Vygotsky opened up an original field in the science of psychology, based on the sociohistorical theory of the nature of man's consciousness.This work, written more than forty years ago and now transla
Over the last two decades a major revaluation has been taking place of the colonial Puritan imagination. With the growth of interest in early American literature has come increasing recognition of its quality and a better understanding of its place in the continuity of American culture. However, much of the best critical work to date has been published as articles in scholarly journals, and in bringing together for the first time the best work in this growing field the present anthology fills a number of important needs. It is at once a valuabale and accessible introduction for students, a summing-up of a new enterprise, and a guide for further studies.
William Faulkner was one of the few major writers of the period following World War I to retain a sense of the place of abstractions in life and in art. Faulkner saw life as a process of flux and chan
Mr. Empson sees the pastoral convention as including not only poems of shepherd life but any work "about the people but not by or for" them. Finding examples in the writing of every country and centur
Profound and intriguing, Grettir's Saga is the last of the great Icelandic sagas. It tells of the life and death of Grettir, a great rebel, individualist, and romantic hero viewed unromantically. Gret
For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provi
These bizarre and wildly imaginative pieces, written in Soviet Russia forty years ago, are as vital and disturbing as the best of today’s absurdist literature. Almost none of the works of Daniil Kharm
Since its first publication in 1954, The Classical Heritage has become established as a classic introduction to cultural and intellectual history from the Carolingian age to the end of the Renaissance
The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukacs's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.
Called by some the French Borges, by others the creator of le nouveau roman a generation ahead of its time, Raymond Queneau's work in fiction continues to defy strict categorization. The Flight of Ica
In this remarkable new book, M. H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789-1835)--the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth."
This book is an attempt to discover the origins and significance of the General Prologue-to the Canterbury Tales. The interest of such an inquiry is many-sided. On the one hand, it throws light on the question of whether `life' or 'literature' was Chaucer's model in this work, on the relationship between Chaucer's twenty-odd pilgrims and the structure of medieval society, and on the role of their `estate' in determining the elements of which Chaucer composes their portraits. On the other hand, it makes suggestions about the ways in which Chaucer convinces us of the individuality of his pilgrims, about the nature of his irony, and the kind of moral standards implicit in the Prologue. This book suggests that Chaucer is ironically substituting for the traditional moral view of social structure a vision of a world where morality becomes as specialised to the individual as his work-life.
This 1973 text provides a critical introduction to the writings of Franz Kafka. Within it Ronald Gray surveys the novels and short stories, and glances also at the religious or confessional writings. He presents a persuasive and coherent account of Kafka's personal and artistic development and its meaning and value for us. Dr Gray argues that the early short stories are most finished and controlled; here Kafka recognised and managed to find a form exactly fitting his own condition, and the writing is less compulsive and obsessional than it became later. Dr Gray quotes extensively, translating specifically for the purpose. He writes for all whose who read Kafka, especially the many who read him in translation and would like a helpful and shrewd guide to understanding. Kafka's work hauntingly expresses one whole area of the modern mind - its anguish, dissociation and guilt - and this sane and sympathetic book puts him into a humane perspective.
