This book focuses on the works of America's premier colonial poet, Edward Taylor (1642 1729). This study analyses typology in Taylor's Christographia and Treatise Concerning the Lord's Supper and examining Taylor's adaptations of figural analogies to suit his personal spiritual needs, Professor Rowe advances a theory which unites Taylor's exegetical discipline as a preacher with his creativity as a poet. This is the first work to draw on the collection of unpublished sermons, discovered in 1977, Upon the Types of the Old Testament. Professor Rowe links Taylor's sermons with corresponding...

In this book, David Wyatt examines the mythology of California as it is reflected in the literature of the region. He argues that the encounter with landscape played an important role in literature of the West, and distinguishes this particular characteristic from the literatures of other American regions. Wyatt discusses in depth the writings of Dana, Leonard, Fremont, Muir, King, Austin, Norris, Steinbeck, and Chandler, Jeffers and Snyder and their literary reactions to the landscape. By examining the changing role of the landscape in literature of California, the book sheds new light on an...

David Halliburton's book is a richly textured study of the complete writings of Stephen Crane, including Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, and the less well-known fiction, newswriting, and poetry. Offering close readings of the works within a broad framework, Halliburton sets out to explore the imaginative world Crane created in his total uvre of fiction, poetry and reportage. Comparative and interdisciplinary methods, combined with insights from historians such as Toynbee and Hofsteader, enable Halliburton to shed light on a number of issues. These include Crane's...

Faulkner's Subject offers a reading of William Faulkner for our time, and does so by rethinking his masterpieces through the lenses of current critical theory. The book attends equally to the power of his work and to the current theoretical issues that would call that power into question. Drawing on poststructuralist, ideological, and gender theory, Weinstein examines the harrowing process of "becoming oneself" at the heart of these novels. This self is always male, and it achieves focus only through strategically mystifying or marginalizing women and blacks. The cosmos he called his own--the...

The centenary of Eliot's birth in 1988 provided the salutary occasion to go back to his life and work, to reassess him in the light of issues raised by various critical movements--the new historicism, feminism, reader-reception theory--that have come to the fore since the New Criticism poststructuralist. This sort of reassessment is the lively and pertinent idea behind Ronald Bush's collection of new essays on Eliot. The essays assembled vary in approach, but share a commitment to the discipline of history, and an awareness that history can function as critique as well as celebration. Many of...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum--"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language"--belongs to a long tradition of writing, connecting political disorders and the corruption of language, that stretches back in Western culture. Representative Words, which gives an account of the tradition from its classical and Christian origins through the Enlightenment, is primarily a study of how and why Americans renewed and developed it between the ages of the Revolutionary and the Civil Wars. It is the first comprehensive treatment of the background to and the appearance of the wealth of...

Paul Giles describes how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds such as Orestes Brownson, Theodore Dreiser, Mary McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman. The book also explores how Catholicism was represented and mythologized by other American writers. By highlighting the recurring themes and preoccupations of American Catholic fictions, Giles challenges many of the accepted ideas about the centrality of Romanticism to the American literary...

Stephen Fredman asserts in this work that American poetry is groundless - that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and discovers for itself fresh meaning.

During the 1930s the Work Progress Administration funded the Federal Theater Project to sustain unemployed theatrical workers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major urban centers, employing over 12,000 people and presenting countless productions. Some of the most popular and memorable of these works, such as the "voodoo" Macbeth and the "swing" Mikado, were produced in the so-called Negro Units, whose story is narrated in this book. Particular focus is given to problems of representation in a community and in an era trying to define what was African American, what was Negro, what...

This book examines the early work of William Carlos Williams in relationship to a women's tradition of American poetry, as represented by Mina Loy, Denise Levertov and Kathleen Fraser--three generations of women poets working in or directly from a modernist tradition. Linda Kinnahan traces notions of the feminine and the maternal that develop as Williams seeks to create a modern poetics. Positioning Williamas in relationship to these three generations of Anglo-American women, the book pursues two questions: what can women poets, writing with an informed awareness of Williams, teach us about...