Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Poetry in Theory
Book SynopsisPoetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 brings together key critical and theoretical texts from the twentieth century which have animated debates about modern poetry. Helps readers to think critically about the nature of modern poetry, and to engage with broader questions about aesthetics, language, culture and imagination. Includes texts by poets, critics, theorists and philosophers, ranging from Ezra Pound to Jacques Derrida. Texts in translation from French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian are presented alongside the work of writers from Britain, Ireland, the United States, Africa, India and the Caribbean. Each text is accompanied by a brief biographical and thematic introduction. A system of cross-referencing points up significant connections and disagreements between the texts. Includes a thematic index and chronology. Trade Review"Poetry has always provided the most severe test for theory, and this rich, wide-ranging anthology shows just how fruitful the encounter between the two has been. Jon Cook’s excellent collection should prove a salutary lesson for all those who assume, utterly against the evidence, that literary theory has had nothing to say about the shape of the sentences and the texture of the verse." —Terry Eagleton, University of ManchesterTable of ContentsAcknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: 1900-20. The Symbolism of Poetry: W.B. Yeats (1900). Three Letters: Rainer Maria Rilke (1903, 1907, 1925). Creative Writers and Daydreaming: Sigmund Freud (1908). Romanticism and Classicism: T. E. Hulme (1911). The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature: Filippo Marinetti (1912). Poet Yeats: Rabindrantah Tagore (1912). Robert Frost: Edward Thomas (1914). Poetry as Spoken Art: Amy Lowell (1917). The New Spirit and the Poets: Guillaume Apollinaire (1917). A Retrospect: Ezra Pound (1918). Note on Poetry: Tristan Tzara (1919). On Poetry and On Contemporary Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov (1919/20). Tradition and the Individual Talent: T. S. Eliot (1919). D. H. Lawrence Preface to New Poems (1920). Prologue to Kora in Hell: William Carlos Williams (1920). Part II: 1921-40. General Aims and Theories: Hart Crane (1925). The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain: Langston Hughes (1926). How are Verses Made: Vladimir Mayakovsky (1926). Science and Poetry: I. A. Richards (1926). A Survey of Modernist Poetry: Robert Graves and Laura Riding (1928). Seven Types of Ambiguity: William Empson (1930). The Poetic Process: Kenneth Burke (1931). Poetry’s Evidence and Automatic Writing: Paul Eluard and Andre Breton (1932/33). New Bearings in English Poetry: F. R. Leavis (1932). Lorca Play and the Theory of Duende: Frederico Garcia (1933). Poetry and Grammar: Gertrude Stein (1935). Poets with History and Poets Without History: Marina Tsvetaeva (1935). Modernism: Walter Benjamin (1938). The Figure a Poem Makes: Robert Frost (1939). Poetry and Abstract Thought: Paul Valery (1939). Part III: 1941-60. Three Lectures on Poetry: Martin Heidegger (1941/44/46). The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words: Wallace Stevens (1942). Feeling and Precision: Marianne Moore (1944). Poetry and Knowledge: Aime Cesaire (1945). Projective Verse: Charles Olson (1950). A Statement for Poetry: Louis Zukofsky (1950). Is There Any Poetic Writing: Roland Barthes (1953). The Concrete Universal: W. C. Wimsatt (1954). Excerpts from Seminars and Papers: Jacques Lacan (1954/55/57). What is Modern Poetry: Donald Davie (1955). Mallarme’s Experience: Maurice Blanchot (1955). The Pleasure Principle/Writing Poems: Philip Larkin (1957/64). On Lyric Poetry and Society: Theodor Adorno (1957). Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics: Roman Jakobson (1960). Part IV: 1961-80. What I See in the Maximus Poems: Edward Dorn (1961). Personism: A Manifesto: Frank O’Hara (1961). When the Mode of the Music Changes/Abstraction in Poetry: Allan Ginsberg (1961/62). The Poet and the City: W. H. Auden (1962). Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall/State/Meant: Imamu Baraka (1964/65). A Sense of Measure: Robert Creeley (1964). The Invisible Avant-Garde: John Ashbery (1968). Closure and Anti-Closure in Modern Poetry: Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1968). Poetic Language, Poetics of Language: Gerard Genette (1969). Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image: Paul de Man (1970). The Muse of History: Derek Walcott (1974). The Ethics of Linguistics: Julia Kristeva (1974). A Modest Proposal: Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1976). Continuity in Language: Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1978). Part V: 1980-2000. The Poe-etic Effect: Soshana Felman (1980). The Dollar Value of Poetry: Charles Bernstein (1983). On Hope: Czeslaw Milosz (1983). Blood, Bread and Poetry: Adrienne Rich (1984). Prologue: The Deed of Writing: Richard Poirier (1987). Even Under the Rine of Terror: Jeremy Cronin (1988). Che cos’e la poesia: Jacques Derrida (1988). The Homosexual Lyric: Thomas Yingling (1990). Avant-Garde or Endgame: Marjorie Perloff (1991). The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma: Evan Boland (1994). The Redress of Poetry: Seamus Heaney (1995). Soul Says: Helen Vendler (1995). Chronology. Select Bibliography. Thematic Index. Index.
£118.70
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Poetry in Theory
Book SynopsisPoetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 brings together key critical and theoretical texts from the twentieth century which have animated debates about modern poetry. Helps readers to think critically about the nature of modern poetry, and to engage with broader questions about aesthetics, language, culture and imagination. Includes texts by poets, critics, theorists and philosophers, ranging from Ezra Pound to Jacques Derrida. Texts in translation from French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian are presented alongside the work of writers from Britain, Ireland, the United States, Africa, India and the Caribbean. Each text is accompanied by a brief biographical and thematic introduction. A system of cross-referencing points up significant connections and disagreements between the texts. Includes a thematic index and chronology. Trade Review"Poetry has always provided the most severe test for theory, and this rich, wide-ranging anthology shows just how fruitful the encounter between the two has been. Jon Cook's excellent collection should prove a salutary lesson for all those who assume, utterly against the evidence, that literary theory has had nothing to say about the shape of the sentences and the texture of the verse." —Terry Eagleton, University of ManchesterTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1 Part I 1900–1920 27 1 W. B. Yeats The Symbolism of Poetry (1900) 29 2 Rainer Maria Rilke Three Letters (1903, 1907, 1925) 35 3 Sigmund Freud Creative Writers and Day-dreaming (1908) 41 4 T. E. Hulme Romanticism and Classicism (1911) 47 5 Filippo Marinetti Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) 56 6 Rabindranath Tagore Poet Yeats (1912) 61 7 Edward Thomas Robert Frost (1914) 65 8 Amy Lowell Poetry as a Spoken Art (1917) 69 9 Guillaume Apollinaire The New Spirit and the Poets (1917) 75 10 Ezra Pound A Retrospect (1918) 83 11 Tristan Tzara Note on Poetry (1919) 91 12 Velimir Khlebnikov On Poetry and On Contemporary Poetry (1919, 1920) 94 13 T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent and Reflections on Contemporary Poetry (1919) 97 14 D. H. Lawrence Preface to New Poems (1920) 106 15 William Carlos Williams Prologue to Kora in Hell (1920) 111 16 Ernest Fenollosa The Chinese Written Character as the Medium for Poetry (1920) 116 Part II 1920–1940 129 17 Mina Loy Modern Poetry (1925) 131 18 Hart Crane General Aims and Theories (1925) 135 19 Langston Hughes The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) 139 20 Vladimir Mayakovsky How Are Verses Made? (1926) 144 21 I. A. Richards Science and Poetry (1926) 152 22 Robert Graves and Laura Riding A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) 160 23 William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) 169 24 Kenneth Burke The Poetic Process (1931) 175 25 Paul Éluard and André Breton Poetry’s Evidence and The Automatic Message (1932, 1933) 182 26 F. R. Leavis New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) 192 27 Federico García Lorca Play and Theory of the Duende (1933) 201 28 Gertrude Stein Poetry and Grammar (1935) 208 29 Marina Tsvetaeva Poets with History and Poets without History (1935) 215 30 Walter Benjamin Modernism (1938) 223 31 Robert Frost The Figure a Poem Makes (1939) 234 32 Paul Valéry Poetry and Abstract Thought (1939) 237 Part III 1940–1960 245 33 Martin Heidegger Three Lectures on Poetry (1941, 1944, 1946) 247 34 Wallace Stevens The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words (1942) 256 35 Randall Jarrell The End of the Line (1942) 268 36 Aimé Césaire Poetry and Knowledge (1945) 275 37 Charles Olson Projective Verse (1950) 288 38 Louis Zukofsky A Statement for Poetry (1950) 296 39 Roland Barthes Is There Any Poetic Writing? (1953) 301 40 W. K. Wimsatt The Concrete Universal (1954) 307 41 Jacques Lacan Excerpts from Seminars and Papers (1954, 1955, 1957) 315 42 Donald Davie What is Modern Poetry and The Reek of the Human (1955)? 323 43 Maurice Blanchot Mallarmé’s Experience (1955) 330 44 Philip Larkin The Pleasure Principle and Writing Poems (1957, 1964) 337 45 Theodor Adorno On Lyric Poetry and Society (1957) 342 46 Roman Jakobson Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics (1960) 350 Part IV 1960–1980 359 47 Edward Dorn What I See in The Maximus Poems (1961) 361 48 Frank O’Hara Personism: A Manifesto (1961) 367 49 Allen Ginsberg When the Mode of the Music Changes and Abstraction in Poetry (1961, 1962) 370 50 W. H. Auden The Poet and the City (1962) 377 51 Imamu Baraka Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall and State/Meant (1964, 1965) 385 52 Robert Creeley A Sense of Measure (1964) 390 53 John Ashbery The Invisible Avant-Garde (1968) 393 54 Barbara Herrnstein Smith Closure and Anti-closure in Modern Poetry (1968) 399 55 Gerard Genette Poetic Language, Poetics of Language (1969) 408 56 Paul de Man Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image (1970) 413 57 Derek Walcott The Muse of History (1974) 420 58 Julia Kristeva The Ethics of Linguistics (1974) 437 59 Hans Magnus Enzensberger A Modest Proposal (1976) 447 60 Veronica Forrest-Thomson Continuity in Language (1978) 456 61 Geoffrey Hill Poetry as ‘‘Menace’’ and ‘‘Atonement’’ (1978) 464 Part V 1980–2000 475 62 Shoshana Felman The Poe-etic Effect (1980) 477 63 Charles Bernstein The Dollar Value of Poetry (1983) 491 64 Czeslaw Milosz On Hope (1983) 494 65 Adrienne Rich Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1984) 503 66 Richard Poirier Prologue: The Deed of Writing (1987) 514 67 Jeremy Cronin ‘‘Even under the Rine of Terror ’’ (1988) 523 68 Jacques Derrida Che cos’è la poesia? (1988) 533 69 Thomas Yingling The Homosexual Lyric (1990) 538 70 Marjorie Perloff Avant-Garde or Endgame? (1991) 547 71 Eavan Boland The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma (1995) 559 72 Seamus Heaney The Redress of Poetry (1995) 567 73 Helen Vendler Introduction, Soul Says (1995) 574 Chronology 581 Select Bibliography 619 Thematic Index 622 Index 624
£36.05
John Wiley and Sons Ltd James Joyce
Book SynopsisThe difficulties that students face when tackling Joyce's works are addressed by focusing on plot, implying that the real books are hidden behind the author's complex language and style. This book demystifies Joyce's style, demonstrating that everything students need to know in order to read his works may be discovered in the books themselves.Trade Review"Seidel has written an admirable brief introduction for the general reader. Obviously the product of many years of teaching Joyce, it's concise, fresh and very accessible." Ronald Bush, St John's College, University of Oxford "Entering the Joycean labyrinth – whether for the first time, or the twenty-first – one could not wish for a wiser, more gracious, better-humored guide than Michael Seidel. He ranges over the full spectrum of Joyce's writing with a lightness of touch and a sureness of direction that makes being his student an unmitigated delight." Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Southern Illinois University "In James Joyce: A Short Introduction, Michael Seidel has pulled off one of the most difficult feats in current publishing. Seidel manages to capture anew what it is that makes Joyce's writing unique, and to elucidate even his most abstruse of abstrusities with a directness, clarity and infectious pleasure which reminds one all over again why one loves Joyce." Jeri Johnson, Exeter College, University of Oxford "In James Joyce: A Short Introduction, Seidel has provided a clear and accessible distillation of the biographical and historical background to Joyce's work as well as a set of methodological tools designed to help the 'general reader' understand and interpret Joyce's use of language and narrative form. Resisting the urge to 'decode' Joyce's style by appealing to content, Seidel has done an admirable job of demystifying some of Joyce's techniques without dismissing or devaluing their importance." Irish Studies ReviewTable of Contents1. Introducing Joyce. 2. Master Plots. 3. Dubliners. 4. Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. 5. Exiles. 6. Levels of Narration. 7. Homer in Ulysses. 8. Three Dubliners. 9. Reflexive Fiction. 10. Strategic Planning. Notes. Index.
£94.00
John Wiley and Sons Ltd James Joyce
Book SynopsisThe difficulties that students face when tackling Joyce's works are addressed by focusing on plot, implying that the real books are hidden behind the author's complex language and style. This book demystifies Joyce's style, demonstrating that everything students need to know in order to read his works may be discovered in the books themselves.Trade Review"Seidel has written an admirable brief introduction for the general reader. Obviously the product of many years of teaching Joyce, it's concise, fresh and very accessible." Ronald Bush, St John's College, University of Oxford "Entering the Joycean labyrinth – whether for the first time, or the twenty-first – one could not wish for a wiser, more gracious, better-humored guide than Michael Seidel. He ranges over the full spectrum of Joyce's writing with a lightness of touch and a sureness of direction that makes being his student an unmitigated delight." Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Southern Illinois University "In James Joyce: A Short Introduction, Michael Seidel has pulled off one of the most difficult feats in current publishing. Seidel manages to capture anew what it is that makes Joyce's writing unique, and to elucidate even his most abstruse of abstrusities with a directness, clarity and infectious pleasure which reminds one all over again why one loves Joyce." Jeri Johnson, Exeter College, University of Oxford "In James Joyce: A Short Introduction, Seidel has provided a clear and accessible distillation of the biographical and historical background to Joyce's work as well as a set of methodological tools designed to help the 'general reader' understand and interpret Joyce's use of language and narrative form. Resisting the urge to 'decode' Joyce's style by appealing to content, Seidel has done an admirable job of demystifying some of Joyce's techniques without dismissing or devaluing their importance." Irish Studies ReviewTable of Contents1. Introducing Joyce. 2. Master Plots. 3. Dubliners. 4. Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. 5. Exiles. 6. Levels of Narration. 7. Homer in Ulysses. 8. Three Dubliners. 9. Reflexive Fiction. 10. Strategic Planning. Notes. Index.
