This collection of personal critical essays employs a formal study of literature as framework for the consideration of universal issues, including grief management, death, and acceptance of and benefit from traumatic change. * The book makes clear Brackett's belief that no reasonable explanation exists for the necessity some scholars see in ......
In Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax, Mary Blockley uses modern linguistics to tackle the thorny problem of how to interpret a written language that relied neither on punctuation nor on capitalization to mark clause boundaries and subordination.Distinguished by a remarkable combination of erudition and lucidity, Aspects of Old English Poetic ......
The laudatory essay, in which one author praises the work of another, is frequently characterized as an unimportant, even uncritical mode of writing. But as Eleanor Kaufman argues in The Delirium of Praise, this mode of exchange is serious and substantial enough to merit scholarly attention. By not conforming to standard practices of critical ......
''The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands. Literary fiction is probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise.''from the author's Preface The standard contrast between fiction and reality, notes ......
Michael McKeon, author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, here assembles a collection of influential essays on the theory of the novel. Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss, Lukács, Bakhtin, and other prominent theorists explore the historical significance of the novel as a genre, from its early beginnings to ......
The European esoteric tradition was introduced into Russia in the eighteenth century by Freemasons and continued in Russian romantic literature of the early nineteenth century.
This study, which conjoins historiographical methods developed by modern scholars of esoterica and formalist methods of textual analysis, reveals the role ......
Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies The border between fact and fiction has been trespassed so often it seems to be a highway. Works of history that include fictional techniques are usually held in contempt, but works of fiction that include history are among the greatest of ......
If Walter Benjamin (with an irony that belies his seemingly tragic life) is now recognized as one of the century's most important writers, reading him is no easy matter. Benjamin opens one of his most notable essays, ''The Task of the Translator,'' with the words ''No poem is intended for the reader, no image for the beholder, no symphony for the ......
This text documents the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s to the present. It brings attention to larger political and cultural issues at stake in the interpretation of texts, offering a historical analysis of how literary theory was shaped.
