Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Immediately after World War I, four major European and American poets and thinkers--W. B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, R. M. Rilke, and C. G. Jung--moved into towers as their principal habitations. Taking this striking coincidence as its starting point, this book sets out to locate modern turriphilia in its cultural context and to explore the biographical circumstances that motivated the four writers to choose their unusual retreats. From the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia to the ivory towers of the fin de si cle, the author traces the emergence of a variety of symbolic associations with the...

Evelyn Barish began this book partly to inquire into a silence--Ralph Waldo Emerson's failure to discuss or mourn his father, who died when the boy was seven years old. As she probed the meaning of this loss, she found herself tracing the development of an American prophet, producing a detailed intellectual biography of Emerson's early years up to the writing of Nature. In the process she has painted a vivid picture of American society of the period and of Emerson's unusual family--including his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a brilliant and eccentric woman, who was described by Emerson as...

The work of Wallace Stevens has been read most widely as poetry concerned with poetry, and not with the world in which it was created; deemed utterly singular, it seems to resist being read as the record of a life and times. In this critical biography Alan Filreis presents a detailed challenge to this exceptionalist view as he traces two major periods of Stevens's career from 1939 to 1955, the war years and the postwar years. Portraying Stevens as someone whose alternation between cultural comprehension and ignorance was itself characteristically American, Filreis examines the poet's...

This major interpretation of the life and art of Robert Lowell exposes the full relationship between the poetry and the personal and national experience to which it is so remarkably connected. Steven Axelrod proposes that the key to our understanding of Lowell's poetic achievement lies precisely in this interpenetration of his life and his art.

Originally published in 1978.

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...

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville prophesied that American writers would slight, even despise, form--that they would favor the sensational over rational order. He suggested that this attitude was linked to a distinct concept of democracy in America. Exposing the inaccuracies of such claims when applied to poetry, Stephen Cushman maintains that American poets tend to overvalue the formal aspects of their art and in turn overestimate the relationship between those formal aspects and various ideas of America. In this book Cushman examines poems and prose statements in which poets as...

Eugene Goodheart examines the skeptic disposition that has informed advanced literary discourse over the past generation, arguing that the targets of deconstructive suspicion are fundamental humanistic values. " This book] is a fair-minded, generous critique of the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and their followers. These writers have argued that language is so inherently slippery it can never express a speaker's intended meaning. The critic's role, in their view, is to explore the contradictions, subtexts, and metaphorical byways of works that may be most...

Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. Lippmann dubbed this manipulative opinion-making process -the manufacture of consent.- A more familiar term for such large-scale persuasion would be propaganda. In Weapons of Democracy, Jonathan Auerbach explores how Lippmann's stark critique gave voice to a set of misgivings that had troubled American social reformers since the late nineteenth...

Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps America's most famous writer. Adapted many times to the stage and screen and an inspiration to countless illustrators, graphic novelists, and musicians, his tales and poems remain a singular presence in popular culture. (His most famous poem inspired the name of the NFL's Baltimore Ravens.) And then there is the matter of Poe's literary influence. "How many things come out of Poe?" Jorge Luis Borges once asked. And yet Poe remains misunderstood, his works easily confused with the legend of a troubled genius. Now, in this annotated edition of selected tales and...