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The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a greased pig, for example, or a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit. In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters.

Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means--and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying...

Hundreds of years ago, deep within an ancient Jewish religious work, the details of a prophesied judgment day are revealed. Written in 300 BC, the book of Enoch holds the truth for the future. The world needs to know the reality, but one question remains-who will spread the word?

Long after the turn of the twenty-first century, water and oxygen are in short supply. With nearly all the natural resources depleted, a megacompany controls the insatiable demand for water and oxygen through its international desalination plants. But when the company's network administrator discovers...

In "Estranging the Familiar," G. Douglas Atkins addresses the often lamented state of scholarly and critical writing as he argues for a criticism that is at once theoretically informed and personal. The revitalized critical writing he advocates may entail--but is not limited to--a return to the essay, the form critical writing once took and the form that is now enjoying a resurgence of popularity and excellence.

Atkins contends that to reach a general audience, criticism must move away from the impersonality of modern criticism and contemporary theory without embracing the old-fashioned...

Deconstruction -- a mode of close reading associated with the contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida and other members of the "Yale School" -- is the current critical rage, and is likely to remain so for some time. Reading Deconstruction / Deconstructive Reading offers a unique, informed, and badly needed introduction to this important movement, written by one of its most sensitive and lucid practitioners. More than an introduction, this book makes a significant addition to the current debate in critical theory.

G. Douglas Atkins first analyzes and explains deconstruction...

Hundreds of years ago, deep within an ancient Jewish religious work, the details of a prophesied judgment day are revealed. Written in 300 BC, the book of Enoch holds the truth for the future. The world needs to know the reality, but one question remains-who will spread the word?

Long after the turn of the twenty-first century, water and oxygen are in short supply. With nearly all the natural resources depleted, a megacompany controls the insatiable demand for water and oxygen through its international desalination plants. But when the company's network administrator discovers...

Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the art of living.

Atkins s readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language--and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of...

John Dryden's celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism is revealed in this provocative study as the culmination of a lifelong search that began with his youth in an actively Puritan family. Atkin's familiarity with the religious thought of the times allows him to range widely among Dryden's contemporaries and predecessors and to bring a fresh perspective to those key poems in Dryden's religious development: Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. Through a sensitive reappraisal of all Dryden's texts -- including those less widely known -- Atkins shows that Dryden had a...

G. Douglas Atkins here offers an original consideration of T. S. Eliot's essay as a form of embodied thinking. A combination of literature and philosophy, the genre of the essay holds within itself a great tension--that between truth and creative prose. And, as Atkins explains, these conflicting forces of truth and creativity exist not only within the literary format itself but also within the writers and their relationships with the genre, making essay writing a wonderfully enriching "impure art."

Exploring the similarities between Eliot's prose and poetry with the art of essay writing,...

"The critical rage" (and likely to remain so), deconstruction is the most controversial and arguably the most promising critical-theoretical movement of recent decades. It has proven to be enormously influential as a strategy of textual analysis, thanks in large part to the enterprise of such critics as J. Hillis...