The essays in this volume explore the persistent struggle of language to overcome its own limitations. Given their scope--from Dantes confrontation with the divine All to Samuel Becketts obsessive need to speak in the face of Nothing--they expand our notion of the extent to which all speech is an assault on silence, an attempt to articulate what lies beyond the grasp of words. The collection offers the reader, in roughly chronological order, diverse conceptions of the ineffable as either superfluity or absence of reality. It also exposes language in the act of extending its own boundaries,...

The Bible in the American Short Story examines Biblical influences in the post-World War II American short story. In a series of accessible chapters, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins offer close-readings of short stories by leading contemporary writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Allegra Goodman, Tobias Wolff and Julia Valdez Quade that highlight the biblical passages that they reference. Exploring episodes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and both Jewish and Christian heritages, this book is an important contribution to understanding the influence of the Bible...