Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Literary Figures

Though it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, the poetry of Robert Penn Warren still is not widely or well understood. In this study, Victor H. Strandberg redresses this imbalance by providing a comprehensive survey of the poetic canon of this gifted, complex, and much-neglected poet.

Warren writes in the tradition of Western poets concerned with the painful experience of a forced, one-way passage from innocence into "the world's stew" of time and loss. This passage, Strandberg explains, results for Warren in bifurcation of the self into...

In this lucid book a distinguished scholar and critic measures British fiction from World War I through the convulsive effects of the Depression and World War II, and the importance of the writing that has been done since Finnegan's Wake.

Webster presents a moving account of the shattering impact of the Great War upon British writers, particularly Rose Macaulay, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. The cynicism and despair which afflicted them also bore heavily on the novelists of the thirties and forties -- Graham Greene, Joyce Cary, L. P. Hartley, C. P. Snow, who...

Students of Browning have long been puzzled by the discrepancies between the dramatic framework of Fifine and its symbolic development, but these difficulties are resolved in Southwell's explication by a biographical hypothesis. The powerful influence of the memory of his beloved wife, Elizabeth, involved Browning in a deep ambivalence, and Fifine at the Fair represents his effort to escape the effects of the profound inhibitions associated with her memory, while at the same time remaining loyal to it.

The poem is itself a flawed quest for Eros. Browning's symbolic...

A New York Times Editors' Choice

"Keizer writes eloquently and perceptively . . . More than just thoughtful, reasonable, carefully observed, elegantly written, and deeply humane, this book is also that rare thing, a work of genuine wisdom."-Chicago Tribune

Perhaps no profession is so constantly discussed, regulated, and maligned by non-practitioners as teaching. The voices of the teachers themselves, however, are conspicuously missing. Defying the trend, teacher and writer Garret Keizer takes us to school in this arresting chronicle of his...

"Exceptional. If there has been a more honest, calm, and profoundly moving memoir written in the last few years, then I've missed it." "Times Literary Supplement"

How would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir, Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family, and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to England, and a successful media and academic career, then a cancer diagnosis and its unresolved consequences. A profoundly moving, comic, and original account by a stunning...

The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning could command public admiration without the need for authorial self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself--the historical as opposed to the figural individual--was a brilliant, maverick innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating study of...

Alejo Carpentier was one of the greatest Latin American novelists of the twentieth century, as well as a musicologist, journalist, cultural promoter, and diplomat. His fictional world issues from an encyclopedic knowledge of the history, art, music, and literature of Latin America and Europe. Carpentier's novels and stories are the enabling discourse of today's Latin American narrative, and his interpretation of Latin American history has been among the most influential. Carpentier was the first to provide a comprehensive view of Caribbean history that centered on the contribution of...