£30.35
John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Life of Evelyn Waugh
Book SynopsisIn this biography, Douglas Patey follows Evelyn Waugh's career from the comfortable middle-class home he was anxious to flee, through his escapades at Oxford, his adventures in South America and Africa, his experience of war, to his last years as veiled autobiographer.Trade Review"Patey mounts a spirited defence of Waugh, dismissing with some authority many of the familiar items on the charge-sheet. Patey seems to have read not only everything his subject wrote, but a great deal of background material. Such thoroughness, and an alertness to what may be going on in Waugh's apparently limpid prose makes it a valuable addition to a growing body of critical work on this twentieth-century master." Times Literary Supplement "This calm, deliberate biography- which measures Waugh's life in the context of his work, rather than making the work serve as an excuse for discussing the life - should be included in every academic collection for use of undergraduates through faculty" Choice "Patey's sympathetic and acute portrait of Waugh narrates Waugh's narration of his own life, combining thorough research with an exhaustive knowledge of Waugh's fiction and nonfiction and the insight of a highly skilled literary critic. The result is the finest biography by far of Evelyn Waugh to date, and a welcome corrective of the regnant record. It is impossible to pay sufficient tribute to the chapter Patey devotes to Brideshead Revisited. It is, simply, the very best interpretation of the novel of which I am aware." First Things The Life of Evelyn Waugh is a biography with a difference. In addition to being the life story of the English writer who was so active from the late 1920s until his relatively early death in April 1966 at age 62, it is also a critical assessment of his novels and other literary works. Readers will be well repaid for their perseverance." Languages and Literature "It is a tribute to the thoroughness of Patey's research and his ready invocation of so many perspectives that the subject of his biography should emerge as an even more fascinating and complex figure than one had imagined. It is Waugh the writer, though, who must remain of prime interest. In this regard, Patey is the perfect critical guide." The Month "Patey is a crisp and detailed writer who pays Waugh and the reader the greatest tribute of all-he stays out of the way and gets on with the story" Arthur Jones "A remarkably insightful and readable account of Evelyn Waugh, the writer and the man. While taking the full measure of Waugh's comic genius, Douglas Patey brilliantly analyzes Waugh's sacramental imagination about the world - the writer's conviction, explored through a variety of fictional and journalistic forms, that the extraordinary and transcendent lie just on the far side of the ordinary. Indispensable for anyone who wants to get inside the mind and soul of one of the great English authors of our time." George Weigel "This is surely the finest biography of Evelyn Waugh yet written. It is unashamedly a literary biography and concentrates on the published work, though never forgetting the personal context in which these were written. Within its pages there is much valuable information, some of it of a kind that brings out the essential spirituality of Evelyn Waugh." Culture Wars "Patey has provided the layman and the devotee alike with an indispensable guide to the writer and the vagaries of hs century. I suspect The Life of Evelyn Waugh will be a well-thumber reference tool for many years to come." Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and StudiesTable of ContentsChronology of Waugh's Works. List of Illustrations. List of Abbreviations. Preface. 1. Becoming Modern (1903-1930). 2. The Doom of Youth: Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. 3. Political Decade - I (1930-1935). 4. Political Decade - II (1935-1939). 5. A Peoples War (1939-1945). 6. Brideshead Revisited. 7. A Peoples Peace (1945-50). 8. The Post of Honour is a Private Station (1948-1953). 9. Retrospective: Shaping a Life (1953-66). Notes. Bibliography. Index.
£41.75
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Reading the American Novel 1865 1914
Book SynopsisAn indispensable tool for teachers and students of American literature, Reading the American Novel 1865-1914 provides a comprehensive introduction to the American novel in the post-civil war period. Locates American novels and stories within a specific historical and literary context Offers fresh analyses of key selected literary works Addresses a wide audience of academics and non-academics in clear, accessible prose Demonstrates the changing mentality of 19th-century America entering the 20th century Explores the relationship between the intellectual and artistic output of the time and the turbulent socio-political context Trade Review Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1 Toward the “Great American Novel”: Romance and Romanticism in the Age of Realism 9 2 Of Realism and Reality: Definitions and Contexts 25 3 Dramas of the Broken Teacup: American “Quiet” Realism 41 4 The Nature of Naturalism: Definitions and Backgrounds 55 5 Implacable Nature, Household Tragedy, and Epic Romance 73 6 Frank Norris: The Beast Within 91 7 The Rocking Horse Winners: Theodore Dreiser and Urban Naturalism 109 8 Subjective Realism: Stephen Crane’s Impressionist Fictions 125 9 Impressions of War: The Interior Battlefield 141 10 Sense and Sensibility: Sentimental Domesticity and “New Woman’s Fiction” 157 11 Domestic Feminism: The Problematic Louisa May Alcott 179 12 “All the Happy Endings”: Marriage, Insanity, and Suicide 195 13 Vulgarians at the Gate: Edith Wharton and the Collapse of Gentility 215 14 Tea-Table as Jungle: Henry James and “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” 235 15 Economies of Pain: W. D. Howells 261 16 The “Gilded Age”: Genteel Critics and Militant Muckrakers 283 17 What Is An American? Regionalism and Race 299 18 The Territory Ahead: Emerging African American Voices 323 19 The “Dream of a Republic”: War, Reconstruction, and Future History 343 20 At the Modernist Margin: Mark Twain 367 Bibliographical Resources 387 Index 421
£38.73
Harvard University Press Sinceritys Shadow
Book SynopsisEver since Wordsworth redefined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, poets in English have sought to represent a sincere self-consciousness through their work. Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed by staging its own failures.Trade ReviewThe ambitious project undertaken by Deborah Forbes in Sincerity's Shadow is to reinvigorate sincerity as a critical concept...Overall...this is a wonderfully stimulating book, which should energize debate about poetic selfhood. * Year's Work in English Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Personal Universal Sincerity as Integrity in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Rich 2. Before and After Sincerity as Form in the Poetry of Wordsworth, Lowell, Rich, and Plath 3. Sincerity and the Staged Confession The Monologues of Browning, Eliot, Berryman, and Plath 4. The Drama of Breakdown and the Breakdown of Drama The Charismatic Poetry of Byron and Sexton 5. Agnostic Sincerity The Poet as Observer in the Work of Keats, Bishop, and Merrill Conclusion Notes Index
£64.56
Harvard University Press Writing For an Endangered World Literature
Book SynopsisEmphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, this book provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear ways. Focusing on 19th- and 20th-century writers, it reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.Trade ReviewAuthor of the widely influential The Environmental Imagination, Buell is a major figure in contemporary ecocriticism. Here, in broadening the scope of his earlier book, Buell blurs the usual distinction between natural and built environments. Exploring how a variety of texts imagine urban, rural, ocean, and desert places, he convincingly argues that literary imagination is powerfully shaped by--and shapes--a single, complex environment that is both found and constructed...Buell's book is important: it points ecocriticism in profoundly new and welcome directions. -- W. Conlogue * Choice *
£27.86
Harvard University Press On Hashish
Book SynopsisWalter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin and of his unique form of thought.Trade ReviewThe essays and notes that Benjamin devoted to the characteristics of narcotic intoxication...are, despite their fragmentary nature, among the most authentic ever put to paper .... Benjamin's experiments correspond quite precisely to the specific cognitive intentions articulated in his most developed philosophical texts.... Like the micrological explorations that typify his philosophizing as a whole, his experiences of intoxication bring to light surprising finds. -- Hermann Schweppenhäuser, co-editor of Walter Benjamin's collected worksFascinating...On Hashish gives the reader a sense of Benjamin's philosophical method and a tour through the library (and the staggering erudition) that supported it, but also provides some insight into the man himself--his drives, his fears, and his creative process. -- Michael Berk * Nextbook *In search of heightened awareness, Benjamin would eat hashish, smoke opium and get injected with mescaline...Some of his notes (such as the part about giggling) will be familiar to any contemporary stoner, but even when dealing with drugs he surprises his readers...Everything Benjamin wrote, even when the subject is less than pleasant, exudes an almost euphoric spirit. It was as if he wrote as a form of worship, out of gratitude for the chance to live and discover. -- Robert Fulford * National Post *During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the radical thinker and cultural critic Walter Benjamin made a series of experiments with hashish, mescaline and opium...This very welcome collection is the first in English to round up his better-known drug pieces, such as his elliptical account of a hashish-intoxicated evening stroll around the port of Marseilles, and to place them in the context of the related notes, drafts and marginalia that track the course of his elusive and constantly evolving project. This is a very worthwhile venture, and one that produces a book much greater than the sum of its parts. Benjamin's scattershot approach to recording his drug experiences means that there are as many nuggets of brilliance (and as many incomprehensible rambles) in his notes and journal entries as in his finished prose. -- Mike Jay * Fortean Times *[On Hashish is] a miscellany, gathering the protocols of [Benjamin's] drug experiments, two accounts of his experiences, and a handful of references to drugs culled from his other works. It can only begin to suggest the true importance of drug experiences for the development of Benjamin's thought. Yet for this very reason On Hashish stands in the same relation to a more conventional essay on drugs as Benjamin's literary essays do to conventional criticism...What makes On Hashish an important book is that Benjamin's drug experiments not only were a failure in themselves but also shifted the ground beneath his other work in a way that he never fully acknowledged. -- Adam Kirsch * New Yorker *[Benjamin's] drug experiences show once again how singularly committed he was to the program of the avant-garde: overcoming the limitations of the self by subjecting it to an array of pulverizing, Dionysian, ego-transcending influences. -- Richard Wolin * The Nation *Drugs did, mostly, make Benjamin smile, and what could bring smiles to the lips of this proud, gifted and doomed man can't but bring smiles to the reader. There is wonderful writing in this book, much of which illuminates Benjamin's better known, equally suggestive, and no less enigmatic texts. Plus, here, we catch him tapping his foot. And smiling. -- Harvey Blume * Jerusalem Report *Harvard's pocket-sized On Hashish, edited by Howard Eiland, brings together everything that Benjamin ever wrote on the subject. It includes notes by him and his friends about the drug protocols and two essays. One of Benjamin's solitary experiments ended up as the basis for 'Hashish in Marseilles,' an essay that begins with him sitting in his hotel waiting for the drug to hit and then follows him around the streets. At points along the way, he giggles at his own jokes, has paranoid thoughts, feels the immensity of his solitude, and gets hungry. A piece of ice brings enormous pleasure; Pâté de Lyon reminds him of the words 'Lion paste'; the name of a boat in the harbor makes him think of aerial warfare; and he passes two men on the street who remind him of Dante and Petrarch. -- Eric Bulson * Times Literary Supplement *Benjamin's work continues to fascinate and delight because it has something for everyone: the literary critic, art historian, philosopher, urban theorist and architect. Whether he is talking about children's toys, Mickey Mouse, Surrealism, photography, or Kafka, Benjamin has a knack for figuring out what they can tell us about the wider world that produced them. -- Eric Bulson * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsTranslator's Foreword Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts "Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature," by Marcus Boon Editorial Note, by Tillman Rexroth Protocols of Drug Experiments (1-12) Completed Texts "Myslovice--Braunschweig--Marseilles" "Hashish in Marseilles" Addenda From One-Way Street From "Surrealism" From "May-June 1931" From The Arcades Project From the Notebooks From the Letters "An Experiment by Walter Benjamin," by Jean Selz Notes Index
£23.36
Harvard University, Asia Center The Heart of Time
Book SynopsisKnight describes modern Chinese fiction’s unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the 20th century.
£32.26
Harvard University, Asia Center Love after The Tale of Genji
Book SynopsisThe Tale of Genji has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to obscurity. The author calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light on this undervalued body of work and examining three representative texts as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji.
