violently interesting poet, one who despite, or perhaps because of, her suicide at age thirty continues to fascinate and trouble us.

Description: Originally published in 1956. In Ishmael, Professor James Baird responds to the increasing secularization of Western civilization and the creation of what he calls "authentic primitivism." For Baird, the aesthetic austerity of Protestantism undermined the structure of symbols created by Catholicism. In the absence of a meaningful structure of cultural authority in Western civilization, "primary art" took on a quasi-religious role by connecting humans to a transcendent being. Ishmael describes a new system of art, beginning around 1850, that supplanted Christian symbolism. Baird examines writers who helped to create a modern authentic primitivism, with emphasis on Herman Melville, whom Baird sees as a locus of change for the cultural significance of primary art. Baird provides a social history and biography of writers who participated in the primary art movement from 1850 to 1950

Description: Originally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit—or at least devalue—the importance of "romance" as a thematic and generic category of American fiction. In The Form of American Romance, he examines its evolution and meaning through readings of five exemplary texts: Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Melville's Pierre, James's Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Barth's Letters. Each of these novels treats the problems of reading and writing in a self-referential way that reflects on the questions they dramatize, and Dryden has chosen each with the others in mind. Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.

Description: This original analysis of the representation and self-representation of women in literature and visual arts revolves around multiple early modern senses of "painting": the creation of visual art in the form of paint on canvas and the use of cosmetics to paint women's bodies. Situating her study in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, France, and England, Patricia Phillippy brings together three distinct actors: women who paint themselves with cosmetics, women who paint on canvas, and women and men who paint women—either with pigment or with words. Phillippy asserts that early modern attitudes toward painting, cosmetics, and poetry emerge from and respond to a common cultural history. Materially, she connects those who created images of women with pigment to those who applied cosmetics to their own bodies through similar mediums, tools, techniques, and exposure to toxic materials. Discursively, she illuminates historical and social issues such as gender and morality with the nexus of painting, painted women, and women painters.Teasing out the intricate relationships between these activities as carried out by women and their visual and literary representation by women and by men, Phillippy aims to reveal the delineation and transgression of women's creative roles, both artistic and biological. In Painting Women, Phillippy provides a cross-disciplinary study of women as objects and agents of painting.

Description: Originally published in 1966. This book is primarily a literary study of Rousseau's account of his diplomatic experiences in Venice, contained in book 7 of the Confessions and written in 1769. The author analyzes Rousseau's methods of achieving an artistic rendering of psychological truth in autobiography, as exemplified in his treatment of the events of 1742–1749. Professor Madeleine Ellis contributes to an understanding of Rousseau as a creative artist and positions him vis-à-vis the classical and romantic movements. Ellis collates the text of the Confessions with contemporary correspondence and other documents to show how discrepancies between the two have artistic implications. These implications lead her to define Rousseau's principles and methods as a man of letters and the interrelations of art and truth in his memoirs. In revealing that Rousseau, the memorialist, gives an artistic rendering of psychological truth, Ellis shows Rousseau's attitude toward truth. She does this by following a path of analysis unexplored by previous critics but indicated by Rousseau himself when he says, "It is the story of my soul that I have promised . . . I record not so much the events of my life as the state of my soul as they happened." Ultimately, the objective of this study is to illustrate the artistic means—literary and rhetorical—employed by Rousseau and their implications for the truth he proposed.

Description: Originally published in 1951. Kemp Malone provides a guide to reading Chaucer's work that is intended for readers who are familiar with Chaucer's work but who are not Chaucerians. The first chapter places Chaucer in the historical and literary context of the fourteenth century. The other essays focus on Chaucer's poetry by providing historicized interpretations of Chaucer's work and methods for each poem.

