You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Melville: Fashioning in Modernity considers all of the major fiction with a concentration on lesser-known work, and provides a radically fresh approach to Melville, focusing on: clothing as socially symbolic; dress, power and class; the transgressive nature of dress; inappropriate clothing; the meaning of uniform; the multiplicity of identity that dress may represent; anxiety and modernity. The representation of clothing in the fiction is central to some of Melville's major themes; the relation between private and public identity, social inequality and how this is maintained; the relation between power, justice and authority; the relation between the "civilized" and the "savage." Frequently ...
Prefaced by an account of the early days of Berryman studies by bibliographer and scholar Richard J. Kelly, “After thirty Falls” is the first collection of essays to be published on the American poet John Berryman (1914-1972) in over a decade. The book seeks to provoke new interest in this important figure with a group of original essays and appraisals by scholars from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United States. Exploring such areas as the poet’s engagements with Shakespeare and the American sonnet tradition, his use of the Trickster figure and the idea of performance in his poetics, it expands the interpretive framework by which Berryman may be evaluated and studied...
This volume offers a comprehensive account of modern literary criticism, presenting the field as part of an ongoing historical and intellectual tradition. Featuring thirty-nine specially commissioned chapters from an international team of esteemed contributors, it fills a large gap in the market by combining the accessibility of single-authored selections with a wide range of critical perspectives. The volume is divided into four parts. Part One covers the key philosophical and aesthetic origins of literary theory, while Part Two discusses the foundational movements and thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. Part Three offers introductory overviews of the most important movements and thinkers in modern literary theory, and Part Four looks at emergent trends and future directions.
Studying Poetry is a fun, concise and helpful guide to understanding poetry which is divided into three parts, form and meaning, critical approaches and interpreting poetry, all of which help to illuminate the beauty and validity of poetry using a wide variety of examples, from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan.
World, Self, Poem collects the best of the essays submitted by poets and scholars from around the U.S. and Canada, and beyond, for presentation at the "Jubilation of Poets" festival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in October 1986. In this collection, eighteen critics consider the works of a number of important postmodern poets and, using various approaches, confront some of the central problems posed by the poetry of the past 25 years. John Ashbery, Wendell Berry, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Lousie Gluck, Adrienna Rich, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, and William Stafford are among the poets who receive detailed attention in these essays. The questions addressed include political involvement and noninvolvement, the theme of nuclear annihilation, the poet's use and misuse of history, poetry workshops in Central America; the "I" in contemporary poetry; the pastoral vein in contemporary poetry; the nature and implications of concrete and "found" poetry; analogies of poetry and music.
In a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, RobertLowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four midcentury poets: Lowell, RandallJarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholedand therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rareexplicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evadedthe notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the privatenature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, andBerryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence.Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisanotrac...
Disappearing Men examines the complex and rebellious representations of gender in the work of several writers of 'devolutionary' Scottish fiction in the period 1979 to 1999. The study focuses on the context of a 'crisis in masculinity' accompanying the rapidly changing male role in the period, concluding that men often disappear from sight in this writing, highlighting issues of male insecurity and female disorientation in a new gender landscape. Hence the novels examined here by authors James Kelman, Jancie Galloway, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Alan Warner, strongly challenge the stereotype of the Scottish 'hardman' and his dominance in 20th century Scottish fiction. Disappearing Men disse...
The first monograph to investigate the poetics and politics of haunting in African diaspora literature, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity examines literary works by five contemporary writers - Fred D'Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Toni Morrison. Joanne Chassot argues that reading these texts through the lens of the ghost does cultural, theoretical, and political work crucial to the writers' engagement with issues of identity, memory, and history. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, this truly interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the fast-growing field of spectrality studies.
A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative anglophone poetries from decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic.
The twelve classic comedy films examined within these pages are distinguished by an equal number of defining comic performances. Ranging from The Great Dictator (1940) to A Southern Yankee (1948), each film focuses on the most central theme of "clown comedy": Resilience, the encouragement or hope that one can survive the most daunting of life's dilemmas--even during the war-torn 1940s. And each film can be regarded as a microcosm of the antiheroic world of its central clown (or clowns). Among the performers represented are Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, Eddie Bracken, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd and Red Skelton. This lavishly illustrated work includes an introduction by noted film critic and historian Anthony Slide.