£30.56
Harvard University, Asia Center When Our Eyes No Longer See
Book SynopsisFor the writers and poets of early-20th-century Japan, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.Trade ReviewIn his fascinating new study...Gregory Golley offers new perspectives on the ethical dimensions of twentieth-century literature by his rigorous consideration of both the art and the science of [Miyazawa] Kenji's work, together with that of his fellow members of Japan's modernist generation, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Yokomitsu Riichi...Golley's study makes for compelling reading and represents a major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Japanese modernism. -- William O. Gardner * Journal of Japanese Studies *Golley's book is eloquent and erudite, offering subtle critiques of our understanding of the literary history of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s through both a fine-grained historical account of the discourses of the "new scientific realism" in prewar Japan and through a series of rereadings of some of the major figures of the interwar period. -- Jonathan Zwicker * Journal of Asian Studies *
£30.56
Harvard University Press Songs of Ourselves
Book SynopsisRubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced American readers’ lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet’s words. By blurring boundaries between “high” and “popular” poetry, and between modern and traditional, Rubin reveals a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.Trade ReviewHere is a model of what scholarship can do: knowledge, imaginatively applied to matters of importance. Joan Rubin gives an understated but forceful history of poetry's readership, fads, attainments and allegiances in the United States. Implicitly, by sheer force of information, Rubin dispels blather—wiping away trite assumptions, displacing stereotypes, and correcting nostalgia for some vague good old days. Through the lens of a central human art, this book provides a new way of regarding Americans and our culture. -- Robert PinskyThis unusually wide-ranging, admirably researched, resourcefully argued study demonstrates far better than anyone has done before the crucial importance of poetry in the making of American culture--not only in the past but in our own time as well. This book should be of great interest not only to specialists in literature and cultural history but to any reader interested in the place of poetry in American life. -- Lawrence Buell, author of EmersonIn its fresh takes on poetry from Longfellow and Markham to Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Pinsky, Songs of Ourselves is both an elegy to the emotional life of a bygone period and an affirmation that even after the rise of high modernism and New Criticism, traditional, regular, and at times sentimental poetry continues to be enjoyed to this day. -- Werner Sollors, is author of Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial LiteratureJoan Shelley Rubin tells a new history of American poetry, broader than a chronicle of writers or literary movements. Here are the people who read poetry: in school, at home, in church, around the scout campfire. Exhaustively researched, dazzlingly written, Songs of Ourselves reveals how poems transcended and escaped the printed page to take their place in Americans' lives and experience--from immigrant classrooms a century ago to poetry slams today. -- Scott Casper, University of Nevada, RenoAmericans-especially those who read poetry- like to ask whether poetry matters; Rubin's big cultural history demonstrates how, and how widely, it once did. * Publishers Weekly *Ms. Rubin has done innovative research into the wide array of social functions that poetry served from 1880 until 1950. Her book delves into school recitation days and war memorial services; the poetry of the summer camp and the verse-speaking choir; anthologies designed for Americanization programs and as devotional aids...When subjected to the tensions of a powerful nation in a tumultuous era, the timeless appeals of poetry will naturally take distinctive and surprising forms. Ms. Rubin has chosen to survey some of these surprises over 70 years of explosive American history—from the lingering aftermath of the Civil War through the ravages of two world wars to the technological wizardry of the 20th century. She has chosen a field where the eternal and the temporal contend--just the sort of terrain where poetry has always been most at home. -- Brad Leithauser * Wall Street Journal *This humane, at times exhaustingly detailed literary history dignifies, against the critics' aesthetic judgments, the comfort, pleasure and emotional richness readers found in popular poetry. And as a social historian, Rubin...succeeds in showing how this poetry was adopted by educators, churches, immigrant groups and other organizations to promote various social and cultural goals...She keeps admirable faith with one ordinary reader's desire not so much to "try to figure out what the poem means, as much as what the poem means to us in our lives now." -- Tom Sleigh * New York Times Book Review *Taking a larger view of Songs of Ourselves...it’s hard not to be deeply impressed, not only by its massive evidence that poetry played powerful roles in the lives of Americans, but also its boldly...corrective stance against the knee-jerk canon-making tendencies of Literary Studies. It is no longer possible to view modern American poetry as an enterprise only occupying some aesthetically purified, uncommodified, revolutionary space outside of mainstream culture. -- Steve Healey * Rain Taxi *This is a book that needed to be written. Superb and original, it not only recovers a vast amount of American cultural history, it changes the way we understand the present. It is a book to celebrate- and reread. -- Dana Gioia, Poet and Former Chair, National Endowment for the ArtsThis is a thrilling, sweeping overview of how--and why--poetry mattered (and still matters) to its readers. -- Angela Sorby * American Historical Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I. The Poet in American Culture *1. Seer and Sage *2. Amateur and Professional *3. Absence and Presence *4. Sophisticate and Innocent *5. Celebrity and Cipher *6. Alien and Intimate Part II. Poetry in Place and Practice *7. Listen, My Children: Modes of Poetry Reading in American Schools *8. I Am an American: Poetry and Civic Ideals *9. Grow Old Along with Me: Poetry and Emotions among Family and Friends *10. God's in His Heaven: Religious Uses of Verse *11. Lovely as a Tree: Reading and Seeing Out-of-Doors * Coda: "Favorite Poems" and Contemporary Readers * Notes * Index
£24.26
Harvard University Press The Long Voyage Selected Letters of Malcolm
Book SynopsisCritic, poet, editor, chronicler of the Lost Generation, elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898â1989) was an eloquent witness to American literary and political life. His letters, mostly unpublished, provide a self-portrait of Cowley and his time and make possible a full appreciation of his long, varied career.Trade ReviewMalcolm Cowley was one of the most important (and easily the most omnipresent) literary figures of the past century… Cowley’s was a long, eventful and controversial life, amply documented in his letters… Bak has done on the whole an astounding job of effectively boiling down Cowley’s voluminous correspondence… To delve into Cowley’s letters is to get a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the literary life, with its glittering prizes, really operates… This volume is a permanent addition to American literary history the likes of which we may never see again. If the telephone made letter-writing a luxury, email and texting have rendered it as obsolete as the manual typewriter, and we as readers are undoubtedly the poorer for it. That is all the more reason to cherish this invaluable collection. -- Tom Moran * Chicago Tribune *Cowley was perhaps the greatest literary cross‐pollinator of the 20th century. It’s impossible to imagine the American canon without him… Cowley’s best letters—they are alternately frisky, warm, pushy and ruminative—are collected now in The Long Voyage… Many are to his childhood friend from Pittsburgh, the philosopher of language Kenneth Burke, and to his lifelong confidant Allen Tate. This volume also records his end of correspondences with Faulkner, Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Lionel Trilling, Louise Bogan, Edmund Wilson and multiple others… Consistently busy on a multitude of fronts, Cowley wrote letters that are grainy with gossip and ringing observations, almost from the beginning. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *Cowley’s letters carry the style he had in all of his writing, featuring a very American, cynical, go-getter voice and an uncanny facility with a sharp closing line… The Long Voyage is also a reminder of a time, not long ago, when literature had a more central place in the cultural conversation… Bak has done a masterful job with this collection… Cowley has never quite been forgotten, but the work he did was often as hidden as it was influential. This collection will remind readers of 20th-century American literature of the key role Cowley played in its development, and might perhaps spur them to read some of Cowley’s own works. -- Greg Barnhisel * Los Angeles Review of Books *[This is a] vast collection of letters, sensitively compiled and annotated by [Cowley’s] biographer, Hans Bak… At his best he wrote from an empathy that few contemporaries shared. -- Marc Robinson * Times Literary Supplement *Cowley earned, many times over, his status as the grand old man of American letters. Did anyone do more to establish the current canon of the major writers of the twentieth century? Did anyone do more than Cowley, as the indefatigable consulting editor for Viking, to identify new talent among the following generations?… Did anyone work harder behind the scenes of influential organizations (the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Yaddo, countless book prizes, and so on) to support writers in need and reward deserving achievement?… He ultimately belonged, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner, to what his friend Hart Crane called ‘the visionary company,’ and not as a fellow traveler but as a full member. -- Christopher Benfey * New Republic *[A] vast and rich omnium-gatherum of epistolary activity… Cowley [was] one of the most important and influential men of letters (or freelance literary intellectuals, if you prefer) of the twentieth century… [He had] an immensely influential critical and editorial career that spanned seven decades… [Cowley] is nowhere near as famous or well regarded as he deserves to be… Bak’s commentary and notes are helpful, to the point, jargon-free, and superbly well-informed, and the letters themselves have been selected and judiciously edited to form an almost biographical narrative. Because the book focuses on letters that illuminate Cowley’s involvement with both literature and politics, the private man barely makes an appearance, but that absence is more than made up for by his son Robert Cowley’s foreword, a moving act of filial piety and a shrewd assessment of the shape and significance of his father’s career. And why should anyone produce an 850-page volume of Malcolm Cowley’s letters, and why should you care that someone did? Because, simply put, the American literature of the twentieth century would look considerably poorer and less interesting without his activities as a critic, editor, and memoirist, and our broader understanding of American literary history much less clear… If you don’t reckon with Malcolm Cowley’s works and days, you can’t really understand how American literature ascended to its rightful place among the great literatures of the world, or how it was made. -- Gerald Howard * Bookforum *Now, at last, we can see the history of twentieth-century literature, which he helped to shape, through Cowley’s own eyes. -- Adam Kirsch * City Journal *Bak’s a fair-minded and microscopically well-informed guide to the material… Cowley’s correspondence also makes it possible to get a sense of him as a fairly stylish performer in his day, a sense that’s harder to get from the stuff he wrote for publication. -- Christopher Tayler * Harper’s *Boswell of the ‘lost generation,’ literary editor of The New Republic, and champion of authors from Fitzgerald and Faulkner—whose career he resuscitated—to Kerouac and Kesey, Malcolm Cowley lived a long life and wrote a ton of letters debating, critiquing and defending the state of American literature. (Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken and Edmund Wilson were among his closest interlocutors.) The majority of the letters in this collection have never before been published… His collected letters amount to a heady portrait of American literary and intellectual life in the twentieth century. -- Rachel Arons * New Yorker blog *[Cowley] set to work almost singlehandedly reviving the stature of William Faulkner, whose name had faded and whose 17 novels and short story collections were out of print. The exact cause and effect can never be proved, but Cowley’s 1946 book The Portable Faulkner is seen as one factor leading to Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for literature… The Long Voyage gives us a much broader and clearer picture of Cowley as someone who, to use his own phrase, ‘worked at the writer’s trade’—and did so honorably. -- George Fetherling * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette *Hans Bak’s selection of Cowley’s letters will interest anyone with specialized knowledge of American literature during its 20th-century apogee… The Long Voyage [is] a fine memorial of those high days when book reviewers were not afraid of showing their intelligence and discrimination, and wrote pieces that changed the way the educated segment of nations thought. -- Richard Davenport-Hines * The Spectator *The Long Voyage is a must-own for any devotee of American literature. -- David Duhr * Texas Observer *Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) may be one of the most important (and unheralded) literary figures of the twentieth century. His critical track record for fostering genius and capturing the sensibility of the Lost Generation now receives a spotlight, thanks to savvy editor Hans Bak. * Barnes & Noble Review *As a poet, editor, literary historian and memoirist, Cowley (1898–1989) had his finger on the pulse of American literature for most of the 20th century… In this collection, editor Bak gathers approximately 500 letters culled from Cowley’s papers in Chicago’s Newberry Library, most previously unpublished. Correspondents include Kenneth Burke (a childhood friend), Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, Edmund Wilson, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, and almost anyone who was anybody in American literature… In addition to his literary activities, the letters shed light on Cowley’s politics, including his ties to communist front organizations in the 1930s, his reaction to the Moscow Trials, and his fight to preserve his reputation during the McCarthy era… This title will appeal to students of modern American literature, particularly those familiar with Cowley’s oeuvre. -- William Gargan * Library Journal *A committed, contentious life at the center of American letters comes alive in this scintillating collection. The book follows Cowley (1898–1989) from his 1920s salad days as a poet and critic in New York and Paris, immersed in fierce literary squabbles over the emerging modernist aesthetic; through his 1930s reign as the New Republic’s literary editor, when he discovered Marxism and drew (not unfounded) accusations of pushing a Stalinist line that dogged him during and after World War II; to his postwar efforts to champion old masters and newcomers, from Fitzgerald and Faulkner to Kerouac and Kesey. Cowley’s letters fizz with gossip, bawdy jokes, lurid anecdotes, witty reflections… Ably contextualized by editor Bak’s extensive biographical insertions, these missives convey the intense passions aroused by the aesthetic and political upheavals of the 20th century through the pen of one of the era’s leading literary intellectuals. * Publishers Weekly *This is a grand reunion. They are all here—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hart Crane, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and all the rest—presided over by the indefatigable and conscientious intelligence of Malcolm Cowley, the great friend and critic and chronicler of American writers and their work. These wonderful letters amount to the diary of American literature in the twentieth century. -- Lance MorrowMalcolm Cowley—who was there, at the inner ring—is an eloquent voice in helping us to know how twentieth-century American literature got made. This selection from a lifetime of letters only confirms how indispensable he was and is. -- Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961
£35.66
Harvard University Press The Letters of Robert Frost
