‘Zarin’s marvelous gift for linguistic play, her gentle humor and her sheer delight in imaginative stanza form and rhyme punctuate this collection and provide a relief that serves to sharpen the reflective edge of the serious poetry.’ –Robert Hosmer, ‘The Southern Review”
Focusing on the vexed friendship between Hart Crane and Allen Tate, this book examines twentieth-century American poetry’s progress toward institutional sanction and professional organization, a process in which sexual identities, poetic traditions, and literary occupations were in question...
Tracing a genealogy of colonial discourse, Suleri focuses on paradigmatic moments in the multiple stories generated by the British colonization of the Indian subcontinent. Both the literature of imperialism and its postcolonial aftermath emerge here as a series of guilty transactions between two...
One of England’s most widely acclaimed young novelists adopts two eerily convincing narrative voices and juxtaposes their stories to devastating effect in this mesmerizing portrait of slavery. Cambridge is a devoutly Christian slave in the West Indies whose sense of justice is both profound...
Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David...
A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck’s sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father’s hollow life and her mother’s inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter’s belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-...
The subject of Michael Warner’s book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one’s place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from...
William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice provides the most coherent account of Empson’s diverse career to date. While exploring the richness of Empson’s comic genius, Paul H. Fry serves to discredit the appropriation of his name in recent polemic by the conflicting parties of...
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill writes that a person “whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steamengine has a character.” Although Mill never devoted an essay or treatise solely to character, Janice Carlisle argues that the subject was central to his...
This pioneering study of Afro-American narrative is far more critical, historical, and textual than biographical, chronological, and atextual. Robert Stepto asserts that Afro-American culture has its store of canonical stories or pregeneric myths, the primary one being the quest for freedom and...
In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan’s independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and...
From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, no figure was more central to debates in England about the relations between the sexes than that of the modest woman. Drawing on a wide range of narratives from the period, Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the multiple and...
“This collection is … a lesson to editors about how different types of subjects may profitably be brought together in one volume. And though the feminist orientation is provocative, there is a complete absence of any tone of vindictiveness, and an obvious determination to get at the truth.” -...
It is impossible to examine any part of the war on terrorism in the twenty-first century without seeing the hand of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell or one of their loyalists. The Commanders, an account of the use of the military in the first Bush administration, is in many respects their story—the...
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate,...
A Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays.
Contains 28 newly commissioned essays written by the most distinguished historians and literary scholars
Situates Shakespeare in the historical and...
In The School of Hawthorne, Brodhead uses Hawthorne as a prime example of how literary traditions are made, not born. Under Brodhead’s scrutiny, the Hawthorne tradition opens out onto a wide array of subjects, many of which have received little previous attention. He offers a detailed account...
For the last two centuries, literature has tested the authority of the individual and the community. During this time, in David Bromwich’s words, “A motive for great writing…has been a tension, which is felt to be unresolvable, between the claims of social obligation and of personal autonomy. That...
As the title suggests, ‘Bearing the Word’ looks with particular intensity at the intersections of women’s reproductive and literary roles. Through close readings of works by Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Homans...
Deals with thought, nature, meditation, the past, language, friendship, renewal, love, failure, travel, and the imagination
Describes farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, and Montana as they cut and bale hay for their cattle ranches
Based on hundreds of inside sources and secret documents, the author reveals the inner operations of the C.I.A., the world’s largest and most sophisticated espionage apparatus, its players, and its clandestine relationships throughout the world
First published in 1987, this title tracks the spy thriller from John Buchanan to Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré, and shows how these tales of spies, moles, and the secret service tell a history of modern society, translating the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth...
This is the dazzling first novel in a series that will certainly take its place amongst the great books of our time.
Reengaging the ideas of alternate lives, worlds, and worldviews that pulsed through his remarkable Little, Big, John Crowley’s Agypt series is a landmark in contemporary fiction. The...
The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American fiction by giving details of the novel’s composition, publication history and contemporary reception. The group of essays, each specially commissioned from a...
This reinterpretation of acting theories in light of the history of science examines acting styles from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century and measures them against prevailing conceptions of the human body and its inner workings.
From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila...
Bob Woodword’s classic book about John Belushi—one of the most interesting performers and personalities in show business history—“is told with the same narrative style that Woodward employed so effectively in All the President’s Men and The Final Days” (Chicago Tribune).
John Belushi was found dead...
David Stark, an adolescent and mainstay of a family of women nearing physical or emotional collapse, hitchhikes from Southern California to San Francisco to locate a wandering sister and encounters adulthood
It has often been held that scholasticism destroyed the literary theory that was emerging during the twelfth-century Renaissance, and hence discussion of late medieval literary works has tended to derive its critical vocabulary from modern, not medieval, theory. In Medieval Theory of Authorship,...
Rush that speaks. Born into the community of Truthful Speakers one thousand years after the Storm, he was raised on stories of the old days - a world filled with saints, a world in which all things were possible, a world which finally destroyed itself. In love with a beautiful woman, Rush journeys...
Critical essays examine the works of a wide range of authors, including Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Hart Crane, and Ralph Waldo Emerson
A wide-ranging, comparative study of the problematic status of originality in Renaissance literature.
Images of life and spiritual growth center around the themes of the garden, the mirror, and lamentations in this collection of twenty-six poems
John Crowley’s masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood;not found on any map;to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family,...
Alice James (1848-1892) was the sister of Henry and William James, as literary as her more famous brothers, but–as was typical for a Victorian woman–never formally educated and thus deprived of any opportunity for a normal “career.” In her introductory biographical essay, Professor Ruth...
This dazzling book is at once an indispensable guide to Stevens’s poetic canon and a significant addition to the literature on the American Romantic movement. It gives authoritative readings of the major long poems and sequences of Stevens and deals at length with the important shorter works...
The Brethren is the first detailed behind-the-scenes account of the Supreme Court in action.
Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong have pierced its secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the Chief and Associate Justices—maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making decisions that...
A GRIPPING CHRONICLE OF THE ARMY THAT KEEPS AMERICA MOVING - OR CAN STOP IT OVERNIGHT!
They control the lion’s share of American wealth. They are on of the largest private sources of real estate investment capital in the world. Their very name stirs whispers of corruption, racketeering,...
This is Crowley’s second novel, describing a world in which genetically engineered animals are given a variety of human characteristics. Painter is a leo, a combination of man and lion; Reynard, a character derived from medieval European fable, is part fox.
