Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> General

An exploration of the moral use of knowledge among the Amuesga of Central Peru.

This book, first published in 1990, summarizes and evaluates the contribution of Martin Buber as a theorist of myth. Buber provides explicit guidelines for understanding and evaluating myths. He describes reality as twofold: people live either in a world of things, to which they relate as a subject controlling its objects, or in a world of self-conscious others, with whom one relates as fellow subjects. Human beings require both types of reality, but also a means of moving from one to the other. Buber understands myths as one such means by which people pass from I-It reality to I-You...

This bibliography, first published in 1993, attempts to provide a complete and accurate description of the manuscripts of Patrick Branwell Bronte, excluding his letters. Its aim is not only to correct previous errors and update and extend earlier lists, but also to reconstruct as far as possible dismembered and scattered manuscripts. This book will be of interest to students of English Literature."

From the claustrophobic environment of Haworth Parsonage emerged an astonishing range and diversity of character and talent. Between them the two youngest Bronte sisters wrote three novels, each sharply individual in style, purpose and subject-matter.

The title, first published in 1968, discusses and illustrates the similarities and differences in the writings of Emily and Anne Bronte, paying particular attention to their place in the development of the Victorian novel. He stresses the complexities of structure and characterisation in "Wuthering Heights," introducing the reader first to...

The late Leo Spitzer enjoyed a reputation as one of the twentieth century's outstanding philologists and linguists. His writings in the field of the romance languages and of comparative philology have been always stimulating, often controversial. This collection presents his essays in English and American literature which appeared in various journals and other publications during his lifetime. They range from an explication de texte of three great Middle English poems, through close scrutiny of writings of Donne, Milton, Keats, to a consideration of Edgar Allan Poe and Whitman, and,...

The author charts the interaction between self and world through four major phases whereby the self initially has marginal status (the picaresque), begins to flourish and court recognition (Defoe, Marivaux, and Fielding), glows defiant and tries to impose its will on society and the other (Prevost, Richardson, Goethe, and Laclos), and finally makes a prophetic inward turn (Diderot, Sterne, and Rousseau). He shows how these phases also reflect the development of literature as it moves from mimetic to generative fiction, from the power of gesture to that of word.

Originally published...

Professor Quinones describes significant stages in the development of literary Modernism, redefining the period as extending from about 1900 to 1940, and beyond, and not as an entity centered on the 1920s.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the...

Franz Anton Mesmer's concept of animal magnetism exercised a profound influence on key European and American thinkers. Mesmer, who saw in his discovery the secret of health, had hoped to recover the harmony between man and nature by harnessing the power of magnetic fluids. In calling attention to the existence of a second self that surfaces in the hypnotic trance, Mesmer made his real contribution and took the first, decisive steps on the road leading to the unconscious. While most critical studies of mesmerism originate in the history of science or medicine, Maria Tatar's book takes a...

Challenging the view of epistolary narrative as a faulty precursor to the nineteenth-century realist novel, Elizabeth MacArthur argues that the openness and flexibility that characterize correspondences, both real and fictional, reflect the preoccupations of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her readings of the Lettres portugaises, Mme du Deffand's correspondence with Horace Walpole, and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Hlose propose an alternative to closure-oriented theories of narrative as they uncover an interplay between two forces: a tendency towards closure and meaning (metaphor)...

Post-Petrarchism offers a theoretical study of lyric poetry through one of its most long-lived and widely practiced models: the lyric sequence, originated by Francis Petrarch in his Canzoniere of the late fourteenth century. A framework in which poems are suspended according to some organizing or unifying principle, the lyric sequence emerges from European humanist culture as a poetic discourse that represents personal experience and operates as a kind of fiction. Here Roland Greene proposes that since Petrarch the lyric sequence has survived in European and American...

Originally published in 1995. V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent living in the West, has written in many forms. Through an analysis of five works by Naipaul written in different modes and periods of his life, this study posits a relationship between a cultural condition and a choice of genre and narrative, or more specifically between cultural displacement and the writing of autobiography. Examining an aspect of Naipaul s development as a post-colonial writer, this book is of interest in exploring the way that concepts of self determine the writing of texts. It considers...

Originally published in 1981. This book looks at the autobiographical work of nine twentieth-century writers Henry Adams, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Boris Pasternak, Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Green and Adrian Stokes. The author argues that often the writer has shaped his life through his craft, coming to understand the pattern of his own existence through the formalism of language. In each case the writer stamps his personality on the work by mean of a distinctive verbal surface whose discipline enables him to evade narrow egotism and forces both reader and writer...

Originally published in 1985. This investigation of Ovid s fable takes a different tack to previous studies of the love lyric or the themes but looks at the creation of narrative strategies to explain Narcissus experience. The story has always been understood as literally impossible but invites readers to ask what is meant by the puzzling tale of deception and death.

The limits placed on the fable by the commentaries of the medieval period allow us to appreciate the narrative expansion of the fable in twelfth and thirteenth-century poetry. Themes in this book are the way the fable is...