Book SynopsisPensive, mercurial, and often funny, the private Robert Frost remains less appreciated than the public poet. The Letters of Robert Frost, the first major edition of the correspondence of this complex and subtle verbal artist, includes hundreds of unpublished letters whose literary interest is on a par with Dickinson, Lowell, and Beckett.Trade ReviewThis opening volume of a complete edition of Frost’s letters meanders from a schoolboy’s love notes (‘I have got read a composition after recess and I hate to offaly’) to the dashed valedictions of the poet at 45, fleeing a cushy job at Amherst. Generously annotated, it replaces the selected letters edited by Lawrance Thompson half a century ago… In almost every way, this new edition is a triumph of scholarly care… The notes are as thorough as most readers could wish… For all his private flaws, his tragedies large and small, American literature—and the language itself—owes a profound debt to that dark, demonic, beguiling figure, Robert Frost. -- William Logan * New York Times Book Review *It must be said that these early letters carry the burden of [Frost’s] poetry so finely as to be no embarrassment to the poetry. The book has been edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen with continuous tact and sensitivity to the likely demands of a literate reader; there are enough notes and just enough (they never strike one as intrusions pretending to be elucidations). A good index and a biographical glossary complete the authority of a book that has been printed with the care and elegance it deserves. Frost’s letters seem the inevitable expressions of a personality, so that, even when a mask is on, there is interest to be found in exactly what it reveals. -- David Bromwich * Times Literary Supplement *It can sometimes seem, from the surfeit of images of Frost in his later years, that he was born old, incapable of youth in the same way John Keats is incapable of age. The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920, edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen, part of a heroic effort by Harvard University Press to collect all Frost’s writings in a definitive edition, goes some way toward filling this imaginative deficit… These letters [show] Frost at home in metaphor, if nowhere else… His own oppositional modernism was as revolutionary as Eliot’s. -- Dan Chiasson * New Yorker *Long overdue, The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920 is deservedly getting a lot of attention. Frost is not simply a lively correspondent, he is an artist of the epistolary form, defining himself and his poetic era in these pages. The trio of editors, Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen, have done a splendid job, bringing into print all of the known letters from this period, silently correcting obvious typos, offering helpful annotations in ample headnotes and footnotes… The truly original, splenetic, aphoristic, and revisionary mind of a major poet comes into view… No reader will come away from this volume without a quickened sense of the poet’s greatness in the face of his obvious failings as a human being. His unique, almost ferocious, intelligence shines on every page of these letters. -- Jay Parini * Chronicle of Higher Education *[A] superb first volume of the Letters (two more are on the way)… The letters have less to say about the events in the poet’s life than about the life of his writing, although at several points the unspoken pressure of the life that informs the writing makes itself felt. The whole volume reveals a lot about the way Frost’s imagination works—and his desperation to make it work… Frost’s letters are vital documents not simply because they throw more light on his work, but because they throw more darkness on it. -- Matthew Bevis * London Review of Books *The collected Letters reviewed here should serve as a thorough corrective to [biographer Lawrence] Thompson’s view of Frost as a ‘monster’ and a parallel tendency to dismiss him as a poet of seemingly easy favorites like ‘The Road Not Taken.’ The letters call for a renewed evaluation of Frost as a poet who drew skillfully, and with playful subtlety, on classic poetic themes and subjects to give them a modern relevance… [An] excellent and meticulously edited volume. -- Andrew Hamilton * New Criterion *Such a joy to read… This is the first time a complete version of [Frost’s letters]—running in chronological order—has been made available. Frost saw these noble exchanges almost like an art form: one where he could deconstruct his own work, and the work of others, with precision and intellectual rigor… Through them, we get a deep insight into Frost’s views on: the mechanics of poetry; politics; the art of conversation; and the importance of structure and syntax in language… These letters give us greater insight into Frost the poet, and Frost the man, and they are a fitting testament to his exceptional work ethic as a writer. Anyone interested in the laborious process an artist must undertake to perfect his craft will read this book with awe and fascination, and as a constant source of inspiration. -- J. P. O’Malley * NPR Books *The first volume [of letters] is already enough to prove, if proof were needed, that Frost was anything but the shit-kicking fireside verse-whittier of legend. When not actually practicing his art, he thought about it so long and hard that it was a wonder he had time for anything else. His detractors would like to think that he found plenty of time to suborn editors, sabotage rival poets and practice infinite cruelties on his wife and family, but even his detractors must have noticed that he got quite a lot of meticulously crafted poems written. These letters are proof that his working methods and principles were the product of a mental preoccupation that began very early. Right from the start he had an idea of what a poem should do… Whatever else they reveal about him—perhaps he stole cars—the next two volumes of letters are bound to go on showing that he was as thoughtful and hard-working as an artist can get: further evidence that the best of modernism is a way for the classical to keep going. -- Clive James * Prospect *To remove some of the confusion surrounding Frost himself is among the editors’ aims in this first of four planned volumes of his complete letters. It continues the commendable project by Harvard University Press of bringing into print all the primary material of one of America’s most important 20th-century poets… Judging by this first volume, which takes us up to Frost at age 46 (he was born in 1874), he comes across very well: sympathetic, funny, self-deprecating, and both loyal and caring towards family and friends. -- Simon West * The Australian *Writers, in particular, are revealed through traditional correspondence. Thanks to Harvard’s undertaking, Frost’s more complete, chronological letters help correct the poet’s legacy by allowing it weight and breadth. -- Valerie Duff * Boston Globe *The Frost who emerges from his letters can come across as vain, defensive, ingratiating, stubborn… But what redeems Frost is his acute awareness of his own deficiencies of character—along with his lively sense of humor. Like his poems, his letters can be playful and teasing. Others read like drafts of lectures, in which he tries out his ideas about poetry. They take us back to an era when letter-writing was the next best thing to a conversation beside the fireplace. Frost meant his letters to do what Horace said poetry should do—please and instruct their readers. Thanks to the labors of Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen, they can now please and instruct us as well, even though we don’t write letters anymore. -- Mark Walhout * Books & Culture *The Frost of the letters is deeply literary, a theorist of prosody, a scholar of Greek and Latin… Frost’s erudite, wide-referencing letters…revel in multi-level puns and literary riddles as much as anything in Joyce…That so many perfect poems arose from what his letters testify was an imperfect life isn’t duplicity; it’s grace. -- Michael Lista * National Post *The Letters of Robert Frost [is] a projected four-volume edition of all the poet’s known correspondence that promises to offer the most rounded, complete portrait to date… The complete correspondence, scholars say, will show Frost in full, revealing a complex man who juggled uncommon fame with an uncommonly difficult private life (including four children who died before him, one a suicide), a canny self-fashioner who may have cultivated the image of a birch-swinging rustic but was as much the modernist innovator as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound… If there’s a true revelation in the first volume, the editors say, it’s the sheer intellectual firepower Frost brings even to a casual missive, the range of references that can wind playfully from George Bernard Shaw to Gothic architecture to Neolithic archaeology, all in a few hundred words. -- Jennifer Schuessler * New York Times *Robert Frost, it seems, didn’t just craft some of the best poetry in the English language, he wrote a lot of letters, too: 3,000 and counting. While many have appeared in prior collections, nothing matches the size and scope of this project. -- Mackenzie Carpenter * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette *The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920 is a staggering effort by the three editors—Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen—and Harvard University Press to present, for the first time, the entire collection of all of Frost’s preserved correspondence. What’s unique about this effort is that there’s no discernible bias made by the editors; instead, their expectation, as suggested in the preface, is that unlike prior biographies and incomplete collections of correspondence, ‘the availability of the correspondence in its entirety will present both an occasion and a means to come to know Robert Frost anew.’ [It’s] a collection so massive that casual readers may look at its fatty binding and flee in terror with memories of being forced to read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Joyce’s Ulysses or Wallace’s Infinite Jest. But those people would be mistaken; while visibly daunting, The Letters of Robert Frost should be read by everyone. -- Shyam K. Sriram * PopMatters *Overall, the letters show Frost to be a mature artist, a good friend, and a caring husband and father… The introduction, chronology, index of correspondents, and helpful contextual notes make these letters both accessible and enjoyable for anyone interested in Frost. How could it be otherwise for a poet who always wrote for the many and the few? -- Micah Mattix * Weekly Standard *Frost shows himself to be playful, sly, caring and supremely serious about his art in his letters to poets Amy Lowell, Louis Untermeyer, Edward Arlington Robinson and Harriet Monroe; publishers Alfred Knopf and Henry Holt; former students; his daughter; and many friends… Judiciously annotated with a biographical glossary of correspondents and an indispensable chronology, this volume may well inspire a Frost renaissance. * Kirkus Reviews *Not the rustic sage, but the savvy, ambitious, cosmopolitan poet emerges from this first volume of Frost’s lively, shrewd letters… The editors’ exhaustive, well-organized notes and appendices, explicating every obscure figure and stray allusion, make the collection a must for scholars; but Frost’s witty, urbane style make the letters an engaging browse for ordinary readers, too. * Publishers Weekly *After decades in which Robert Frost’s letters were unavailable, we are given the first of several volumes, taking him up through 1920. Especially valuable are letters from 1913–14 in which Frost staked out his poetic aims and principles. The editorial job is painstakingly, indeed brilliantly, performed. -- William H. Pritchard, Amherst College
£35.66
Harvard University Press The Program Era
Book SynopsisMcGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.Trade ReviewMcGurl’s book is not a history of creative-writing programs. It’s a history of twentieth-century fiction, in which the work of American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Bharati Mukherjee is read as reflections of, and reflections on, the educational system through which so many writers now pass… The Program Era is an impressive and imaginative book. -- Louis Menand * New Yorker *McGurl’s study rises above the conventional thinking to draw some surprising conclusions about how the proliferation of creative writing courses has shaped American literature for over half a century… The Program Era is an intelligent, persuasive and thought-provoking book; by shifting the focus away from individual writers towards the institutions that nurtured (or inhibited) them, McGurl breaks new critical ground. -- Patrick Langley * Times Literary Supplement *[A] magisterial book… [It’s a] magnificent and unique theoretical construction [McGurl] has achieved in The Program Era. -- Fredric Jameson * London Review of Books *The Program Era juxtaposes an unlikely cast of writers between its covers: Flannery O‘Connor, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, George Saunders, and on. McGurl positions this diverse crew squarely in the context of the remarkable growth of creative writing programs in the U.S. after World War Two. McGurl‘s reinterpretation of these writers, whom scholars have so often read separately from one another, promises to unsettle all the standard ways literary historians carve up the postwar world of letters. McGurl has a rare talent for writing literary criticism that smuggles its theoretical concepts into your brain under the cover of lucid and readable and unpretentious prose. Academic literary critics, perhaps by necessity, spend lots of time becoming specialists in their patch of intellectual turf and speaking only to each other in an ever-subdividing glossolalia of theory. If we’re lucky, McGurl‘s book will inaugurate for us a new genre of literary history that, though wholly intelligible to the general reader, doesn’t pull its punches or water down the complexity of its vision. -- Lee Konstantinou * The Believer *What has the movement of postwar writing into the university done to our literature?… The obvious nature of this question only places the decades-long lack of a proper answer in higher relief. It is proportionately exhilarating to find, in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a brilliant and comprehensive mind developing one at last. McGurl trains his gaze on the university writing programs and some of the masterful novelists they have incubated. But he makes his most compelling arguments at the level of the writer’s practical place in the academy, examining the distorting (and enabling) effects of university discipline on individual artists, and considering the wider role of ‘creative writing’ within a chain of notions of creativity (lasting from high school to the service-economy workplace) that inculcate skills for late-capitalist life… McGurl gives the best account I have seen of [Flannery] O’Connor’s cruel maximization of ‘ironic distance’; in her third-person narration, she aspires, as he puts it, almost ‘to the unimaginable condition of fourth person narration—narration from a higher dimension.’ His pages on Raymond Carver and ’80s minimalism, a mode that ‘came to be seen, oversimplifying the case drastically, as the ‘house style’ of the creative writing program,’ are similarly unrivaled… McGurl’s clear-sighted exposure of the hidden institutional background of postwar literary production is one of the first reliable signs that we will finally see that era thoroughly anatomized in a new generation of scholarship. -- Mark Greif * Bookforum *[A] fascinating and (at times) beautifully argued book… [It] introduced me to many forgotten or unfairly neglected authors whose books I will seek out, as well as provocatively repositioning unlikely authors such as Raymond Carver as academic intellectuals. -- Matt Thorne * Catholic Herald *McGurl performs a complicated series of critical and interpretive maneuvers in The Program Era. He describes in detail how the institutionalization of creative writing ‘has transformed the conditions under which American literature is produced’ and how that has ‘converted the Pound Era into the Program Era.’ -- Jennifer Howard * Chronicle of Higher Education *A remarkably generous, unusually inclusive, and irresistibly buoyant work of literary criticism and scholarship. -- Brian Lennon * Electronic Book Review *[There’s] much food for thought in what [McGurl] has to say about literary trends. Most, interesting, though, is his sensitive exploration of the interplay between individual writers and the Creative Writing programs… Opinionated and lively… He delivers a cornucopia of exciting new ideas and insights in a work which will be indispensable reading for teachers and students of creative writing, and for anyone interested in modern fiction… [A] complex, energetic and fascinating book. -- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne * Irish Times *McGurl does have some smart things to say about the evolution of this creative writing movement—he documents it as part of the rise of progressive education in general—and about the many paradoxes involved when universities get in the business of trying to structure, codify and reward artistic endeavor. -- Charles McGrath * New York Times *If you find postwar American fiction interesting, you may wish to explore the academic system that begat it: a story well told by The Program Era. -- David Gewanter * Times Higher Education Supplement *It is a cliché to say that a book so changes your view of a particular historical period or problem that you never see it the same old way again. But this is the kind of book that warrants such praise. McGurl has brought deep learning, sweeping ambition, and stylistic brio together here to produce a whole new story of postwar American fiction. There is nothing else like it on the shelves of contemporary literary criticism. -- Jim English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural ValueThe Program Era is a brilliant book of great ambition and originality. It will be rightly regarded as a landmark work and will shape the critical understanding of postwar American literature and culture for many years to come. -- Sean McCann, author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential GovernmentThe institutionalized teaching of creative writing thrives in America. In Mark McGurl’s wide-ranging, audacious study, the academy comes to define postwar fiction in surprising ways. You won’t think of most of your favorite authors quite the same way again. -- Ed Park, author of Personal DaysTable of Contents* Preface * Introduction: Halls of Mirror * Part 1: "Write What You Know"/"Show Don't Tell" (1890--1960) *1. Autobardolatry: Modernist Fiction, Progressive Education, "Creative Writing" *2. Understanding Iowa: The Religion of Institutionalization * Part 2: "Find Your Voice" (1960--1975) *3. The Social Construction of Unreality: Creative Writing in the Open System *4. Our Phonocentrism: Finding the Voice of the (Minority) Storyteller * Part 3: Creative Writing at Large (1975--2008) *5. The Hidden Injuries of Craft: Mass Higher Education and Lower-Middle-Class Modernism *6. Art and Alma Mater: The Family, the Nation, and the Primal Scene of Instruction *7. Miniature America; or, The Program in Transplanetary Perspective * Afterword: Systematic Excellence * Notes * Index
£20.66
Harvard University, Asia Center The Real Modern
Book SynopsisThe Real Modern examines three Korean authors of the 1930s—Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun—whose works critique competing modes of literary representation in the period of Japanese colonial rule. A re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context, it sheds new light on the relationship between political discourse and aesthetics.Trade ReviewThe Real Modern will have a profound impact not only on the ways in which we understand global modernisms, but on our understanding of colonial cultural production in general and 1930s colonial Korea in particular. Meticulously researched and developing a series of highly nuanced, original analyses of three major 1930s modernist Korean writers, The Real Modern [is] a most welcome addition to existing studies on Korean, Asian, and Western modernisms. Hanscom’s sophisticated approach to theories of language in 1930s colonial Korea offers, for the first time in English-language scholarship, a much-needed situating of the richness and complexity of colonial Korean modernism within the broader crisis of representation confronted not just by the modernists but, in varying degrees, by all colonial Korean writers and intellectuals in this period. [This is] a path-breaking [book that] completely revises our thinking about modern Korean literary history and the relations among politics, aesthetics, and modernism in colonial Korea. -- Theodore Hughes, Columbia University
£30.56
Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies On the Wonders of Land and Sea
Book SynopsisOn the Wonders of Land and Sea is a comparative study of travel writers in the eastern Islamic world from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Situating texts in their socio-historical contexts, the essays study works by male and female Muslim and Parsi/Zoroastrian travelers in the Hijaz, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Europe.
£16.10
Harvard University, Asia Center Fictions Family
Book SynopsisEllen Widmer examines the writings of a literary family whose works embodied shifting attitudes toward women in late Qing China. She illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the preceding period, the synchronic interplay of genres during the family's lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with other regions.
