Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> General

Addressed to educators and general readers the "consumers of literature" from all walks of life this important new book explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers, in addition, challenging and stimulating ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and kaleidoscopic experience found in the study of literature.

Dr. Frye's proposals for the teaching of literature include an early emphasis on poetry, the "central and original literary form," intensive study...

"This is the first extended study I know of what the author calls a "Holocaust performative, ..".. The author] asks what a "holocaust performative" might look like and how such a study might illuminate "events of this particular genocide that are unrepresentable and outside the parameters of representation itself..".. Patraka] contributes an important and possibly contentious dimension to Holocaust studies." -James Young

"Theater, always a medium of fragile bodies and intractable ideologies, meets its biggest challenge in the Holocaust. How represent the unrepresentable? Vivian...

Henry Mitchell wrote for the Washington Post from the early 1970s to 1991. He was best known for his gardening columns, some of which have been gathered in two beloved books, The Essential Earthman and One Man s Garden. In addition to his gardening columns, Mr. Mitchell also wrote feature stories and for years had a general interest column that appeared on Fridays under the title Any Day. This book collects the most enduring of those brilliant columns. Henry Mitchell was a bit of a curmudgeon. He had an eye for cant and an even sharper eye for the deeper truths of reality. Never pompous,...

Interactive fiction -- the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure -- has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach...

How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late nineteenth-century Spain? Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Lou Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture.

Charnon-Deutsch organizes the 190 images reproduced in this book into six broad categories, or "fictions of the feminine": she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a...

Written in the form it discusses, Reorienting Rhetoric is both a narrative weaving out of a theme and a systematic treatment of a set of these ideas. The theme is the role of narration in the history of Western rhetoric. The ideas include the gradual tendency to privilege only systematic language, to discard all traditional modes of thinking, and to view narrative as an object but not as a means of thinking. Reorienting Rhetoric argues that narration is a mode of thinking as important as logic and that as narration goes, so goes rhetoric. O'Banion's perspective is heavily...

In Romantic theories of art and literature, the notion of mimesis--defined as art's reflection of the external world--became introspective and self-reflexive as poets and artists sought to represent the act of creativity itself. Frederick Burwick seeks to elucidate this Romantic aesthetic, first by offering an understanding of key Romantic mimetic concepts and then by analyzing manifestations of the mimetic process in literary works of the period.

Burwick explores the mimetic concepts of "art for art's sake," "Idem et Alter," and "palingenesis of mind as art" by drawing on the...

Women Writers in Russian Literature presents a critical overview of Russian women writers from earliest times to the present, including emigre authors. Each of the 14 essays is by a scholar in a particular field; together, they cover all of Russian literature--from old Russia through the 18th and 19th centuries and up to the present--and include all genres: prose, poetry, drama, and autobiography. This collection examines images of women, and reintroduces Russian women writers whose recognition is long overdue. It also focuses on issues of reception and canon formation, and the...

This book is a comparative study of 12 works of fiction broadly representative of the Western canon. Its aim is to discover what gives these 12 works their lasting appeal and vitality over and beyond their formal qualities. It focuses on the interplay of text and subtext within each work after defining these terms at the outset. It then compares its 12 sample classics systematically in a conclusion that argues from the works themselves to classics in general.

Binion's key finding is that for a piece of fiction to feel deep, whole, and great, as classics do, its text must be underpinned...

All five of the epics discussed in this volume came to serve as the basis for an ethnic and national tradition of history, religion, and literature documenting, sometimes encyclopedically, the crucially formative events of a people's early collective experience. A sequential study of these stories will invite and provoke comparative questions and discussions of similar or parallel images, episodes, cultural values, narrative strategies, and poetic forms.

Of the five works discussed herein--the Mesopotamian "Epic of Gilgamesh," the Hebrew "David Story" from 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 Kings,...

All five of the epics discussed in this volume came to serve as the basis for an ethnic and national tradition of history, religion, and literature documenting, sometimes encyclopedically, the crucially formative events of a people's early collective experience. A sequential study of these stories will invite and provoke comparative questions and discussions of similar or parallel images, episodes, cultural values, narrative strategies, and poetic forms.

Of the five works discussed herein--the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hebrew David Story from 1 and 2...

While Kamau Brathwaite is renown for his achievements as a world literary, historical, and cultural critic, his Anglophone Caribbean poetry is the cornerstone of his legacy. His critically acclaimed trilogy, The Arrivants, which is composed of the individual volumes, Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands is analyzed along with many other poetic works. Also discussed within are his innovative and highly original literary techniques which have evolved during over forty years as a poet.

This book is a collection of selected critical responses to...

The poetry produced by the British poets of the 17th and 18th centuries is considered to be among the best ever written. But many general readers feel intimidated by the language or structure of the poetry, and so tend to shy away from enjoying these poets and their works. Nelson takes readers on a tour of the major works and figures of 17th- and 18th-century British poetry, explaining major themes, devices, styles, language, rhythm, sound, tone, imagery, form, and meaning. Beginning each chapter with a sketch of the poet's life and career, the author then looks at five or six...

Since the publication of his haunting, elegiac Goodbye to a River in 1960, John Graves has become one of Texas' most beloved writers, whose circle of loyal readers extends far beyond the borders of his home state. A "regional" writer only by virtue of his gift for vividly evoking the spirit of the land and its people, Mr. Graves is also admired for the unerring craftsmanship of his prose.

Now the University of Texas Press takes great pleasure in publishing A John Graves Reader to introduce his writing to a new generation of readers. This anthology contains...

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading James Joyce useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Read within this framework, "Dubliners "emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of...