The world of the troubadours of medieval Provence--of Bertran de Born, Arnaut de Mareuil, and Peire Bremon lo Tort--always fascinated Ezra Pound and, as Stuart McDougal shows, provided both themes and techniques for his early poetry.
Pound's first translations of Provencal poetry were a way of penetrating an alien sensibility and culture and making it his own; they were also important technical exercises. Confronted with the problem of finding a suitable form and language for the Provencal experience, he condensed, deleted, expanded--the results were highly original...
The world of the troubadours of medieval Provence--of Bertran de Born, Arnaut de Mareuil, and Peire Bremon lo Tort--always fascinated Ezra Pound an...
The search for a substitute for religion, Adalaide Kirby Morris argues, occupies Stevens' poetic energy from his earliest to his latest work. It emerges in his patterns of speech, in his symbols, and in his poetic forms; it encompasses a critique of Christianity, often wryly humorous and sometimes bitterly satiric; and it results in a theory of poetry that becomes a mystical theology.
At the center of this mystical theology, the author finds, is the conviction that God and the imagination arc one. The study concludes that poetry provides for Stevens a sanction, a solace, a form of...
The search for a substitute for religion, Adalaide Kirby Morris argues, occupies Stevens' poetic energy from his earliest to his latest work. It em...
In applying the standards of modern literary criticism to medieval Arabic literature, Andras Hamori concentrates on those aspects of the literature that appear most alien to modern Western taste: the limitation of themes, the sedimentation with conventions, and the use of elusive patterns of composition.
The first part of the book approaches Arabic literature from the historical point of view, concentrating on the transformations in poetic genres and poetic attitudes towards time and society in the literature between the sixth and the tenth centuries. The problems of poetic technique...
In applying the standards of modern literary criticism to medieval Arabic literature, Andras Hamori concentrates on those aspects of the literature...
The dramatic political struggle of Boris Pasternak and the continued success of his novel. Dr. Zhivago, have often taken center stage in discussions of this writer. Olga Raevsky Hughes chooses instead to focus on the aesthetics underlying Pasternak's snuggles and successes to explore the ways in which his views of art and the artist were applied in his writings.
Professor Hughes examines those aspects of Pasternak's views on art that he himself considered crucial: the beginnings of poetry in his life, the relation of his art to life, his relationship to his time, and his...
The dramatic political struggle of Boris Pasternak and the continued success of his novel. Dr. Zhivago, have often taken center stage in dis...
This book-length treatment of Gyorgy Lukacs' major achievement, his Marxist aesthetic theories. Working from the thirty-one volumes of Lukacs' works and twelve separately published essays, speeches, and interviews, Bela Kiralyfalvi provides a full and systematic analysis for English-speaking readers.
Following an introductory chapter on Lukacs' philosophical development, the book concentrates on the coherent Marxist aesthetics that became the basis for his mature literary criticism. The study includes an examination of Lukacs' Marxist philosophical premises; his theory of the origin...
This book-length treatment of Gyorgy Lukacs' major achievement, his Marxist aesthetic theories. Working from the thirty-one volumes of Lukacs' work...
Why, during the last two hundred years, when critical achievement in the field of tragedy has been outstanding, has there been little creative practice? David Lenson examines the work of various writers not ordinarily placed in the tragic tradition--among them, Kleist, Goethe, Melville, Yeats, and Faulkner--and suggests that the tradition of tragedy does continue in genres other than drama, that is, in the novel and even in lyric poetry.
The notion of tragedy's migration from one genre to others indicates, however, rather sweeping modifications in the theory of tragedy. Achilles'...
Why, during the last two hundred years, when critical achievement in the field of tragedy has been outstanding, has there been little creative prac...
This book interprets Mon Faust and explores the differences between Valery's and Goethe's treatments of the Faust figure. The author shows by close analysis how Valery opposes a Cartesian, anti-Pascalian Faust to Goethe's romantically flawed hero. The title of the project conceived by Valery's Faust, The Mind's Body-part autobiography, part metaphysical treatise-embodies the Cartesian dilemma ironically illustrated by the Mon Faust fragments: the misfortunes of the thinking essence, the cogito, in its subjugation to the body.
The first three chapters...
This book interprets Mon Faust and explores the differences between Valery's and Goethe's treatments of the Faust figure. The author shows b...
A poet's tradition provides him with a sense of community that may be regarded as a necessary condition for poetry. Jenijoy La Belle, who studied with Roethke, here describes the cultural tradition that he defined and created for himself. In so doing, she demonstrates how an understanding of Roethke's sources and the influences on his work is essential for its interpretation.
The author considers the sources of Roethke's poetry and the influence on him of a wide circle of poets including T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Whitman, Wordsworth, Smart, Donne, Sir John Davies, and Dante. In addition,...
A poet's tradition provides him with a sense of community that may be regarded as a necessary condition for poetry. Jenijoy La Belle, who studied w...
Studying the nature of symbol in Coleridge's work, Father Barth shows that it is central to Coleridge's intellectual endeavor in poetry and criticism as well as in philosophy and theology. He finds symbol to be an essentially religious reality for Coleridge, one that partakes of the nature of a sacrament, especially sacrament as an encounter between material and spiritual reality.
Father Barth notes that eighteenth-century poetry was by and large a poetry of metaphor rather than of symbol, a poetry of reference rather than of encounter. In close readings of the poetry of Wordsworth...
Studying the nature of symbol in Coleridge's work, Father Barth shows that it is central to Coleridge's intellectual endeavor in poetry and critici...
We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in literature. He directs his attention toward several older poets and examines Shakespeare in particular to show how literary modernity depends, not on chronological considerations, but on the process of mimesis, or imitation, that art has traditionally claimed for itself.
In analyzing Shakespeare's major tragedies, Professor Felperin...
We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture...