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A loosely connected series of poems about Annie Allen, a Black girl growing up in Chicago. The first part, "Notes from the Childhood and Girlhood," provides glimpses into Annie's birth, her mother, and her responses to racism, killing, and death. "The Anniad," a mock heroic poem, describes Annie's dreams of a lover who goes to war, returns, marries and leaves her, and finally comes home to die. The last section, "The Womanhood," gives a broader view of Annie's outlook on the world and the things she wants to change in it.
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Epic has long been regarded as the exclusive domain of the male literary genius and as an incarnation of patriarchal values. This provocative collection of essays challenges such a hegemonic stereotype by demonstrating the ways in which women writers have successfully adapted the masculine epic tradition to suit their own aesthetic needs and to express their own heroic literary, social, and historical visions. Bringing the female epic out of the shadows, the contributors rethink generic boundaries to illuminate this heretofore hidden literary practice. The essays range from Mary Tighe to Rebecca West from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Gwendolyn Brooks, and from Frances Burney to Virginia Woolf. Bernard Schweizer's introduction, titled 'Muses with Pens,' connects the trajectory of ideas and influences in the individual essays to demonstrate how each participates in reclaiming for women writers a place in the development of a female epic tradition. The volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars working on issues related to genre, canon formation, and the evolution of female literary authority.
Featuring original contributions by scholars in the field of women's studies, this invaluable reference illuminates the lives and works of Maya Angelou, Kate Chopin, Joan Didion, Anne Tyler, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and others.
Hidden in your body is a set of thirty-five divine objects that represent aspects of God; think of them as a vocabulary to describe your soul. They can help you explore your own perfect nature. With roots in Platonic philosophy and Sufi metaphysics, these eternal body-forms were discovered forty years ago and are only now being shared with the world. They don't just provide knowledge and even wisdom; they also grant immediate and sustained relief from everyday suffering. Spiritual coach and writer Neal Allen describes the discovery, the body-forms themselves, and gives step-by-step instructions for encountering them yourself. His wife, the novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott, contributes a sweet foreword that chronicles her encounter with a body-form on their first date.
What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in culture. Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, she argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses in contemporary life and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.
In a world of supercomputers, genetic engineering, and fiber optics, technological creativity is ever more the key to economic success. But why are some nations more creative than others, and why do some highly innovative societies--such as ancient China, or Britain in the industrial revolution--pass into stagnation? Beginning with a fascinating, concise history of technological progress, Mokyr sets the background for his analysis by tracing the major inventions and innovations that have transformed society since ancient Greece and Rome. What emerges from this survey is often surprising: the classical world, for instance, was largely barren of new technology, the relatively backward society ...
Woody Allen's screenplays are some of the wittiest and most sophisticated of modern cinema classics, and these four scripts reflect the emotional range of his talent. Annie Hall, subtitled 'A Nervous Romance', starred Diane Keaton with Woody Allen and won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Script, Best Actress and Best Director. Manhattan takes city life as its subject and stars Woody Allen as TV-comedy writer. Interiors and Stardust Memories are studies of the inner lives of their characters.
In this collection of essays, talks, and reviews, Major Jackson revels in the work of poetry not only to limn and assess the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of poets, but to amplify the controversies and inner conflicts that define our age: political unrest, climate crises, the fallout from bewildering traumas, and the social function of the art of poetry itself. Accessible and critically minded, Jackson returns to the poem as an unparalleled source of linguistic pleasure that structures a multilayered “lyric self.” In his interviews, Jackson illustrates poetry’s distinct ability to mediate the inexplicable while foregrounding the possibilities of human song. Collected over sever...
Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co.: Middle-Generation Poets in Context Takes on the oft-noted but little explored friendship of three of the most respected poets of the twentieth century. Editor Suzanne Ferguson collects eighteen essays that explore the literary, personal, and political affiliations of Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, influential literary figures who flourished in the periods between modernism and postmodernism. Essay in the first section of the book directly compare the subjects, while sections on each of the poets follow. The contributors unpack received wisdom on the poets, revising and updating our conceptions. The multiple viewpoints reflect on one anot...