Critical Approaches Frye: The Road of Excess Knights: King Lear as Metaphor Kushner: The Critical Method of Gaston Bachelard Gershman: Surrealism: Myth and Reality Applications The Writer and His Method Winner: Myth as a Device in the Works of Chekhov Nothnagle: Myth in the Poetic Creation of Agrippa D'Aubigne Campbell: The Transformation of Biblical Myth: MacLeish's Use of the Adam and Job Stories Hiller: The Symbolism of Gestus in Brecht's Drama Sr. Joselyn: Animal Imagery in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction The Work Examined--Archetypes and Interpretations LaGuardia: Chastity, Regeneration,...

An exploration of the conditions in which some classic authors came to produce their work.

In these Shakespearean essays originally published together in 1979, the distinguished literary critic L. C. Knights offers the fruits of his long-term thinking about individual plays (notably, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Lear) and explores the ways in which a deep and imaginative understanding of Shakespeare's work can relate to and enrich other areas of knowledge - politics, history, social and emotional relationships, the nature of theatrical experience ... Certain critical assumptions are of course implicit here: that great works of art have a continuing life which is renewed through...