£35.66
Harvard University Press Charles Olson
Book SynopsisDescribed as one of the most influential American literary figures of the mid-20th century and a near-prophet of the Black Mountain School, Olson was highly regarded as both a theorist and a poet. Here is an examination of Olson's understanding of poetry that provides the framework needed for understanding his work.Trade ReviewBrilliant… One puts it down with the conviction that it is also one of the most remarkable books on any post-war poet… Von Hallberg’s contention that Olson’s poems ‘cannot be adequately appreciated within terms of recent poetic theory’, and his subsequent exploration of alternative theory, powerfully remove our preconceptions of what a poem ought to be and so enable us to see with a new clarity the nature of Olson’s achievement. * Times Literary Supplement *This book is careful, useful and provocative, and intelligently sees Olson in the literary tradition of Pound, Williams, and the Objectivists, and the politico-cultural context of New Deal liberalism. * The Georgia Review *Von Hallberg is especially good on Whitehead's influence on Olson and the relationship of Olson's poetics to that of the ‘objectivists’…His study of Olson's relation to Pound and Williams is definitive. Moreover, even though he is interested mainly in Olson's theories, his readings of difficult key poems are often little short of brilliant. * American Literature *Charles Olson: is he a cranky, self-obsessed, and messianic theorist? Or is he indeed a particularly charismatic writer who has synthesized the several poetic impulses of a generation? These are the components of the Olson ‘question’—a question to which Mr. Von Hallberg commits himself with energy and erudition. His book is deeply engaged with previously untouched materials and broadly informed. -- John Malcom BrinninRobert von Hallberg's is the first reasoned effort to say what kind of poet Olson was: always the first thing we need to know about an American innovator. No intending voyager in the seas and shoals of Maximus should omit this book from his kit. -- Hugh KennerTable of Contents* Introduction * Secretly, the Praises: The Cultural Politics of a New Dealer * Toward a Poetics for the Long Poem: Olson's Relation to Pound and Williams * A Common World: Olson, Whitehead, and the Objectivists * Spaceman--Mapping a Theme of Olson * Deaf to the Lure of Personality: Varieties of Anti--Poetic * From Precept to Paradigm: One Conclusion * Abbreviations * Notes * Index
£55.21
Harvard University Press On Modern Poetry
Book SynopsisGuido Mazzoni tells the story of poetry’s revolution in the modern age. The chief transformation was the rise of the lyric as it is now conceived: a genre in which a first-person speaker talks about itself. Mazzoni argues that modern poetry embodies the age of the individual and has wrought profound changes in the expectations of readers.Trade ReviewA valuable text…It is, at its core, a rich literature review circling what Mazzoni goes to great lengths to illustrate is the slipperiness of its subject. Modern poetry becomes no clearer after the author’s rigorous analysis, but as a continued step in the inscrutable analysis of poetry, On Modern Poetry offers a necessary and well-rehearsed step forward. -- Anthony DeGenaro * Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature *In this sweeping comparative study, Guido Mazzoni shows how poetry’s fate in the post-Romantic world reflects the individualism of modern Western society: atomized by small differences, narcissistic, ‘free.’ His sociological reading of modern poetry goes well beyond the conventional approach of matching poems and poets with local context. It discusses an entire corpus against the largest historical backdrop. Revelatory and often troubling, On Modern Poetry is criticism of the highest order. -- David Quint, author of Epic and EmpireRanging widely across European and American verse traditions, Guido Mazzoni maps the space of a modern poetry fundamentally determined by the Romantic revolution of self-expression. He shrewdly illuminates the ways in which modern poetry departs from earlier poetic conventions, shaped indelibly by the paradoxes of modern life. -- Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the LyricThis is a book that many people will want to read, and a book that contemporary scholars should read. Tackling the uneven historical development of ‘Western’ ideas of lyric, On Modern Poetry is engaged in exactly the conversation those of us interested in the field of poetics need to have right now. I, for one, am grateful for Mazzoni’s many contributions. -- Virginia Jackson, author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric ReadingThis richly erudite book isn’t shy about its provocative thesis. Modern poetry, Mazzoni argues, diverges from both earlier poetic forms and the novel by virtue of its relentless drive toward subjectivism, autobiographism, and egocentrism. Charting the gaudy triumph of lyric individuation, he ranges impressively across two hundred years of canonical poetry in English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global Age
£31.46
Harvard University Press Introspection and Contemporary Poetry
Book SynopsisIn this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experimentfrom the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montagelike methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W. S. Merwin to the radical plainness of Frank Bidart. Williamson examines these and other poets from a psychological perspective, giving an especially striking reading of Sylvia Plath.Table of Contents* Introduction *"I Am That I Am": The Ethics and Aesthetics of Personal Poetry * Real and Numinous Selves: A Reading of Plath * Language Against Itself: The Middle Generation of Contemporary Poets *"Surrealism" and the Absent Self * The Diffracting Diamond: Ashbery, Romanticism, and Anti-Art * The Future of Personal Poetry * Notes * Credits * Index
£46.71
Harvard University, Asia Center The Chinese Political Novel
Book SynopsisFocusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Catherine Vance Yeh traces the rise of the political novel to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s. Yeh explores in detail the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes, among them the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global.
£42.46
Harvard University, Asia Center Recontextualizing Texts
Book SynopsisOffering the first systematic examination of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume Soseki's Kokoro and The Three-Cornered World; Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain; Mori Ogai's Wild Geese; and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Quicksand.
£31.46
Harvard University Press The Nonconformists
Book SynopsisThe Cold War was an era of surprising connections between American and Czech literary cultures. Major writers met behind the Iron Curtain, while others smuggled, translated, and adapted works from the other side. Brian K. Goodman explores the artistic and political consequences, arguing that the movement of literature inspired new forms of dissent.Trade ReviewA stimulating book…brilliantly shows that while American literature and music offered Czechs a dream of improvisatory freedom, Czech literature offered Americans an example of what, variously, they might do with it as if it mattered. -- Kathryn Murphy * Times Literary Supplement *Goodman brilliantly reveals how US–Czech literary encounters produced, largely unintentionally, the figure of the ‘dissident writer,’ which eventually became the symbol of the human rights movement that brought down the Iron Curtain. He reminds us that the Cold War was a period of lively, if often tortured, cultural exchange that cannot be reduced to the terms of a Cold War binary. -- Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Free WorldEye-opening and unforgettable. Goodman is a wonderful storyteller, and this is a story never told before. Featuring a vibrant continuum of literature, music, and theater linking Czechoslovakia and the United States, this East-West fusion sheds light on Franz Kafka, Václav Havel, and Josef Škvorecký no less than Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller. -- Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak PlanetIlluminating and full of insights. With lucid and often elegant prose, Goodman masterfully tackles the continuities between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War era. Among its many virtues, The Nonconformists moves us away from a US-centric literary history and toward one that attends carefully to the cross-cultural networks that extended across the Iron Curtain. -- James Dawes, author of The Novel of Human RightsBeautifully written and imaginatively conceived, The Nonconformists brilliantly captures the ambiguities of moral witness in the era of Cold War literary dissent. Goodman takes us on a grand literary tour showing how the transnational encounters between such towering figures as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Václav Havel, and Milan Kundera were foundational for the emergence of a new global human rights order in the late twentieth century. -- Mark Bradley, author of The World ReimaginedGroundbreaking and highly original. Goodman’s meticulous archival research and his capacious familiarity with the latest research in Czech and American studies is impressive. Even more so is his ability to stitch together what might initially seem to be adjacent case studies into a deep fabric of transnational intellectual history. -- Michelle Woods, author of Kafka Translated
£32.26
Harvard University Press When Novels Were Books
Book SynopsisThe novel was born religious, alongside Protestant texts produced in the same format by the same publishers. Novels borrowed features of these texts but over the years distinguished themselves, becoming the genre we know today. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this history, showing how the physical object of the book shaped the stories it contained.Trade ReviewGranting publishers equal billing with authors and paying as much attention to buying habits as to reading practices, [Stein] coordinates the history of the novel with ‘the development of the book as a media platform.’…While Watt celebrated a genre bursting free from the stale conventions of epic and romance, Stein casts the novel itself as the fixed point against which modern devotional genres began to emerge. -- Leah Price * New York Review of Books *Engaging and thought-provoking. -- Hal Jensen * Times Literary Supplement *Crisp, refreshing…A clarifying, pleasurable read, one that offers a model for how attention to a period’s larger media ecology can unstick adherence to anachronistic categories. -- Annika Mann * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *Compact and erudite…This is clearly a pathfinding book, transatlantic in scope and clear in its focus. It usefully reframes the novel as one print-based mechanism in the emergence of modern selfhood…Readers, therefore, will welcome this careful, innovative study as an important reminder that the novel’s rise, including even its most cherished formal features, did not happen merely to meet the demand of a new middle-class readership but was the effect also of calculated transformations in the incipient book publishing industry. -- Sean Silver * Modern Language Quarterly *[An] erudite work…His analysis of the interconnectedness of pious writings and fiction is thoughtful and astute, and illuminates tensions in both Defoe’s and Richardson’s work…Impressive for both the extent of its research and the lucidity of its prose. -- Hal Gladfelder * Review of English Studies *An impressive attempt to bring together book history and literary history…A refreshing, succinct, and striking new account of how and why the novel achieved literary hegemony over the course of the eighteenth century…[An] innovative work. -- David Womersley * Studies in English Literature *Jordan Alexander Stein has recovered a print world in which secular and religious texts were bought, sold, and read interchangeably with one another on both sides of the Atlantic, and the novel’s formal features developed in tandem with the material affordances of the book. The result is an entirely new account of the novel: no longer the harbinger of secular modernity, the novel is, Stein shows us, the residue of what religious writings left behind. -- Amanda Claybaugh, author of The Novel of PurposeIn this original and erudite study, Jordan Alexander Stein brings fresh insight to an enduring subject in literary studies—the rise of the novel. Redirecting our attention from old modes of genre history to new modes of media history, he argues that eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans learned to read novelistically—and to read for character—within a distinct media ecology. Stein’s reconstruction of that learning process will transform how we assess the relations among fiction, print culture, and practices of reading. -- Deidre Lynch, author of The Economy of CharacterBy revealing how a modern genre emerged from changes in format, not just form, Jordan Alexander Stein restores early novels like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela to a common shelf alongside other books—conversion narratives, spiritual biographies, and the confessions of penitent sinners—that shared the same material dimensions. What mattered most about early English novels, Stein shows us, was not that they were secular or fictional; it was that they were books telling stories about someone’s vulnerability. The crucial figure in the rise of the novel—the imagined person who came to be known as a ‘character’—was no rational, self-possessing hero but a divided, broken self, in danger and beset by doubt. When Novels Were Books is a major contribution to book history and, even better, a gift to our thinking about what books mean and why we care about them. -- Caleb Smith, author of The Oracle and the CurseTakes aim at literary common sense, asking scholars to look again and aslant at novels and the stories they tell about them…Filled with revisionist insights…An alacritous, perceptive study that presses hard on shibboleths. It elicits surprise and nurtures new forms of wonder. -- Sonia Hazard * Studies in the Novel *[A] contribution to the historiography of the rise of the novel and a challenge to the enterprise as a whole. -- Julianne Werlin * Novel *Stein’s fundamental project is to revise the ‘rise of the novel’ narrative by examining print’s role as both a technology and a business, while attending to its powerful social dimensions. He offers a professedly revisionary account that challenges ideologically driven versions of the story, including those tying the novel to the emergence of secular modernity. -- Sandra M. Gustafson * American Literary History *
£32.36
Princeton University Press The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin
Book SynopsisAmong Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader: Bakhtin''s foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years, yet hardly altered in his lifetime. With the collapse of the Soviet system, a truer sense of Bakhtin''s contribution may now be judged in the context of its origins and its contemporary Russian reclamation. A foremost Bakhtin authority, Caryl Emerson mines extensive Russian sources to explore Bakhtin''s reception in Russia, from his earliest publication in 1929 until his death, and his posthumous rediscovery. After a reception-history of Bakhtin''s published work, she examines the role of his ideas in the post-Stalinist revivTrade ReviewOne of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1998 "Caryl Emerson is arguably the most knowledgeable and gifted Bakhtin Scholar in the United States... The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin provides us with fascinating glimpses of his life and his character with a history of his intellectual career in Russia and in the West, and with a serious discussion of the problematic areas of his thought."--The New Republic "It is impossible to do more here than give a very fragmentary notion of the wealth of material contained in Emerson's book, which she presents not only with penetration but also with a responsive awareness of what it reveals about the present state of Russian culture."--London Review of Books "One of the three or four most important books on [Bakhtin] now available in English."--The NationTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction East Meets West in the Ex-USSR PART ONE: XXX: BAKHTIN STUDIES, BAKHTINISTICS, BAKHTINOLOGY Chapter One The Russians Reclaim Bakhtin, 1975 to the Jubilee The Three Worlds of Mikhail Bakhtin The Post-Stalinist Revival of the Russian Literary Profession The 1990s: The Russian Bakhtin Industry Takes Stock Chapter Two Retrospective: Domestic Reception during Bakhtin's Life Dostoevsky, I (1929) Dostoevsky, II (1963) Rabelais and Folk Culture The 1975 Anthology: Essays on the Novel Posthumous: The First Manuscripts and Final Essays PART TWO: LITERATURE FADES, PHILOSOPHY MOVES TO THE FORE (REWORKING THREE PROBLEMATIC AREAS) Chapter Three Polyphony, Dialogism, Dostoevsky Can Polyphony Exist? If So, Does It Apply? Unsympathetic Case Studies and Suspicious Close Readings "The Torments of Dialogue": In Defense of Bakhtin Chapter Four Carnival: Open-ended Bodies and Anachronistic Histories Pro: Carnival as Incarnation, Eucharist, Sacral Myth Contra: Demonization, Stalinization Neither For nor Against: Carnival as Analytic Device Chapter Five XXX: "Outsideness" as the Ethical Dimension of Art (Bakhtin and the Aesthetic Moment) Belatedly Finding a Place for the Very Early Bakhtin Outsideness: What It Is and Is Not The Problem of Form The Logic of Aesthetic Form and "Consummation as a Type of Dying" Afterword One Year Later: The Prospects for Bakhtin's XXXHOHayka [inonauka], or "Science in Some Other Way" Index
£38.25
Princeton University Press Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion
