In a sensitive and provocative study of six great works of British literature, David Rosen traces the evolution of masculinity, inviting readers to contemplate the shifting joys and sorrows men have experienced throughout the last millennium, and the changing but constant tensions between their lives and ideals. Focusing on Beowulf, Sir Gawain and ......
These stories mark the return of Mark Costello's now-legendary creation Michael Murphy, the character who first appeared in the acclaimed collection The Murphy Stories. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the Washington Post Book World, "Murphy is a Midwestern cousin of Donleavy's Ginger Man, but much more human and troubled. . . . ......
Here, two of Australia's leading cultural critics bring together work that represents a distinctive national tradition, moving between high theory and detailed readings of localized cultural practices. Ethnographic audience research, cultural policy studies, popular consumption, ''bad'' aboriginal art, landscape in feature films, style, form and ......
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response
''Presents a number of important Americanist scholars doing substantial and thought-provoking work. These scholars rethink responses to canonical works and come to important new undertsandings of women's and African American writing . . . Readers in History suggests that new attention to the social dynamics of reading will generate important new ......
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1885) published nothing in her lifetime, save short extracts from her journals and letters which her brother, William, included in his Guide to the Lakes. She spent most of her life caring for her brother and his family, working, traveling and studying with him and his friends who include de Quincey and Coleridge. This ......
Throughout one of English history's most tumultuous periods, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) took part in and reported on nearly every major political, religious, and social controversy. This widely acclaimed biography offers a fascinating account of Defoe's remarkable life. Paula Backscheider reveals new information about Defoe's secret career as a ......
This is a ''biography of the imagination, '' an inner narrative of Sylvia Plath's life and work. Combining psychoanalytical, feminist, and intertextual methods, Steven Gould Axelrod traces what Roland Barthes has called ''the body's journey through language.'' After an introductory look at the roles played by language and silence in Plath's verbal ......
The publication of You Know Me Al brought instant fame to Ring Lardner (1885-1933), one of the great American humorists of this century. Considered the satirist's greatest work, the book is a collection of letters from one Jack Keefe, a baseball ''busher,'' to his longtime friend, Al Blanchard, in their midwestern hometown. The voice of Jack Keefe ......
''This is a substantial and readable volume, and it is supplied with a rich array of documentation in the notes and bibliography. It deals with a question of critical importance for current research on medieval `literature': namely, the relationship between this literature and us . . . This is an important collection, and one may congratulate the ......
