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Written in a fine and lucid prose style, T. S. Eliot and American Poetry presents a critical study of Eliot's major poems as it examines what America means to its poets. Eliot's contribution to a poetic dialogue on this subject with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and other literary figures plays a significant role in this groundbreaking study. Investigating Eliot's literary inheritance through his familial traditions, represented particularly by his mother, Charlotte Eliot, and in terms of the American Renaissance, Lee Oser addresses all phases of Eliot's career as a poet. Following an introduction that reevaluates the importance ...
"Oser examines the twentieth-century literary clash between a dogmatically relativist modernism and a robust revival of Christian humanism. Reviewing English literature from Chaucer to Beckett, and the thoughts of philosophers, theologians, and modern literary critics, Oser challenges the assumption that Christian orthodoxy is incompatible with humanism, freedom, and democracy"--Provided by publisher.
Migrant Form examines the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Satyajit Ray for the anti-colonial arguments in their unsettled, and unsettling, aesthetics. Among the questions it engages are the following: What are the aesthetic moves through which art expresses its resistance to dominance and demands for conformity? How can we define anti-colonial aesthetics? How do these aesthetics manifest themselves in different media such as literature and film? Contending that Joyce inaugurates an anti-colonial «aesthetics of reconstitution», the book mines such aesthetics in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to propose a formal model for postcolonialism. It also draws on that exercise to consider how Rushdie extends a play with reconfigured forms into an overt politics in two of his novels (Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses). Turning its attention to film, the book contests the common view of Ray as a gentle realist and examines a formal restlessness in Ray's earlier work, Charulata (The Lonely Wife), before demonstrating how Ray stages his preference for restlessness in his final film, Agantuk (The Stranger).
When the legendary Sir Ted Pop hires young Richard Bellman as his secretary, Bellman's work on the great man's memoir transforms his young life into a divine comedy -- or is it a devilish farce? In a New York beach house in Southampton, Bellman treads the forbidden ground of Ted's final hour with Johnny Donovan, his partner in fame, who "fell" from a London rooftop in 1969. Sir Ted battles false prophets and mad messiahs for control over his own story, but what rock's biggest mystery reveals to Bellman is the unthinkable hand of God.
Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian grounds. Stressing Shakespeare’s theological sensitivity, Oser places Shakespeare’s work in the “radical middle,” the dialectical opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of art intended for a catholic (small “c”) audience. It describes the conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his literary purposes. Oser review...
This volume looks at ideas of sympathy in the early 20th-century novel. It offers a new reading of literary modernism challenging notions of modernism as hostile to emotion and empathy. It also offers a new intervention into the growing field of literature and emotion studies.
When the Eternal Can Be Met excavates the philosophy behind the theology of the twentieth century's most prominent Christian writers: C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. These three literary giants converted to Christianity within little more than a decade of one another, and interestingly, all three theological authors turned to the theme of time. All three authors also came to remarkably similar conclusions about time, positing that the temporal present moment allowed one to meet the eternal. Decades before Lewis, Eliot, and Auden sought to creatively construct a fictive or poetic theology of time, the prominent philosopher Henri Bergson wrote about time's power to transform an indi...
"Iris Murdoch was one of the most interesting and wide-ranging philosophers in recent British history. In addition to her five works on moral philosophy and existentalism, including Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she was the author of twenty-five works of fiction, including The Sea, the Sea, winner of the Booker Prize, and The Black Prince, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. This collection reassesses her literary and philosophical output, focusing on her key literary works and the influence she had among contemporary philosophers" --
Reflecting the surge of critical interest in Eliot renewed in recent years, A Companion to T.S. Eliot introduces the 'new' Eliot to readers and educators by examining the full body of his works and career. Leading scholars in the field provide a fresh and fully comprehensive collection of contextual and critical essays on his life and achievement. It compiles the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment available of Eliot's work and career It explores the powerful forces that shaped Eliot as a writer and thinker, analyzing his body of work and assessing his oeuvre in a variety of contexts: historical, cultural, social, and philosophical It charts the surge in critical interest in T.S. Eliot since the early 1990s It provides an illuminating insight into a poet, writer, and critic who continues to define the literary landscape of the last century