Book SynopsisExplores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. This book analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion.Trade Review"Leslie Bow's book is a smart, timely, and provocative analysis of the relations between rhetorical positions and material realities, themes of identity and difference, and national politics as they are treated in Asian American women's literature. Refreshingly, this work does not romanticize agency (personal and political) but rather explores how women writers and critics negotiate agency among contradictory identity positions and discourses. This is a unique book that will have a broad-base appeal to academics, intellectuals, and activists."—Wendy S. Hesford, Indiana University"Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion is a challenging, informed, and thoughtful project that should be of great interest to scholars and teachers of literature, Asian American studies, and feminist studies. It fuses a set of compelling theoretical questions about national and gendered identities and affiliations with excellent examples, careful readings of narrative, and crucial background on literary publication and dissemination."—Josephine Lee, University of MinnesotaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix 1. Introduction: Theorizing Gendered Constructions of Ethnic and National Collectivity 3 2. To Enjoy Being a Girl: Sexuality and Partial Citizenship 37 3. The Triumph of the Prefeminist Chinese Woman?: Incorporating Racial Difference Through Feminist Narrative 70 4. Third World Testimony in the Era of Globalization: Le Ly Hayslip's Bad (Girl) Karma and the Art of Neutrality 115 5. The Gendered Subject of Human Rights: Domestic Infidelity in Irrawaddy Tango and The Scent of the Gods 137 Afterword: Multipying Loyalties 168 Notes 179 Works Cited 197 Index 209
£31.50
Princeton University Press Experimental Nations
Book SynopsisTracing the move from the anticolonial, nationalist, and arabist literature of the early years to the relative cosmopolitanism and diversity of Maghrebi francophone literature today, this title draws on contemporary literary and postcolonial theory to deterritorialize its study.Trade ReviewHonorable Mention for the 2003 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone StudiesTable of ContentsTRANSLATOR'S NOTE vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION: Is an "Experimental" Nation Possible? 1 1: Nations of Writers 11 1.Cultural "Terrain" 11 2.New Geolinguistics 14 2: Cities of Writers 27 1.The Imaginary of the Medina in Francophone Literature from the Maghreb 27 2.Algiers/Paris, or the City as a "Site of Memory ": Merzak Allouache's Salut Cousin 38 3: Nabile Fares, or How to Become "Minoritarian" 47 4: Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout's L'invention du desert )67 5: (Hi)stories of Expatriation: Virtual Countries 83 1.Assia Djebar's La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua: Introduction to the Cinematic Fragment 83 6: Multilingualism and National "Traits" 99 1."Translating or Whiting Out Language": On Khatibi's Amour Bilingue 99 2.On Khatibi's Notion of the "Professional Traveler" 124 3.Writing Metafiction: On Khatibi's Le livre du sang 135 7: The Cartography of the Nation: Mouloud Feraoun's Le fils du pauvre Revisited 149 8: By Way of a Conclusion 159 APPENDIX: Le Depays: On Chris Marker's Lettre de Sibeie (1957)165 NOTES 171 INDEX NOMINUM 205 INDEX REUM 209
£31.50
Princeton University Press F.B. Eyes
Book SynopsisFew institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau's intimateTrade ReviewWinner of a 2016 American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015 A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of 2015 Shortlisted for the 2016 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association "[An] immensely important story about the black authors that we thought we knew, from the 'notorious negro revolutionary' Claude McKay to the Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez... [A] welcome model for seeing state interference in culture as a two-way street."--Los Angeles Review of Books "F. B. Eyes is pitched at both academic and general readers. It makes an unexpected addition to studies of twentieth-century African American literature and succeeds in presenting J. Edgar Hoover as a more complex figure than James Baldwin's telling description of him: as "history's most highly paid (and most utterly useless) voyeur."--Douglas Field, Times Literary Supplement "[A] bold, provocative study... Maxwell's passion for the subject spills onto every page of his detailed, persuasive documentation that 'the FBI [was] an institution tightly knit (not consensually) to African-American literature.'"--Publishers Weekly (a Publishers Weekly pick of the week) "[S]tartling... Much of what Maxwell has discovered ... paints a sobering picture of state-sanctioned repression and harassment over decades. It's a tribute to the strength of the panoply of FBI-targeted writers, intellectuals and leaders that they, for the most part, toughed it out and remain with us today as a fundamental part of the fabric of American history and letters."--Repps Hudson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "[T]his well-researched volume illustrates the paranoia and self-censorship that altered the course of African American literature for decades as a result of the bureau's surveillance. This scholarly work will appeal to academic readers with a particular interest in African American literature or the FBI."--Library Journal "[T]he book's fresh perspective on the FBI's fitful tango with both its targets and its own intentions gives twenty-first-century artists potentially more daring variations, in the NSA age, on the arch replies of Wright, Ellison, Hughes, et al., to the spies. But the prospect can never neutralize the queasy, infuriating sense of so much officially sanctioned energy-squandering on generations of writers who wanted little more than to be taken more seriously than their ancestors... The lurid and revealing testimony collected in F.B. Eyes calls to mind the sage counsel offered by John le Carre's fictitious traitor in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Secret services, he explains, are 'the only real measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of the subconscious.'"--Gene Seymour, Bookforum "F.B. Eyes is a startling look at how racism has influenced the highest levels of authority."--John T. Slania, Book Page "[R]iveting... F.B. Eyes is scintillating scholarship; for those invested in the literary and extra-literary lives of African American authors it holds all the intrigue of a pulp spy novel."--Adam Bradley, Chronicle Review "[Maxwell] brilliantly and chillingly examines how for 50 years Hoover and the FBI monitored the literary production of African American writers... The volume reads like a detective thriller as it uncovers what Maxwell calls the 'ghostreading' practices of the FBI."--Choice "Professor Maxwell's book and ... website are a treasure trove for readers and researchers alike, especially those with an interest in political history and literary history."--Robin Lindley, History News Network "Wickedly amusing... Genius."--Alan M. Wald, Modern Philology "Solid and often eye-opening."--John Woodford, Against the Current "Maxwell does an excellent job in thoroughly exploring FBI investigations of black writers and this unique writer-critic interplay... F.B. Eyes does well in illuminating the interplay between bureau surveillance and literary production."--Jared Leighton, American Studies "Indispensable to American historians and literary critics alike."--Kenneth O'Reilly, Journal of American History "F.B. Eyes exhibits exhaustive research without exhausting its subject. It is the rare combination of the complex argument stated clearly. Maxwell's reader-friendly structure is a welcome contribution to the genre of academic writing... Paves the way for new readings of works we think we already know by providing a new understanding of the complex interplay between twentieth-century African American writers and their readers."--Tamara Slankard, Modern Fiction StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Introduction 1 The FBI against and for African American Literature 1 The Files and the FOIA 7 Five Theses and the Way Forward 15 Part One/Thesis One: The Birth of the Bureau, Coupled with the Birth of J. Edgar Hoover, Ensured the FBI's Attention to African American Literature 25 The Bureau before Hoover 29 Hoover before the Bureau 35 Bureau of Letters: Lit.-Cop Federalism, the Hoover Raids, and the Harlem Renaissance 42 Part Two/Thesis Two: The FBI's Aggressive Filing and Long Study of African American Writers Was Tightly Bound to the Agency's Successful Evolution under Hoover 59 Flatfoot Montage: The Genre of the Counterliterary FBI File 63 The Counterliterary State and the Charismatic Bureaucracy: Trimming the First Amendment, Fencing the Harlem Renaissance 68 Persons to Racial Conditions: Literary G-Men and FBI Counterliterature from the New Deal to the Second World War 76 Afro-Loyalty and Custodial Detention: Files of World War II 85 Total Literary Awareness: Files of the Cold War 94 COINTELPRO Minstrelsy: Files of Black Power 107 Part Three/Thesis Three: The FBI Is Perhaps the Most Dedicated and Influential Forgotten Critic of African American Literature 127 Reading Like a CIA Agent 131 Reading Like an FBI Agent 141 Critics behind the Bureau Curtain: Meet Robert Adger Bowen and William C. Sullivan 150 Ask Dr. Hoover: Model Citizen Criticism and the FBI's Interpretive Oracle 165 Part Four/Thesis Four: The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Century Black Atlantic, Both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows 175 The State in the Nation-State; the State of the Transnational Turn 180 The State of Black Transnationalism; the State in the Black Atlantic 186 Checking Diasporan ID: Hostile Translation and the Passport Office 195 State-Sponsored Transnationalism: The Stop Notice and the Travel Bureau 205 Jazz Ambassadors versus Literary Escapees 212 Part Five/Thesis Five: Consciousness of FBI Ghostreading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature 215 Reading Ghostreading in the Harlem Renaissance: New Negro Journalists and Claude McKay 225 Invisible G-Men En Route to the Cold War: George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison 232 Mysteries and Antifiles of Black Paris: Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes 243 Black Arts Antifiles and the "Hoover Poem": John A. Williams, James Baldwin, Sam Greenlee, Melvin Van Peebles, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez 259 Bureau Writing after Hoover: Dudley Randall, Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor 269 Appendix: FOIA Requests for FBI Files on African American Authors Active from 1919 to 1972 277 Notes 285 Works Cited 315 Index 343
£29.75
Princeton University Press The Age of Auden
Book SynopsisW H Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work - it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book deals with Auden's influence on American poetry. It offers an account of Auden's dramatic impact on the younger American poets, from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath.Trade ReviewWinner of the 2012 SAMLA Studies Award, South Atlantic Modern Language Association One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011 "Auden's productivity and out-flung array of styles complicate Mr. Wasley's chosen task of tracking influences--and render it all the more gratifying when he unfolds some unexpected linkage. He is surely right when pointing out that no other poet of our time has assembled so disparate a circle of admirers. Auden's followers range from James Merrill to Allen Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht to Adrienne Rich, Robert Hayden to Maxine Kumin, Joseph Brodsky to John Ashbery... Though Auden's influence is powerful and broad, The Age of Auden helpfully delineates its borders. The battle of literary reputations takes place in a dusty arena, and W. H. Auden will surely be one of those titanic figures that loom through whatever dim clouds arise. He will remain unignorable."--Brad Leithauser, Wall Street Journal "This substantial study focuses on his life and work after his emigration to America just before World War II, and his profound influence on younger US poets... As a work of old-style literary criticism based on close textual analysis, this is a book for students, and for lovers of Auden and post-war American poetry."--The Age "A poetry anthology is elevated to greatness when, in offering the work of artists at their best moments, it reveals clear affinities between the works. Wasley's effort is that scholarly rarity: a critical examination that functions as a great anthology."--Choice "The reality of Auden's influence is undeniable, and Wasley's retracing is both nuanced and revealing."--James Gifford, Years Work in English StudiesTable of ContentsList of Abbreviations ix Preface xiii Prologue: Auden in "Atlantis" 1 Part I Chapter 1: A Way of Happening: < Auden's American Presence 33 Part II Chapter 2: Father of Forms: Merrill, Auden, and a Fable of Influence 77 Chapter 3: The Gay Apprentice: Ashbery, Auden, and a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Critic 109 Chapter 4: The Old Sources: Rich, Auden, and Making Something Happen 145 Epilogue: He Became His Admirers: Saying Goodbye to Auden 175 Notes 209 Index 243
£38.25
Princeton University Press Imagining Virginia Woolf
Book SynopsisAnswers the question, 'how does one read an author', by undertaking an experiment in critical biography. This book provides an original way of reading, one that captures with variety and subtlety the personality that exists only in Woolf's works and in the minds of her readers.Trade Review"DiBatistta (Fast-Talking Dames) pieces together a portrait of Virginia Woolf as experienced by readers... For general fans of literary criticism or of Woolf's writing in particular, DiBattista's experiment will offer an intriguing perspective on Woolf's relationship to her art and her audience."--Publishers Weekly "Like Anne Fernald's Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, DiBattista's study extends understanding not only of Woolf's craft and intellectual life but also of reading practices in general."--Choice "What interests Maria DiBattista is not who Woolf actually was--the flesh and blood woman--but the multiple personalities that emanate from her books. Reading a writer familiar to us is, in many ways, no different from seeing people we know, she says. In both cases, the person we think we know is a composite of the various facets of them we have glimpsed."--Fiona Capp, The Age "[W]hen people ask me about biographies about Woolf, I will recommend this one. Certainly, it cannot replace the more traditional biographies DiBattista acknowledges in her introduction, but it is an important supplement to them. My own understanding of the traditional biographies is more nuanced, a result of reading DiBattista's book."--Molly Youngkin, English Literature in Transition "[T]his short book is full of insights... I recommend it to you; it is a pleasure to read."--Stuart N. Clarke, Virginia Woolf Bulletin "[T]he more vivid impressions generated by DiBattista's study: namely, the reader's sensation of having been shown 'Virginia's Room' in a new light, as well as the realization that Woolf's 'room of one's own' is now a multitude of rooms, imaginative spaces where her readers have the freedom to hang looking-glasses in whatever odd corners they may choose."--Rosemary Joyce, Tulsa Studies in Women's LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix THE DEMON OF READING Chapter 1. The Figment of the Author 3 Chapter 2. Personalities 14 WOOLF'S PERSONALITIES Chapter 3. The Sibyl of the Drawing Room 41 Chapter 4. The Author 64 Chapter 5. The Critic 92 Chapter 6. The World Writer 119 Chapter 7. The Adventurer 140 EPILOGUE Chapter 8. Anon Once More 169 Notes 173 Index 191
£25.20
Princeton University Press Last Looks Last Books
Book SynopsisExamines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. This title focuses on the books: "The Rock", "Ariel", "Day by Day", "Geography III" and "A Scattering of Salts".Trade ReviewOne of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011 "Close reading of poems, especially for nonacademic audiences, is hard to find. This makes Helen Vendler's Last Looks, Last Books an attractive proposition. Vendler, long a tastemaker equally respected inside and outside the academy, wants to find out how her subjects 'do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit.'"--Daisy Fried, New York Times Book Review "[A] book that needs to be read and heeded."--Peter Brooks, New York Review of Books "Helen Vendler is our great biographer of the poem... Her lucid, plain-spoken narratives make the poem seem as engrossing as a 'life of the poet' tale."--David Gewanter, Times Higher Education "Vendler convincingly demonstrates how this liminal moment demanded that each poet render a new style in his or her verse. By illuminating the varied and fluid poetic equilibrium between life and death in her precise, nuanced readings, Vendler shapes the reader's own last look at a major vein of American poetry."--Choice "[A] sumptuous banquet."--John Cunningham, Rain Taxi Review of Books "Vendler's insightful critical study is essential for lovers of these American poets... Vendler makes an especially important case for Lowell ... and thus provides readers a new means of appreciating these late poems."--Stephan Delbos, Prague Post "Last Looks, Last Books is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the five poets' aesthetics and can thus be useful for both scholars and students as a source of new insights on these oeuvres, as well as for those interested in the interaction of death and artistic creation."--Boglarka Kiss, Hungarian Journal of English and American StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Chapter 1: Introduction: Last Looks, Last Books 1 Chapter 2: Looking at the Worst: Wallace Stevens's Th e Rock 25 Chapter 3: Th e Contest of Melodrama and Restraint: Sylvia Plath's Ariel 47 Chapter 4: Images of Subtraction: Robert Lowell's Day by Day 70 Chapter 5: Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III 94 Chapter 6: Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts 117 Notes 143
£22.50
Princeton University Press The Indignant Generation
