'Ambiguities indeed One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck, without beginning or end-a labyrinth without a clue - an Irish bog without so much as a Jack o'the'lantern to guide the wanderer's footsteps - the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops." So judged the New York Herald when Pierre was first published in 1852, with most contemporary reviewers joining in the general condemnation: 'a dead failure, ' 'this crazy rigmarole, ' and "a literary mare's nest." Latter-day critics...
'Ambiguities indeed One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck, without beginning or end...
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville occupy the center of this anthology of nearly three hundred poems, spanning the course of the century, from Joel Barlow to Edwin Arlington Robinson, by way of Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Holmes, Jones Very, Thoreau, Lowell, and Lanier. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide...
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville occupy the center of this anthology of nearly three hundred poems, spanning the course of the century, from Joel Barl...
The Portable Hawthorne includes writings from each major stage in the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne: a number of his most intriguing early tales, all of The Scarlet Letter, excerpts from his three subsequently published romances The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun as well as passages from his European journals and a sampling of his last, unfinished works. The editor s introduction and head notes trace the evolution of Hawthorne s writing over the course of his long career: from the tales, to their apotheosis in The Scarlet...
The Portable Hawthorne includes writings from each major stage in the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne: a number of his most intriguing early tale...
In this brilliant book, William C. Spengemann redefines the genre of early American literature, calling it writings in English that have been influenced by the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the New World. Putting linguistic criteria above national origin he reexamines works by Milton, Franklin, Blake, and Austen, and views them as comparable-and American-writings, all concerned with the displacement of the remembered Old World by an altogether new one. "This brilliantly argued book challenges the most basic assumptions underlying the contemporary study of American literature. It...
In this brilliant book, William C. Spengemann redefines the genre of early American literature, calling it writings in English that have been influenc...
In "Three American Poets," William C. Spengemann describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so.
By linking these utterly singular poets and their work--verse connected by shared qualities of oddity, complexity, and difficulty--Spengemann illuminates the poets' efforts to create verse equal to the demands of a changing nineteenth century. All three responded to a widespread sense of loss--loss, above all, of Christian understandings of the...
In "Three American Poets," William C. Spengemann describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their compara...