Description: Originally published in 1982. The Poetics of Jacobean Drama argues for a rediscovered approach to the study of Renaissance drama. Coburn Freer observes that most modern criticism of this drama treats the plays as if they were written in prose, thus overlooking whole areas of dramatic meaning that were understood in the past. Such an understanding, he asserts, was common among writers, actors, audiences, and readers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and a knowledge of it is essential to a full appreciation of the characterization and dramatic structures in these plays. Freer explores the evolution of the modern reluctance to approach Renaissance drama as one would dramatic poetry—from the standpoint of a listener. Blank verse, the author shows, provided Jacobean dramatists with a poetic form against which they could work the pressures of experience within their characters. The writers' ability to work with and against this form provided infinite resources for delineating character and creating significant coherences in the structure of a play. The Poetics of Jacobean Drama offers insights into what the Renaissance writer, actor, and playgoer would have regarded as the domain of poetry in drama. Topics discussed include the conditions of stage performance and the style of acting, Elizabethan education, the rise of printed texts and collected editions, and the comments of Elizabethan audiences and readers. Freer's commentary and theoretical explanations suggest both why and how we should pay closer attention to the poetry of Renaissance drama.

Description: Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff’s excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward’s most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers. Reading Seward’s writing alongside recent scholarship on gendered conceptions of the poetic career, patriotism, provincial culture, sensibility, and the sonnet revival, Kairoff carefully reconsiders Seward’s poetry and critical prose. Written as it was in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Seward’s work does not comfortably fit into the dominant models of Enlightenment-era verse or the tropes that characterize Romantic poetry. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle for understanding Seward’s writing within a particular literary style, Kairoff argues that this allows readers to see in Seward’s works the eighteenth-century roots of Romantic-era poetry. Arguably the most prominent woman poet of her lifetime, Seward’s writings disappeared from popular and scholarly view shortly after her death. After nearly two hundred years of critical neglect, Seward is attracting renewed attention, and with this book Kairoff makes a strong and convincing case for including Anna Seward's remarkable literary achievements among the most important of the late eighteenth century.

Description: Originally published in 1977. The pioneer critics of Finnegans Wake hailed the work as a radical critique of language and civilization. Resuming their position, Margot Norris explains the book's most intractable uncertainties not as puzzles to be solved by a clever reader but as manifestations of a "chaosmos," a Freudian dream world of sexual transgression and social dissolution, of inauthentic being and empty words. Conventional moralities and restraints are under siege in this chaosmos, where precisely those desires and forbidden wishes that are barred in waking thought strive to make themselves felt. Norris demonstrates convincingly that the protean characters of Finnegans Wake are the creatures of a dreaming mind. The teleology of their universe is freedom, and in the enduring struggle between the individual's anarchic psyche and the laws that make civilization possible, it is only in dream that the psyche is triumphant. It is as dream rather than as novel that Norris reads Finnegans Wake. The lexical deviance and semantic density of the book, Norris argues, are not due to Joyce's malice, mischief, or megalomania but are essential and intrinsic to his concern to portray man's inner state of being. Because meanings are dislocated—hidden in unexpected places, multiplied and split, given over to ambiguity, plurality, and uncertainty—the Wake, Norris claims, represents a decentered universe. Its formal elements of plot, character, discourse, and language are not anchored to any single point of reference; they do not refer back to center. Only by abandoning conventional frames of reference can readers allow the work to disclose its own meanings, which are lodged in the differences and similarities of its multitudinous elements.Eschewing the close explication of much Wake criticism, the author provides a conceptual framework for the work's large structures with the help of theories and methods borrowed from Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida. Looking at the work without novelistic expectations of the illusion of some "key" to unlock the mystery, Norris explores Joyce's rationale for committing his last human panorama—a bit sadder than Ulysses in its concern with aging, killing, and dying—to a form and language belonging to the deconstructive forces of the twentieth century.

Description: Originally published in 1967. In this study of the English Augustan satirists, and the Roman and subsequent authors who were their models, Professor Paulson shows how rhetoric relates to imitation, persuasion to presentation, and the imitation of the satirist to the imitation of the satiric object. He illustrates the tendency of the satirist to invade his own fiction and imitate not the prime object of his satire but the satiric persona, which consequently takes on a life of its own. By analyzing the satiric fictions of the precursors of the Augustans, the author reveals the elements they bequeathed to those who rode the high crest of the satiric wave in England, before the art of satire became submerged in the deepening trough of sentimental romanticism.Paulson shows the Tories Dryden, Pope, and Swift and the Whigs Addison and Steele to be the heirs of a long line of satirists ancient and modern, from Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Apuleius, and Petronius to Rabelais, Cervantes and the English Elizabethan and Civil War poets. Taking Swift as his main example, Paulson examines the dualism of satire in its most interesting and ambiguous modes, and as the embodiment of rhetorical devices that are as complex mimetically as they are rhetorically.