Book SynopsisThe first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era.Trade ReviewWinner of the 2012 Book Award, College Language Association Winner of the 2012 Literary Award for Nonfiction, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. Winner of the 2011 PROSE Award in Literature, Association of American Publishers Finalist for the 2011 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction, The Hurston/Wright Foundation Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, University of Memphis Winner of the 2010 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association "[Jackson's] encyclopedic book offers a chronological, old-fashioned history of literature, covering a period desperately in need of thorough-going research and detail, and presents a deeply documented, dense but thoroughly readable account... Jackson's detail may offer more than the casual sightseer seeks, but scholars will rely upon and mine his monumental work and the prodigious research upon which it is based. It should guide the way African-American and American literature is studied."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A meticulously researched, detailed account of African American literature and its critics from the end of the Harlem Renaissance to the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement... A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in African American studies."--William Gargan, Library Journal "[This] exhaustive compilation--covering from the well-known writers to the little recognized--traverses the journeys of the artists and their links in the hubs of Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C."--Maudlyne Ihejirika, Chicago Sun-Times "Ambitious... Rich with photos and well written, the book merits praise for the deserved attention it brings to the rise of African American criticism and intellectualism and to the many important people who figured in the rise of better-known novelists."--Choice "Jackson's formulation of the indignant generation is a prodigious contribution to African American literary history."--Andrew M. Fearnley, Journal of American Studies "The Indignant Generation is a must-read for scholars of American culture on both sides of the Atlantic... Jackson's book is invaluable for its historiographic, hermeneutic, and literary merits."--Sieglinde Lemke, American Studies "African-American writers had plenty to be indignant about during the middle decades of the 20th century... Lawrence P. Jackson surveys the era with clarity and perception. Focusing on the literary hubs of Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., the book captures the complexities of the period, the great hope and skepticism its black writers engendered."--Steve Bogira, Chicago Reader "Lawrence Jackson's monumental and epic study, The Indignant Generation, provides a masterful overview of yet another key period in African American literary history... At every level, this book of encyclopedic proportions ... is well researched and well written in an elegant and superb style."--Riche Richardson, Southern Literary JournalTable of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Irredeemable Promise: The Bittersweet Career of J. Saunders Redding 1 Chapter One: Three Swinging Sisters: Harlem, Howard, and the South Side (1934-1936) 15 Chapter Two: The Black Avant-Garde between Left and Right (1935-1939) 42 Chapter Three: A New Kind of Challenge (1936-1939) 68 Chapter Four: The Triumph of Chicago Realism (1938-1940) 93 Chapter Five: Bigger Thomas among the Liberals (1940-1943) 123 Chapter Six: Friends in Need of Negroes: Bucklin Moon and Thomas Sancton (1942-1945) 149 Chapter Seven: "Beating That Boy": White Writers, Critics, Editors, and the Liberal Arts Coalition (1944-1949) 178 Chapter Eight: Afroliberals and the End of World War II (1945-1946) 196 Chapter Nine: Black Futilitarianists and the Welcome Table (1945-1947) 219 Chapter Ten: The Peril of Something New, or, the Decline of Social Realism (1947-1948) 258 Chapter Eleven: The Negro New Liberal Critic and the Big Little Magazine (1948-1949) 275 Chapter Twelve: The Communist Dream of African American Modernism (1947-1950) 297 Chapter Thirteen: The Insinuating Poetics of the Mainstream (1949-1950) 323 Chapter Fourteen: Still Looking for Freedom (1949-1954) 342 Chapter Fifteen: The Expatriation: The Price of Brown and the New Bohemians (1952-1955) 379 Chapter Sixteen: Liberal Friends No More: The Rubble of White Patronage (1956-1958) 411 Chapter Seventeen: The End of the Negro Writer (1955-1960) 444 Chapter Eighteen: The Reformation of Black New Liberals (1958-1960) 470 Chapter Nineteen: Prometheus Unbound (1958-1960) 485 Notes 511 Index 559
£22.50
Princeton University Press On Empson
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A brilliant introduction to one of the most original and beguiling intellects of the 20th century."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post "An elegant and concise study of the great British literary critic William Empson (1906-1984)... If we come away with one thing from On Empson, it is the reminder, in the age of STEM courses, of just how much poetry matters--matters not on ethical or political grounds but simply for its own sake, for its exposure of the possibilities of the language that we use every waking moment of every day without taking into account its astonishing possibilities for knowledge, power, and, especially, pleasure."--Marjorie Perloff, Weekly Standard "Part of the dexterity of Wood's own critical idiom lies in using the resources of the colloquial register to say just enough, leaving us to complete and digest the thought. His stylish brevity avoids the dogmatising implicit in all attempts to turn an observation into a theory ... Wood even manages to make Milton's God (1961), Empson's grumpiest, most obsessive book, seem attractive ... An appropriately subtle yet spirited introduction to the seductive power of a particular form of literary criticism."--Stefan Collini, The GuardianTable of Contents1 Empson's Intentions 1 2 The Strangeness of the World 26 3 Large Dreams 55 4 The Other Case 82 5 All in Flight 113 6 Sibylline Leaves 143 7 The Smoke of Hell 171 Acknowledgments 201 Abbreviations 203 Bibliography 207
£19.00
Princeton University Press On Conan Doyle
Book SynopsisA passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars--the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider's accTrade ReviewWinner of the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, Best Critical/Biographical Category, Mystery Writers of America Finalist for the 2012 Marfield Prize, The National Award for Arts Writing, Arts Club of Washington One of The Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Joyce Carol Oates "[A] brief, elegant reflection... With thoughtful care, Dirda explains how Conan Doyle 'rose above the conventions of his time' in many of his writings. Dirda shines a helpful light on the adventurers Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard, while a selection of 'weird' fiction causes him to declare that those stories 'can stand up to the best work of such masters of the uncanny as Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James.' Dirda circles back to Holmes, directing our attention to overlooked aspects of the stories--the elusive presence of Professor Moriarty, for example, or Holmes' brother Mycroft. He also treats us to a delightful, intimate glimpse of the magical power of books in his own early life. What book lover hasn't had at least one cherished experience of reading? Dirda's own involves his loving preparations, as a youth, to read The Hound of the Baskervilles on an appropriately stormy day when the rest of his family was out of the house... And there's much of that same feeling in Dirda's inviting book, which demonstrates why for so many years Dirda has been such an insightful guide to literatures past and present. (Note to director Guy Ritchie: If you're still looking for more Conan Doyle fare after 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows' opens next month, you might read Dirda's book for ideas.)"--Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times "Charming... As any Conan Doyle aficionado knows, the adventures of Holmes comprise a mere fraction of the oeuvre ... and one of Dirda's chief concerns is to give the rest of it appropriate attention... Dirda is also enlightening on the author's influences and literary heirs."--Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement "While casual readers will associate Conan Doyle exclusively with 221B Baker Street, Dirda makes a strong case for investigating Doyle's extensive bibliography, which includes adventure stories (The Lost World), historical novels (Micah Clarke), supernatural stories (The Horror of the Heights), and books on spiritualism. But Holmes is still the main attraction, and the fascinating dynamics of the Irregulars are as rich as any of Conan Doyle's fictions. The Irregulars grudgingly accept, but do not encourage, the views of 'Doyleans,' who consider the Holmes stories as blips written by the author of The Lost World. Dirda's lifelong enthusiasm and keen critical skills underscore the timeless quality of the brilliant detective and his multifaceted creator."--Publishers Weekly "Michael Dirda's book is at once a capsule overview of Doyle's character and writing career and an affectionate tribute to boyhood reading--along with Doyle's works, Dirda discusses Sax Rohmer, Lord Dunsany, H. Rider Haggard, and others. It is a treat to come across Dirda's citation of Jacques Futrelle's Thinking Machine stories, including The Problem of Cell 13, the ultimate locked-door mystery (which I hadn't thought about since I was eleven years old). Dirda provides a fond, glancing survey of the books he treasures... Dirda, who loves all of Doyle's work, slights the distinction between the more mature and the more childlike side of Doyle. But his book is irresistible in its eager appetite for the delights of Doyle's hearty, perfectly handled storytelling. Dirda reminds us that a part of every reader is always twelve years old, and that at least some of the books we devoured at twelve will still nourish us splendidly half a century later. Dirda also provides an affecting brief account of Doyle's life. Doyle was a loyal, genial, and generous man, and he had many talents."--David Mikics, New Republic "Dirda is at his best in his sensitive appreciation of Doyle's style, direct, fluent, and surprisingly flexible as he moves from genre to genre, and in his account of manly civic inspiration as the value Doyle aimed above all to inculcate in his writing ... an endearing, well-balanced introduction to a writer the Strand Magazine called 'the greatest natural storyteller of his age.'"--Kirkus Reviews "The most charming thing about perennial Washington Post literary guru Michael Dirda is his near-on phobic aversion to saying anything other than that a book is wonderful and a pleasure... If we were all to write about reading as Dirda does, if we taught children to write from joy rather than to form arguments, then the world would have many more serious readers and far better books... You will enjoy this book. I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it not because it was frivolous and not because Conan Doyle is wonderful--in fact, it convinced me he;s not--but precisely because Dirda's restraint triggered in me a vigorous critical spirit. That such a feeling also pleases is elementary."--J.C. Hallman, Bookforum "Given the excellence of this introduction, it is interesting to see how two new publications match up to the master."--Andrew Lycett, Telegraph "One of the winning things about Michael Dirda's writing is his appreciation for his fellow appreciators: Christopher Morley, Burton Rascoe, Bernard De Voto, Vincent Starrett and their equivalents in England; all of them were essentially enthusiasts whose job it was to inform the public when good books showed up. There was once a kind of Department of Belles-Lettres that this magazine and others helped staff. The late John Updike, by the end of his life, was its de facto chair. Dirda, with more than thirty years of highly readable literary criticism to his name, may well be a contender. In remembering and reflecting upon his own first excitements as a reader, Dirda is infectious."--Larry McMurtry, Harper's Magazine "This small book (210 pages) is an absolute delight! Michael Dirda has an encyclopedic knowledge of Sherlock Holmes. Better, he writes in a breezy, informative and entertaining manner that holds the reader's attention as surely as one of Conan Doyle's many stories... Whether you are a confirmed Sherlockian or one who has just come recently to the canon, there is something here for you. The writing is superb. The memoirist style fits the story perfectly. It is a book that can be read and re-read and never lose its freshness."--John M. Formy-Duval, About.com "On Conan Doyle is at its best when Dirda, a card-carrying member of the Baker Street Irregulars, lets us in on the great 'spoof scholarship' game of filling in the gaps in the narratives of Watson/Doyle in the canon's 56 stories and four novels... But for now, 'on a dark and chilly night,' he prefers to turn out some lights, find a bottle of Orange Crush, and reread The Hound of the Baskervilles. Why make this choice? It is 'elementary, my dear Watson.'"--Glenn C. Altschuler, Oregonian "Michael Dirda's dissections of how Conan Doyle achieves such satisfying results in almost every story is the chief selling point of his fine little biography, along with capturing his own boyhood love of Conan Doyle."--Newsday "Michael Dirda writes in detail about the Grand Game in On Conan Doyle, his engaging little book about the author and his greatest creation... Dirda makes a sincere case for those other books, but his heart is with Sherlock. He writes affectionately about the enormous Holmes fan community, including an insider's account of the Baker Street Irregulars... And he writes most movingly about his first experience with Sherlock. He describes in vivid detail how, as a fifth-grader, he saw The Hound of the Baskervilles in a paperback catalog, waited for weeks for its delivery--and then put off reading about the 'enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen' until he was alone in the house on a dark and stormy night. Even as a boy, Dirda knew how to read a book."--Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg Times "Dirda has written a rollicking, erudite, and terrifically beguiling little book called On Conan Doyle, which is part of Princeton University Press' 'Writers on Writers' series... Reading experiences don't get much more captivating than this; nor does literary criticism."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR "On Conan Doyle also delves into the strange world of Sherlock Holmes 'scholarship.' Dirda spends a generous amount of time discussing the inner workings of exclusive Holmes societies like the Baker Street Irregulars (of which he is a member; On Conan Doyle is dedicated to them), sketching some of the wilder obsessions of Sherlock scholars, and evoking the romance of searching for antique and obscure books in dusty bookstores around the world... Hopefully this book will remind readers that Conan Doyle was, as Dirda writes, 'much more than just the literary agent for those denizens of 221B Baker Street.' On Conan Doyle is certainly tantalizing in its descriptions of Sir Arthur's other stories and novels, but it also inevitably reminds us of the magic of the razor-sharp, eccentric detective and his devoted friend. When winter sets in, the nights grow long, and a yearning for holiday mystery and adventure takes hold, there is nowhere better to turn than 221B Baker Street."--Bookslut "On Conan Doyle is at once a biography, an appreciation of the Holmes stories, an insightful overview of the other works written by Doyle, and a billet-doux to the Baker Street Irregulars. It is also a memoir of a young man's reading experience... Dirda's first encounter with Holmes was the beginning of a great romance. He recaptures in this book the life-changing ecstasy that reading can be for a child. On Conan Doyle is a celebration of that experience and an invitation to turn again to the world of gaslight and hansom cabs where 'the game is afoot.'"--Christian Science Monitor "Dirda has subtitled this book The Whole Art of Storytelling, with good reason. Starting from Arthur Conan Doyle's life and work--which included, in addition to the Sherlock Holmes stories, wonderful works of historical fiction and adventure--Dirda weaves a memoir of boyhood, a peek into the world of the 'Baker Street Irregulars,' and a meditation on the power of fiction. The game's afoot!"--Barnes and Noble Review "Michael Dirda remembers vividly his first encounter with Sherlock Holmes. At 10, having bought The Hound of the Baskervilles from his grade-school book club, he held on to the book until he had an evening alone ... then gathered his stores: 'two or three candy bars, a box of Cracker Jack, and a cold bottle of Orange Crush.' Thus fortified, the young Dirda wrapped himself in a blanket and submitted to each thrilling, delicious page. In this warm, lively book he repays some of the debt, honoring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's enormous output (21 novels, more than 150 short stories), sturdy prose and, most significantly, the enduring figure of the hyperlogical, eccentric detective Holmes."--Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe "[W]e can be grateful that in this short book, Michael has shared his immense affection for Sherlock Holmes and his creator. What comes through best in the book is his love for tales of adventure, or, as Vincent Starrett calls them, stories 'in which things happen, and then keep on happening.' Dirda also makes a convincing argument that too many readers have let Doyle disappear into his creations. More importantly, it allows those not lucky enough to know Michael Dirda to spend a few hours in his stimulating and fascinating company."--Leslie S. Klinger, Los Angeles Review of Books "Dirda may have won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and he may be a book reviewer for The Washington Post but first he is an enthusiast. This is a lively and passionate book about the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Of course it covers the Sherlock Holmes stories and the wonderful sci-fi tale The Lost World but it reaches far beyond those obvious literary highlights to look, with insight and passion, at Conan Doyle's vast and eclectic oeuvre. Such is Dirda's enthusiasm that it is quite impossible not to be fired up. I immediately ordered The Complete Stories of Sherlock and searched for Through the Magic Door."--Sydney Morning Herald "[A] brief but immensely entertaining book."--Weekly Standard "Short meditation on both the merits of Doyle beyond Sherlock Holmes and why fiction, and our responses to it, are and should be deeply strange. I very much liked it."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution "Dirda is less didactic in this volume, but no less willing to offer judgments informed by long affection. His book is quite short, a lovely size for reading in odd moments or, perhaps, by the fire with a glass of something delicious by your side."--Alexandra Mullen, New Criterion "[This book] deserves a place on the bookshelves of all who recognise Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the great fiction writers of his age... [S]trongly recommended."--Guy Marriott, Sherlock Holmes JournalTable of ContentsPreface "You Know My Methods, Watson" ix "A Hound It Was" 1 "Elementary" 9 "A Most Dark and Sinister Business" 16 "The Lost World" 32 "Twilight Tales" 50 "Steel True, Blade Straight" 74 "I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere" 98 "It Is the Unofficial Force" 126 "I Play the Game for the Game's Own Sake" 140 "A Case for Langdale Pike" 149 "A Series of Tales" 169 "Good Night, Mister Sherlock Holmes" 188 Appendix "Education Never Ends, Watson" 203 Acknowledgments 207 Biographical Note 210
