This is the first book in English on Italy's leading director, Giorgio Strehler. For the past half century, Strehler has been an influential and integral part of European theatrical life as founder of Italy's leading repertory theater, the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, director of the Paris-based Theatre de l'Europe, and through his opera and theater productions. This detailed study evaluates the particular qualities that typify Strehler's work: the lyrical realism that has become the hallmark of his mature style and his gift of interpretation and production. Hirst traces this unique style through...

The classical subjects of geometric probability and integral geometry, and the more modern one of stochastic geometry, are developed here in a novel way to provide a framework in which they can be studied. The author focuses on factorization properties of measures and probabilities implied by the assumption of their invariance with respect to a group, in order to investigate nontrivial factors. The study of these properties is the central theme of the book. Basic facts about integral geometry and random point process theory are developed in a simple geometric way, so that the whole approach...

The concept of kingship as Charles I understood it was challenged by the Covenanters in a struggle of protest over the government of Scotland. Although many aspects of this episode have received historical attention, Charles's own role has not hitherto been investigated in detail. Using a large body of newly available evidence, Dr Donald here attempts to redress the balance, and in doing so offers a substantially new perspective on the Scottish troubles in the crisis years of 1637 41. This study sheds light on the processes whereby Charles, with counsel and yet often in spite of it, tried to...

The Crying of Lot 49 is widely recognized as a significant contemporary work that frames the desire for meaning and the quest for knowledge within the social and political contexts of the '50s and '60s in America. In the introduction to this collection of original essays on Thomas Pynchon's important novel, Patrick O'Donnell discusses the background and critical reception of the novel. Further essays by five experts on contemporary literature examine the novel's "semiotic regime" or the way in which it organizes signs; the comparison of postmodernist Pynchon and the influential South American...

Billy Budd is Herman Melville's most popular work after Moby-Dick. Melville wrote the novella during the five years before his death, and it was published posthumously in 1924. The essays collected here provide a multifaceted introduction to this major American work.

These new critical essays on Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's explosive first novel, not only question our understanding of the "Southern Gothic," but launch a new inquiry into the nature and history of O'Connor's critical reputation. Perceived as a "classic" American writer despite the double setbacks of being a woman and a twentieth-century author, O'Connor continues to speak with striking clarity and disturbing vision to successive generations.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury met with only limited success when published in 1929, probably due to its fragmented, non-chronological structure. Since, however, it has become one of the most popular of Faulkner's novels, serving as a litmus paper upon which critical approaches have tested themselves. In the introduction to this volume Noel Polk traces the critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Sound and the Fury from a variety of critical perspectives. Dawn Trouard offers...

James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African-American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel.

Go Down, Moses (1942) came to fruition during the second world war and was written during one of Faulkner's most traumatic periods, yet it has fallen to critical neglect amid the vast scholarship on the great Southern writer. In part, this collection aims to tilt the balance, forcing the reader beyond critical commonplaces through asking challenging questions. The five essays assembled here explore the tensions of race and gender apparent throughout the novel.

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;...