The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron's anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studi
The second of three volumes by Wald that track the political and personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers, this volume carries forward the chronicle launched in Exiles from a F
From her first awkward poems and stories, to her finely crafted essays as a newspaper and feature writer, to the gathering brilliance that began from the outset of her Florida Period, highlighted by t
The essays in this collection analyse major film adaptations of twentieth-century American fiction, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon to Toni Morrison's Beloved. During the century, films based on American literature came to play a central role in the history of the American cinema. Combining cinematic and literary approaches, this volume explores the adaptation process from conception through production and reception. The contributors explore the ways political and historical contexts have shaped the transfer from book to screen, and the new perspectives that films bring to literary works. In particular, they examine how the twentieth-century literary modes of realism, modernism, and postmodernism have influenced the forms of modern cinema. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book includes production stills and full filmographies. Together with its companion volume on nineteenth-century fiction, the volume offers a comprehensive account of the rich tradition of Amer
The essays in this collection analyse major film adaptations of twentieth-century American fiction, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon to Toni Morrison's Beloved. During the century, films based on American literature came to play a central role in the history of the American cinema. Combining cinematic and literary approaches, this volume explores the adaptation process from conception through production and reception. The contributors explore the ways political and historical contexts have shaped the transfer from book to screen, and the new perspectives that films bring to literary works. In particular, they examine how the twentieth-century literary modes of realism, modernism, and postmodernism have influenced the forms of modern cinema. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book includes production stills and full filmographies. Together with its companion volume on nineteenth-century fiction, the volume offers a comprehensive account of the rich tradition of Amer
'Critical theorists in our time sought foundations of knowledge because they knew there were none to be found, and critical scepticism became a convenient way of burying evidence and saving face. By n
In Disciplining Love, Michael Kramp offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic function of gender, love, and desire in the novels of Austen, initiating a new direction in the study of the early-ninetee
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 cr
Stories shape the world, imposing order on chaos, and the stories we tell declare: I exist. Neil Bissoondath presses these assertions about narrative further. Stories are also, he says, forms of confe
Was Walt Whitman-celebrated poet of freedom and democracy-a determinist at heart? A close study of Leaves of Grass shows that Whitman consistently acknowledges the inevitability of all things. As Joh
Providing an overview of the main themes, issues and critical perspectives that have had the greatest effect on postcolonial literature, this text discusses the historical, cultural and contextual bac
This collection of William Empson's essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is the second volume of his writings on Renaissance literature. Edited with an introduction by the leading Empson scholar John Haffenden, the contents range from famous essays on The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone, The Alchemist and The Duchess of Malfi to a sprightly piece on Elizabethan spirits. In addition, there are previously unpublished essays which revisit critical controversies, and a magnificent, provocative study of A Midsummer Night's Dream which ventures a major new reading of the play. 'I am attracted by the notion of a hearty indifference to one's own and other people's feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in question,' Empson stated. The incomparable Empson here fights his own critical corner with unequalled zest, intelligence and insight.
David Lindsay was a writer of fantasy fiction who died in 1945. He belongs to the tradition of modern fantasy, as distinct from science-fiction, which has its roots in the writings of, amongst others, George Macdonald, and has been maintained in the work of Charles Williams, Mervyn Peake and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lindsay took up a writing career rather late in life, however his name was known within literary circles and two eminent writers expressed their admiration for his work: L. H. Myers and C. S. Lewis. Indeed, Lewis wrote that Lindsay's most famous book, A Voyage to Arcturus, had exerted a strong influence on his own work. Interest in Lindsay has been growing steadily, and in this book, Bernard Sellin has written a comprehensive survey of Lindsay's life and work, analysing the thematic patterns of Lindsay's settings, plots and characters. It will be read with profit by all those who are interested both in Lindsay and in the genre of fantasy literature.
Virginia Woolf identified the influence on her work of 'the Cambridge Apostles', the philosophical society which counted G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and much of male Bloomsbury among its members, as one more 'capable of description' than 'the influence of my mother'. In this major study of Woolf's relationship to Bloomsbury and the aesthetic and philosophical developments of her time, Ann Banfield subjects that influence to a full treatment. The theory of knowledge Moore and Russell formulated, Banfield argues, profoundly affected Woolf's conception of reality, as it did Roger Fry's theory of Post-Impressionism, one source for Woolf's transformations of philosophical principles into aesthetic ones. The Phantom Table is a magisterial account of Woolf's engagement with this remarkable trinity of thinkers: Moore, Russell, Fry. It revises the epistemology of modernism, reconceiving the relation between realism and formalism to account for Woolf's dual reality of sense impressions and log
This, Howard D.Weinbrot's magnum opus, draws on a large range of material to chronicle the developing confidence in British national literature from the 1670s to the 1770s. Using varied biblical, classical, English, economic, French, historical, literary, philosophical, political and Scottish sources, Professor Weinbrot shows that one of the central trends of eighteenth-century Britain was the movement away from classical towards native values and models. He demonstrates for example that Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesy reflects nationalist aesthetics, that Pope's Rape of the Lock affirms domestic peace while rejecting Homeric violence, and that Windsor Forest sings un-Roman peaceful expansion through trade. This learned and lucidly written book offers revisionist but historically grounded interpretations of these and many other important works. It also helps to characterize the complex and varied culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
Shakespearean thinking is always dynamic: thinking that happens in the living moment of its performance, in quickly passing process. This book offers a model of human mentality that can be shown throu
Godless Shakespeare is the first book to discuss Shakespeare's plays from an atheist perspective. Although it is clear that Shakespeare engaged with and deployed much of his culture's broadly religi
Theirs was a world of exploration and experimentation, of movement and growth--and in this, the thinkers of the Renaissance, poets and scientists alike, followed their countrymen into uncharted territ
Adams (English, U. of California, Berkeley) et al. compile 10 chapters that consider culture and identity in the US South and Caribbean as a region. The essays explore these subjects through the lens