£999.99
Princeton University Press The First Book
Book Synopsis"We have many poets of the First Book," the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, The First Book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a uniqueTrade Review"A fascinating story of poetic debuts. With nuanced understanding as well as clear-eyed realism, Jesse Zuba traces the self-fashioning that goes into the making of careers, allowing poets to strike a delicate balance between institutional demands and personal aspirations."—Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University"The First Book combines social theory, cultural and publishing history, and close attention to individual poems to argue that notions of the poet's career, or the poet's profession, have shaped poems, books, and poetic oeuvres in the American twentieth century in ways that prior critics have not seen. Zuba's claims are true, new, and important."—Stephen Burt, Harvard University"Exploring the professionalization of poetic culture over the last hundred years, The First Book represents a confluence of often mutually exclusive kinds of excellence: Zuba is at once an adept close reader of poems, a scrupulous literary historian, a curator of cultures popular and unpopular, and synthesizer of sophisticated critical thinking. Even more rarely, Zuba writes with a quietly stylistic panache that makes The First Book an uncommon pleasure to read."—James Longenbach, University of RochesterTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction: The History of the Poetic Career 1 1 Apprentices to Chance Event: First Books of the 1920s 21 2 "Poets of the First Book, Writers of Promise": Beginning in the Era of the First-Book Prize 68 3 "Everything Has a Schedule": John Ashbery's Some Trees 104 4 From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Gluck's Born-Again Professionalism 128 Conclusion: Making Introductions 154 Notes 169 Bibliography 191 Index 203
£40.50
Princeton University Press On Henry Miller
Book Synopsis"An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller--and to learn how his anarchist sensibility can help us escape "the air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world"--Amazon.com.Trade Review"In On Henry Miller . . . John Burnside shifts the focus from Henry Miller’s unsavoury legacy to the politics of his aesthetics, seeking to draw our attention to 'that most misunderstood of figures, the philosophical, earth-loving pagan anarchist.'"---Merve Fejzula, Times Literary Supplement"Burnside’s provocative study makes a strong case for Henry Miller as a romantic anarchist comparable, on the basis of the evidence provided here, to Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman." * Publishers Weekly *"On Henry Miller is a considered, moving account of how this flawed but much mis-read writer thought, and of what he still offers, philosophically and politically."---Guy Stevenson, Literary Review"By using his own commendable self as an example, Burnside opens up new avenues of appreciation for us all."---Dennis Zhou, The Spectator"Praise for John Burnside: "A master of language.""---Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books"Praise for John Burnside: "Quite simply, he is a wonderful writer.""---Eileen Battersby, Irish Times"Praise for John Burnside: "A brilliant poet, a brilliant memoirist, and a brilliant novelist.""---Christina Patterson, The Independent"Praise for John Burnside: "A writer of manifest and manifold talent.""---Adam O’Riordan, Sunday Telegraph
£17.09
Princeton University Press Reaping Something New African American
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[F]ascinating and original... Hack's skill and sensitivity as a literary critic and the thoroughness of his research make Reaping Something New one of the most compelling works of trans-Atlantic literary scholarship to appear in recent years."--Joseph Rezek, Chronicle of Higher Education "As Hack observes, the relationship between Victorian literature and African American literature has been neglected, and this book fills that gap."--ChoiceTable of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction The African Americanization of Victorian Literature 1 1 Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance 23 2 (Re-) Racializing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" 45 3 Affiliating with George Eliot 76 4 Racial Mixing and Textual Remixing: Charles Chesnutt 102 5 Cultural Transmission and Transgression: Pauline Hopkins 135 6 The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois 176 Afterword After Du Bois 205 Notes 213 Bibliography 259 Index 273
£31.50
Princeton University Press Early Auden Later Auden
Book SynopsisTrade Review"It's a wealth of intelligence, knowledge and insight that Mendelson ... brings to this study... With his array of interpretative tools, he solves for the first time the notorious obscurities of Auden's earliest work."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times "Remarkable ... Presents the poet's life and art so vividly as to illuminate the major works and bring out neglected ones."--Grace Schulman, Nation "Rich and suggestive in its generalizations, resourceful in its scholarship, and precise in its readings of Auden's work."--Paul Fussell, New Republic "Mendelson's brilliant anatomy of Auden's career as a poet and magus in America is an intellectual and artistic tour de force."--Economist "[An] astonishing critical study... An absorbing life of the poet's mind ... Exciting and provocative."--Walter Clemons, Newsweek "[Mendelson's] close readings are always meticulous and insightful, and he draws detailed connections between what Auden read and what he wrote... [S]hould be kept on the shelf right next to the Collected Poems."--Adam Kirsch, New York Observer "Could well change the map of modern poetry... A model of condensation, [it] proceeds through the huge, often neglected body of work with grace and wit."--Tom D'Evelyn, Boston Book ReviewTable of ContentsPreface to the One-Volume Edition ix Early Auden Introduction to Early Auden 3 Part One: The Border And The Group (August 1927-May 1933) I The Exiled Word 15 II The Watershed 36 III Family Ghosts 53 IV The Evolutionary Defile 69 V Trickster and Tribe 86 VI Private Places 115 VII Looking for Land 132 Part Two: The Two Worlds (June 1933-January 1939) VIII Lucky This Point 151 IX The Great Divide 167 X The Insufficient Touch 196 XI Their Indifferent Redeemer 220 XII Parables of Action: 1 236 XIII Parables of Action: 2 257 XIV History to the Defeated 277 XV From This Island 297 Epilogue 325 Later Auden Introduction to Later Auden 329 Part One: Vision And After (1939-1947) I Demon or Gift 339 II The Vision Enters 363 III Against the Devourer 389 IV Investigating the Crime 418 V It without Image 448 VI Imaginary Saints 471 VII The Absconded Vision 495 VIII The Murderous Birth 522 IX Asking for Neighborhood 557 Part Two: The Flesh We Are (1948-1957) X The Murmurs of the Body 589 XI Waiting for a City 615 XII The Great Quell 638 XIII Number or Face 664 XIV The Altering Storm 690 Part Three: Territorial (1958-1973) XV Poet of the Encirclement 715 XVI The Air Changes 735 XVII This Time Final 755 XVIII The Concluding Carnival 783 Postscript His Secret Life 809 Notes and Index Reference Notes 821 Index 877
£999.99
Princeton University Press Leaks Hacks and Scandals
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Shortlisted for the ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Arts of the Present""A bold effort to redefine Arab literary and cultural studies in the contexts of social media and the digital information age . . . . . provocative and ultimately sublime."---Joel Gordon, Critical Inquiry
£78.20
Princeton University Press Leaks Hacks and Scandals
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Shortlisted for the ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Arts of the Present""A bold effort to redefine Arab literary and cultural studies in the contexts of social media and the digital information age . . . . . provocative and ultimately sublime."---Joel Gordon, Critical Inquiry
£22.50
Princeton University Press City of Beginnings
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University""City of Beginnings offers a plethora of sophisticated and accessible close readings of modernist poetry. Creswell weaves them deftly into the cold war context and the shifting political and cultural struggles of the day. . . . Creswell’s well-researched book will be a yardstick for years to come of how tocombine literary criticism and intellectual history of the Arab world."---Jens Hanssen, Journal of Arabic Literature"Beirut has been overlooked in classic histories of modernism, yet Creswell . . . has remedied this with eloquence and erudition in his study of how a group of exiles, iconoclasts, and émigrés—al-Khal, Adonis, and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj foremost among them—radically transformed Arabic poetry."---Anna Della Subin, New York Review of Books"A pleasure to read, both for the lucidity of its prose as for the tacit but evident sympathy of imagination that enlivens it throughout. Creswell’s translations are exact but nuanced. . . . Creswell succeeds admirably in his initial aim. He has set Modernist Beirut firmly on the map."---Eric Ormsby, Etudes Asiatiques"In this extraordinary and original work, Robyn Creswell combines poetry criticism and intellectual history to produce one of the finest accounts of Arab modernism."---Qussay al-Attabi, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Robyn Creswell’s new book on Arabic Modernism, City of Beginnings, is half a Cold War thriller starring poets . . . [and] half . . . applied theory. Creswell’s book is worth your time . . . it creates a space for Arabic Modernism in avant-garde poetics departments in English speaking countries."---Devin Kin, Fence Digital"[Robyn] Creswell’s City of Beginnings is a story of [an] irreverent, incandescent Beirut, of a coterie of young Arabophone writers, cosmopolitan iconoclasts who made [a] Beirut of multiple identities home. . . . To the student of the Middle East, Arabic literature, literary modernism, or Near Eastern intellectual history, this book is a learned, nuanced, and deeply searching guide."---Franck Salameh, Middle East Quarterly"The best parts of Creswell’s book are when he just describes what’s at stake for Adonis and the other modernists as writers. Creswell knows the underreported Arabic literary history cold and the book’s explainer sections transfix." * Fence *"Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings is a threshold and a beginning in the study of Arabic poetry, heralding a creative and erudite approach to the achievements and shortcomings of Arabic modernism." * Arab Studies Journal *"To the student of the Middle East, Arabic literature, literary modernism, or Near Eastern intellectual history, this book is a learned, nuanced, and deeply searching guide." * Middle East Quarterly *
£40.50
Princeton University Press The Passion Projects
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Shortlisted for the MSA First Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association""A wondrous ode to feminist research and biography as a tool and method for revisiting the past. . . . The book will become a key pedagogical resource for the study of Feminist Modernist Studies due to its scope as well as the myriad of primary sources and the bibliography that it provides. Besides this, it is an easy-to-read and thought-provoking work that will appeal to a diverse audience."---Cristina Díaz Pérez, LSE Review of Books"Micir’s queer counterhistory of modernism writes into the story not only authors and artists, but the collectors, curators, editors, archivists, and biographers who create and hold space for the work they value. Micir’s book itself will appeal to anyone interested in modernism and feminist and queer critical methods—and to anyone looking for a compelling and often moving story. . . . a must-read for all researchers sensitive to the framing of the historical narratives they compose."---Carolyn Dever, Public Books"The Passion Projects is a feminist manifesto disguised as a monograph, advocating for a revaluation of feminized labor, a more inclusive understanding of what counts as scholarship, and a renewed approach to collaboration. Micir’s focus on the editing, collecting, curating, and archiving of modernism reveals literary carework and intellectual housekeeping as instrumental to the continued expansion of new modernist studies."---Erica Gene Delsandro, Feminist Modernist Studies"From the unpublished to fragments to curated and collected materials preserved for a future reader, Micir traces beautifully—at times heartbreakingly—the stories of what these incomplete projects tell us about queer women’s lives and desires and their artistic commitments. . . . Micir illuminates partnerships and projects that haven’t received enough attention."---Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Women: A Cultural Review"Micir exposes in minute detail the difficult balancing act between the personal and political when it comes to unravelling the self-made archive."---Eilish Mulholland, Modernist Review"If the intimacy between lovers and friends is central to The Passion Projects, no less so is that between the scholar or other reader of later times and the author who lived years before. . . . One of the glories of Micir’s book is its attention to the intergenerational connections that, arising in such circumstances, help to realize intensely held hopes for queer futurity."---Douglas Mao, Modernism/modernity
£29.75
Princeton University Press The Man I Pretend to Be
Book SynopsisTranslated here in a bilingual edition is Gozzano's best and best-known collection of poems, The Colloquies, along with a selection of his other poems. Also included is an introductory essay by Eugenio Montale, the Italian poet and winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the lTrade ReviewWinner of the 1997 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize for the Translation of Modern Italian PoetryTable of Contents*FrontMatter, pg. i*Contents, pg. vii*Preface, pg. ix*Acknowledgments, pg. xv*Introductory Essay by Eugenio Montale, pg. xvii*I. Youthful Indiscretions / Il giovenile errore, pg. 3*II. On the Threshold / Alle soglie, pg. 41*III. The Veteran / Il reduce, pg. 123*from THE ROAD TO SHELTER (1907) / da LA VIA DEL RIFUGIO, pg. 169*UNCOLLECTED POEMS / POESIE SPARSE, pg. 205*Notes to the Poems, pg. 245*Selected Bibliography, pg. 251
£37.80
Princeton University Press Alexandria Still
Book SynopsisFew places have shaped as many sensibilities as the exotic, mythical city of Alexandria. Jane Lagoudis Pinchin's gracefully written book describes the profound influence exerted by the spirit of Alexandria and the Alexandrian poet, C. P Cavafy, on F,. M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library usesTable of Contents*Frontmatter, pg. i*Table of Contents, pg. vii*Acknowledgments, pg. ix*List of Abbreviations, pg. xi*CHAPTER 1. THE CITY, pg. 1*CHAPTER 2. CAVAFY'S CAPITAL OF MEMORY, pg. 34*CHAPTER 3. THE BRIDGE: E. M. FORSTER IN ALEXANDRIA, pg. 82*CHAPTER 4. DURRELL AND A MASTERPIECE OF SIZE, pg. 159*APPENDIX A. CAVAFY AND HIS ENGLISH TRANSLATORS, pg. 209*APPENDIX B. THE CHRONOLOGY OF A PASSAGE TO INDIA, pg. 223*SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 227*INDEX, pg. 239
£31.50
Princeton University Press Figure of Faust in Valery and Goethe
Book SynopsisThis book interprets Mon Faust and explores the differences between Valery's and Goethe's treatments of the Faust figure. The author shows by close analysis how Valery opposes a Cartesian, anti-Pascalian Faust to Goethe's romantically flawed hero. The title of the project conceived by Valery's Faust, The Mind's Body-part autobiography, part metaphyTable of Contents*Frontmatter, pg. i*Contents, pg. vii*Preface. IN DEFENSE OF A PARTI PRIS, pg. ix*Abbreviations, pg. xv*One. LUST, LA DEMOISELLE DE CRISTAL, pg. 1*Two. LE SOLITAIRE, OU LES MALEDICTIONS D'UNIVERS. ACT ONE, pg. 39*Three. LES FEES, pg. 94*Four. POETIC SEMI-REALITIES: SELFPERCEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION IN GOETHE'S AND VALERY'S FAUST, pg. 152*SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 247*Index, pg. 251
£36.00
Princeton University Press The Poetic World of Boris Pasternak
Book SynopsisThe dramatic political struggle of Boris Pasternak and the continued success of his novel. Dr. Zhivago, have often taken center stage in discussions of this writer. Olga Raevsky Hughes chooses instead to focus on the aesthetics underlying Pasternak's snuggles and successes to explore the ways in which his views of art and the artist were applied inTable of Contents*Frontmatter, pg. i*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix*CHRONOLOGY, pg. xi*TABLE OF CONTENTS, pg. xv*INTRODUCTION, pg. 1*I. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF POETRY, pg. 7*II. ART AND REALITY, pg. 42*III. TIME AND ETERNITY, pg. 78*IV. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF A POET, pg. 128*CONCLUSION, pg. 168*BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 175*INDEX, pg. 185
£27.00
