Search results for ""author john t. shawcross""
Pennsylvania State University Press Intentionality and the New Traditionalism: Some Liminal Means to Literary Revisionism
Intentionality and the New Traditionalism argues that both the text and the author of a literary work are important to a cogent and full reading of that work. The author creates the text, which then leads the reader into a reading of it through its various elements or literary devices that have been consciously employed by the author. The author's presence is thus continuous in the work and important to it. Such elements and literary devices create what can be called an "intentionality" of the text and become limina, or thresholds, through which the reader can enter the world of the text. The limina direct the reader toward one means of understanding the work. Shawcross discusses and demonstrates the significance of specific types of limina, including genre, structure, and numerological relationships within the work, the use of Latin, allusion and historical/biographical context, onomastics, the performing self, and intertextuality. Some of these, such as genre, have been dismissed in recent critical stances, and others have been little considered. Shawcross first explores genre, looking at poetic genres and subgenres, the difference between genre and mode, the generic question of tragedy/comedy, the concept of lyric, and the significance of sequence. He then illustrates the importance of other limina to a variety of authors and periods. He also offers new readings of particular works and suggests possible revised readings of other works of similar nature. Shawcross draws primarily on poetry and works of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, but drama and the novel as well as the nineteenth century are also included.
£29.95
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes
Ambiguity, present in all aspects of the poem, is seen as central to Milton's authorial intentions. Shawcross proposes that the many ambiguities surrounding Milton's dramatic poem Samson Agonistes are intentional: the actual words, the dates of composition, the genre, and the characters - particularly Samson and Dalila but including Manoa, Harapha, and the Chorus. Ambiguity also lies in Milton's presentation of political issues both philosophical and practical, his treatment of gender concepts, the constant questioning of the reader, and the poem's effect. Discussing all these elements, Shawcross follows with a detailed reading of the text which argues that it remains purposefully ambiguous, reflecting Milton's own recognition of the uncertainty of the content, and suggesting that Milton himself would question some of the nice 'solutions' that modern scholarship has offered in the last two decades. JOHN SHAWCROSS is Professor of English, Emeritus, University of Kentucky.
£70.00
Pennsylvania State University Press “Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books”: Essays on the 1667 First Edition
Appearing in tandem with the publication of an authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, these insightful essays by ten Miltonists establish the significant differences between the text, context, and effect of the poem’s first edition (1667) and those of the now-standard second edition. In bringing together essays by various hands, editors Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross seek to map what may be termed a new frontier in Milton studies, one that acknowledges the importance of what Milton himself considered to be the work of a lifetime when he offered Paradise Lost to readers in 1667.While the scholars writing here do not claim that the first edition of Milton’s epic should be viewed as supplanting the second and later editions, they do seek to demonstrate the importance of coming to terms with the original ten-book edition both as a work with its own identity and value and as a source of fundamental insight into the nature of the editions that would follow in its wake. Paradise Lost cannot be fully understood without an awareness of the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the forces through which it made its first and subsequent appearances in the world at large.
£29.95
Pennsylvania State University Press “Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books”: An Authoritative Text of the 1667 First Edition
This authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost transcribes the original 10-book poem, records its textual problems and numerous differences from the second edition, and discusses in critical commentary the importance of these issues.
£33.95