Description: Originally published in 1967. Mark Twain's literary criticism is a significant branch of his writing that is relatively less explored and appreciated than his other writing. Sydney Krause analyzes the full range of Twain's criticism, much of which has lain neglected in notebooks, letters, marginalia, and autobiographical dictations. This body of work demonstrates that, in addition to being an acute critic given to close reading, Twain thought enough of his criticism to present much of it in an enveloping literary form. In his early criticism Twain used the mask of an ignorant fool (or Muggins), while in his later criticism he used the mask of a world-weary malcontent (or Grumbler). The resulting cross fire from extremes of innocence and experience proved effective against a wide range of literary targets. The Muggins dealt mainly with theater, journalism, oratory, and popular poetry; the grumbler with such writers as Goldsmith, Cooper, Scott, and Hare. Much of this criticism was an outgrowth of Twain's romanticism and therefore has importance for the history of American realism. Mark Twain's criticism was not wholly depreciatory, however. He liked Macaulay, Howells, Howe, Zola, and Wilbrandt, for example, because he found in some of their works the realization of history as an immediate presence. The evidence presented in this book challenges the view that Twain was not a serious student of the craft of writing; he possessed the combination of sensitivity and judgment that all great critics have.

Description: Originally published in 1985. Beasts of the Modern Imagination explores a specific tradition in modern thought and art: the critique of anthropocentrism at the hands of "beasts"—writers whose works constitute animal gestures or acts of fatality. It is not a study of animal imagery, although the works that Margot Norris explores present us with apes, horses, bulls, and mice who appear in the foreground of fiction, not as the tropes of allegory or fable, but as narrators and protagonists appropriating their animality amid an anthropocentric universe. These beasts are finally the masks of the human animals who create them, and the textual strategies that bring them into being constitute another version of their struggle. The focus of this study is a small group of thinkers, writers, and artists who create as the animal—not like the animal, in imitation of the animal—but with their animality speaking. The author treats Charles Darwin as the founder of this tradition, as the naturalist whose shattering conclusions inevitably turned back on him and subordinated him, the rational man, to the very Nature he studied. Friedrich Nietzsche heeded the advice implicit in his criticism of David Strauss and used Darwinian ideas as critical tools to interrogate the status of man as a natural being. He also responded to the implications of his own animality for his writing by transforming his work into bestial acts and gestures. The third, and last, generation of these creative animals includes Franz Kafka, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, and D. H. Lawrence. In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.

Description: Winner, 2010 Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book, American Conference on Irish StudiesRenowned as one of the most brilliant satirists ever, Jonathan Swift has long fascinated Hibernophiles beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sean Moore's examination of Swift's writings and the economics behind the distribution of his work elucidates the humorist's crucial role in developing a renewed sense of nationalism among the Irish during the eighteenth century.Taking Swift's Irish satires, such as A Modest Proposal and the Drapier's Letters, as examples of anticolonial discourse, Moore unpacks the author's carefully considered published words and his deliberate drive to liberate the Dublin publishing industry from England's shadow to argue that the writer was doing nothing less than creating a national print media. He points to the actions of Anglo-Irish colonial subjects at the outset of Britain's financial revolution; inspired by Swift's dream of a sovereign Ireland, these men and women harnessed the printing press to disseminate ideas of cultural autonomy and defend the country's economic rights. Doing so, Moore contends, imbued the island with a sense of Irishness that led to a feeling of independence from England and ultimately gave the Irish a surprising degree of financial autonomy. Applying postcolonial, new economic, and book history approaches to eighteenth-century studies, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution effectively links the era's critiques of empire to the financial and legal motives for decolonization. Scholars of colonialism, postcolonialism, Irish studies, Atlantic studies, Swift, and the history of the book will find Moore's eye-opening arguments original and compelling.

