"You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)By virtue of its casual, off-handedly brilliant wisdom and the easy splendor of its nature writing, Thoreau’s account of his adventure in self-reliance on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts is one of the signposts by which the modern mind has located itself in an increasingly bewildering world. Deeply sane, invigorating in its awareness of humanity’s place in the moral and natural order, Walden represents the progressive spirit of nineteenth-century America at its eloquent best.
Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century. Written when the poet was himself still a young man, with most of his greatest work before h
Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw may be Henry James's most widely read tales. Certainly, these swiftly moving accounts of failed connections are among the best examples of his shorter fiction. One represents the international theme that made him famous; the other exemplifies the multiple meanings that make him modern. The introduction to this 1993 volume locates his fiction in the context of the family that conditioned his concern with the sexual politics of intimate experience. In the four essays that follow, Kenneth Graham offers a close reading of Daisy with an emphasis on Daisy; Robert Weisbuch examines Winterbourne as a specimen of James's formidable bachelor type; Millicent Bell places the ghost story governess in the traditions of English fiction and society; David McWhirter then provides a critique of female authority. Deftly summarising earlier criticism, these essays demonstrate the continuing appeal of Henry James in our time.
The fifteen Sherlock Holmes stories reprinted in this volume are generally held to be the most significant, innovative and influential tales featuring Arthur Conan Doyle's archetypal detective. Drawn
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of
Robert Morgan, a native of the North Carolina mountains and a widely published poet, has been writing essays about his craft for more than twenty years. This book brings together some of his most thou
“Denise Levertov fulfills the eternal mission of the true Poet: to be a receptacle of Divine Grace and a 'spendor of that Grace to humanity.'” —World Literature Today
Gretel Ehrlich’s world is one of isolation and wonder, of pain and grace, and these elements ignite her vivid imagination. She writes of ravens and elk and prairie dogs, and eagles falling out of the
This collection presents six essays by one of France's most remarkable contemporary authors. A notoriously playful stylist, Cixous here explores how the problematics of the sexes--viewed as a paradigm
With their call for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”, for self-honesty, and for harmony with nature, the writings of Henry David Thoreau are perhaps the most influential philosophical works in al
Rational persuasion and appeal to an audience's emotions are elements of most literature, but they are found in their purest form in oratory. The speeches written by the Greek Orators for delivery in
Bestsellers by America's favorite humorist:-A Fine And Pleasant MiseryThey Shoot Canoes, Don't They?Never Sniff A Gift FishThe Grasshopper TrapRubber Legs And White Tail-hairsThe Night The Bear Ate G
Lucan is the wild maverick among Latin epic poets. Sneered at for over a century for failing to conform to humanist canons of taste and propriety, in recent years his work has been gaining in reputation. This 1992 book is founded on a genuine admiration for Lucan's unique, perverse, and spellbinding masterpiece. Above all, Dr Masters argues, the poem is obsessed with civil war, not only as the subject of the story it tells, but as a metaphor which determines the way that story is told. In these pages, he discusses in detail a number of selected episodes from the poem which illustrate this principle, and on this basis offers challenging perspective on most of the important issues in Lucanian studies such as Lucan's political stance, his attitude to Caesar, his iconoclastic relation to Virgil and the epic tradition and his distortion of history and geography. This book is a major re-evaluation, provocative and persuasive, of a central figure in the history of Latin epic.
These influential essay and lectures by T. S. Eliot span nearly a half century--from 1917, when he published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, to 1961, four years before his death. With the lumino
