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Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health or illness of his narrators. Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and Marginalia. This incisive catalogue of literary and rhetorical terms, presented in alphabetical order and amply illustrated with examples - in addition to close examinations of some of Poe's most important tales - overwhelmingly demonstrates Poe's rhetorical and linguistic dexterity putting a nearly two-hundred-year-old critical debate to rest by showing Poe to be a conscientious craftsman of the highest order.
Lawrence Durrell excelled in a great variety of genres: poetry, drama, travel books, humorous writings, translations, critical essays, philosophical essays, character sketches, and, above all, genre- and culture-transforming experimental novels. In keeping with Durrell's multifaceted career and the centrality of his experiments, the essays in this collection use a variety of literary approaches to the diversity of Durrell's contributions to literature, illuminating four major dimensions of Durrell's writing.
Presents a collection of critical essays on Poe's novel, The tell-tale heart, arranged chronologically in the order of their original publication.
Through his use of Gnostic beliefs, Durrell destabilizes our notions of the "real" and suggests that the civilization to emerge out of the ruins of a devastated Europe will not be Christian, but Quincunxial. Durrell's aesthetic and thematic concerns establish him as a significant, indeed central, voice in twentieth-century British literature. His career, which spans over five decades, links the British High Modernists with the Postmodernists.
Durrell and the City commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Alexandria Quartet with a collection of fourteen new essays by a group of international scholars and critics. The collection provides a critical consideration of Durrell's urban landscapes, from the London of his early novels to Avignon during World War II in his last great series, while focusing on the place that made him famous--the city of Alexandria--in order to provide a reassessment of his career and achievement.
To the uninitiated, Thomas Pynchon’s V. seems to defy comprehension with its open-ended and fragmented narrative, huge cast of characters (some 150 of them), and wide range of often obscure references. J. Kerry Grant’s Companion to “V.” takes us through the novel chapter by chapter, breaking through its daunting surface by summarizing events and clarifying Pynchon’s many allusions. The Companion draws extensively from existing critical and explicative work on V. to suggest the range of interpretations that the novel can support. The hundreds of notes that comprise the Companion are keyed to the three most widely cited editions of V. Most notes are interpretive, but some also provide historical and cultural contexts or help to resurrect other nuances of meaning. Because it does not constitute a particular “reading” of, or “take” on, the novel, the Companion will appeal to a wide range of users. Rather than attempting to make final sense of the novel, the Companion exposes and demystifies Pynchon’s intent to play with our conventional attitudes about fiction.
The Grail legends have in modern times been appropriated by a number of different scholarly schools of thought; their approaches are analysed here. This study shows how modern (including postmodern) adaptations of the Grail legend correspond to trends in the scholarly community and how the legend has been appropriated by competing world-views. There are three parallel trendsin Grail scholarship and modern adaptations of the legend: controversy over Christian or pagan origins, secularization by way of humanism, and esoteric mysticism. These three trends reflect movements in popular culture. Relativismand multiculturalism influence Christian--pagan cultural conflict in the adaptations. Mythogr...
Heresy and Heterotopia in Works by Lawrence Durrell gathers new essays by international scholars who examine heretical concepts and heterotopian counter-spaces in Durrell's thought and writing. The volume includes studies of texts set in locations from the Mediterranean to Cambodia, with spatial focus ranging from the Egypt of The Alexandria Quartet (and of Anatole France's Thaïs) to the scattered locations of The Avignon Quintet, with stops along the way for the island books and other treatments of wandering and exile in poetry as well as prose. The contributors approach Durrell's texts from a variety of perspectives, philosophical and intertextual, architectural and historical, mystical and digital. In so doing, they expose the deeper echoes set off by his wide-ranging literary production and map out the metaphysical, literary, and aesthetic connections that account for Durrell's impact on our understanding of those twentieth-century social and cultural paradigms that foreshadow the disruptions of today's world.
Novelist Lawrence Durrell's fondness for his adopted homeland of Greece led him to declare "I'm a Greek," and profoundly influenced his work. Attempting to capture the scope of the Greek world's relationship with Durrell's life and work, Lilios (English, U. of Central Florida) presents 22 papers that approach the topic from a range of perspectives. After a number of reminiscences of Durrell by family and friends, a set of essays are organized by place, examining Durrell's relationship with Corfu, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Cyprus. The remaining essays are grouped according to theme discussing such issues as the influence of myth and other "Greek inspirations" on Durrell's novels, poems, and other work. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).