Description: Elizabeth Singer Rowe played a pivotal role in the development of the novel during the eighteenth century.Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRLElizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel is the first in-depth study of Rowe’s prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely unrecognized figure in the history of the novel. Although her poetry was appreciated by poets such as Alexander Pope for its metrical craftsmanship, beauty, and imagery, by the time of her death in 1737 she was better known for her fiction. According to Paula R. Backscheider, Rowe's major focus in her novels was on creating characters who were seeking a harmonious, contented life, often in the face of considerable social pressure. This quest would become the plotline in a large number of works in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it continues to be a major theme today in novels by women.Backscheider relates Rowe’s work to popular fiction written by earlier writers as well as by her contemporaries. Rowe had a lasting influence on major movements, including the politeness (or gentility) movement, the reading revolution, and the Bluestocking society. The author reveals new information about each of these movements, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe emerges as an important innovator. Her influence resulted in new types of novel writing, philosophies, and lifestyles for women. Backscheider looks to archival materials, literary analysis, biographical evidence, and a configuration of cultural and feminist theories to prove her groundbreaking argument.

Description: Originally published in 1976. In The Romantic Sublime Thomas Weiskel investigates the concept of the sublime in the poetry of English Romantic writers. His work infuses elements of structuralism and psychological thought in his attempt to describe and demystify the sublime experience—or, in his words, to "desublimate the sublime." In doing so, he demonstrates that the sublime is largely mystified, and he contrasts those with faith in the awesomeness of sublimation and those who remain skeptical of the sublime's mystifying power. In working to demystify the sublime, Weiskel emphasizes the task of intelligence by assigning morality and intellect the value of mistrust in sublimation.

Description: Originally published in 1969. Alan Roper studies the degree to which Arnold achieved a unity of human significance and literal landscape. If landscape poetry is to rise above the level of what Roper calls "country contentments in verse," the poet cannot think and describe alternately; his thinking and describing must be a part of one another. That Matthew Arnold was aware of the difficulty in achieving the necessary unity becomes clear in his own criticism, which Roper examines along with a large and representative number of Arnold's poems. Considering the latter roughly in the order they were published—except for a fuller analysis of Empedocles on Etna, "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Thyrsis"—Roper follows important changes in Arnold's view of the function and nature of poetry as it emerged in the poems themselves. Basic to the author's critical method is a distinction between geographical sites and poetic landscapes. Focusing on the ways that Arnold and, to a lesser extent, the Augustan and Romantic poets before him untied thought and description, Roper adds a critical dimension to Arnold scholarship. Concerned not with the development of Arnold's ideas nor with their sources in classical antiquity and the Romantic period, he considers Arnold a self-conscious poet who, though sometimes successful, became increasingly unsuccessful in his efforts to imbue a landscape with meaning for individual or social man.

Description: Originally published in 1965. Despite his prolificacy, Washington Irving remained an underexamined figure among literary scholars at the time William L. Hedges published his definitive study of the author in 1965. Most contemporary scholars believed that Irving's central contribution to the American literary tradition was that his work was "polished" and "suave." These scholars maintained that Irving's aristocratic sensibilities defined the stylistic choices of his literary works. To assume this, Hedges contends, is to "both let the man and the work slip beyond one's grasp." Hedges demonstrates that much of Irving's work can be understood in the context of his conflict between federalist and conservative politics. Irving, in other words, found himself incapable of committing to a coherent set of beliefs or attitudes, and this cultural uneasiness manifested itself in his early work. Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832 tries to correct some of the misapprehension about Irving's place in nineteenth-century American literature.

Description: The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence, specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France.Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and formalism—to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma. Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examine the relevance of their interventions for our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary engagements with the violence of modernity.

Description: Originally published in 1965. The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis—the earliest of all medieval dramas—is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.

Description: This book seeks to study the mind of a poet, specifically by picking William Wordsworth as a case study. The reason for signaling out Wordsworth as the person in whom to study the mind of a poet is that The Prelude reveals with unusual fullness a mind that is fundamentally poetic. Even its peculiarities, its numerous limitations, and its unusual emphases are in the main those of a poet. Besides, poetry—not, as with many other writers, religious or social problems, humanitarianism, science, politics, economics, metaphysics, or literary criticism—was the chief concern of his creative years. Further, the sheer amount of verse, criticism, letters, and journals Wordsworth produced makes him an excellent choice for a study of this kind.