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New American Dramatists 1960–1990 (Modern Dramatists)
by Ruby CohnIn the second edition of her New American Dramatists Ruby Cohn carries her panoramic survey to 1990. Not only does she augment the existing chapters on Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway, but she adds new material on women playwrights as well as Asian-American dramatists. With the emergence of David Mamet and Sam Shepard as major playwrights, she contrasts them for mutual illumination.
Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature)
by Wayne K ChapmanThis book is the first to make extensive use of unpublished manuscripts to show how a period of English literature affected W.B.Yeats's development as a poet. Besides presenting a factual account of his acquaintance with English Renaissance writers based on evidence from his library and elsewhere, the study examines his response to numerous minor figures and several major ones - including Spenser, Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton.
Reading Joyce’s Ulysses
by Daniel R. SchwarzReissued to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses' includes a new preface taking account of scholarly and critical development since its original publication. It shows how the now important issues of post-colonialism, feminism, Irish Studies and urban culture are addressed within the text, as well as a discussion of how the book can be used by both beginners and seasoned readers. Schwarz not only presents a powerful and original reading of Joyce's great epic novel, but discusses it in terms of a dialogue between recent and more traditional theory. Focusing on what he calls the odyssean reader, Schwarz demonstrates how the experience of reading Ulysses involves responding both to traditional plot and character, and to the novel's stylistic experiments.
Recycling Shakespeare (The Dramatic Medium)
by Charles MarowitzRecycling Shakespeare is an irreverent assault on the Shakespearian establishment which presumes to have squatter's rights on the 'collected works' which it treats as holy writ. Marowitz, himself both a critic and director with successful productions of nearly a dozen Shakespeare plays behind him, shows how Shakespeare, like so many of his own earlier sources, can be reused, restructured and recycled for contemporary consumption.
The Portrait of a Lady/The Turn of the Screw (The Critics Debate)
by David KirbyIn this study, the author summarizes the reactions of the leading schools of criticism to these works and offers his own consideration of them, arguing that the novels are read most beneficially within the context of genre studies and that each is a melodrama.
Literature And Imperialism (Insights Ser.)
by Robert GiddingsThis collection of essays is concerned with the impact of the experience of empire upon the literary imagination as far as Ireland, Africa and India are concerned. These essays examine the manner in which British imperial experience has been expressed in literature. The contributors discuss Conrad, Forster, Ballantyne, Rushdie, Lawrence of Arabia, Anglo-Irish writers, and such popular classics as 'The Four Feathers'. There is a select bibliography to encourage further reading.
Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928-39
by A. Kemp-WelchStalin's fascination with writers was fully reciprocated as the many 'Odes to Stalin' show. During the 1970s a hugely elaborated system was established for the regulation of belles-lettres based on institutions, ideas and individuals. This original study, ten years in preparation, is based on extensive access to Soviet archives. Much new evidence has been uncovered about the inner workings of cultural policy in the Stalin period and documents by Stalin himself are published for the first time.
Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750–1990
by Patrick ParrinderThe second edition of this lively and trenchant one-volume history of literary criticism in English includes new assessments of the work of T.S.Eliot, I.A.Richards, F.R.Leavis, the American New Critics, Northrop Frye, Roman Jakobson, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Virginia Woolf and others. Authors and Authority traces the connections between critical debate and the changing forms of literary culture from the Neoclassical period to the latest manifestations of literary theory, feminist criticism and cultural studies. From reviews of the first edition: '...a most important study.' British Book News'...valuable and suggestive.' Poetry Nation Review '...consistently balanced, judicious and acute - massively erudite without ever being overpowering.' M.Fagg, Times Educational Supplement.
The English Line: Poetry of the Unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin
by John Powell WardThis book is a survey of a main strand in English poetry over the last two hundred years. This strand is characterized by ordinary everyday language, a meditative and somewhat melancholic tone, and settings in landscape and nature. Some of the main poets treated are Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Frost, Edward Thomas, Housman, Macneice and Larkin. Some of the most important questions that arise are: why these features go together; why the line is essentially male; how far recent theoretical criticism is applicable to such poetry; and why some of the important poets are not English.
Anthony Powell (Modern Novelists)
by Neil McEwanThis introduction to Anthony Powell begins by finding starting-points for his fiction in his life and social background. His five novels of the 1930s are discussed as early products of the imagination which was to be fully developed in the great novel-sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. Three chapters are given to the nature and achievement of the sequence, examining passages in close detail, under the headings 'First Person', 'Myth' and 'Voices'. The final chapter discusses the two novels of the 1980s, and offers some conclusions on Powell as an exponent and analyst of the art of comic fiction.
A History of Literary Criticism
by Michael MoronyThe author traces the course of literary criticism from its foundations in classical and medieval precepts to the theorising of the present day. He explores the texts which have been milestones in the history of critical thought, placing them firmly in the context of their time.
Jane Austen (Women Writers)
by Meenakshi MukherjeeThis book combines a feminist perspective with a non-western reading of Jane Austen. The author considers how being a woman shaped Austen's literary attitudes and social thinking, and brings to bear her own post-colonial consciousness in understanding the economics, geography and social conventions of Austen's world. Analysis of the novels focuses on the way Jane Austen's treatment of interrelated issues such as marriage and professions, space and enclosure, art and life, language and artifice, provide the dynamics of narrative in her work.
Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones (Modern Dramatists)
by Penny Griffin Anne Caborn Bruce King Tony WallArthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones established an English drama that was respected by other countries. They dedicated themselves to the reclamation of English drama from the doldrums of the late 18th century. Together they raised standards in the theatre of acting and production, explored important social and moral issues, and fought a lifelong battle with the censor, changing standard views of what was acceptable in the theatre. Dr Griffin explores their lives and work in this important volume.
The British and Irish Novel Since 1960
by James AchesonThe essays in this collection survey the work of some of the most important British and Irish novelists of today. They not only consider afresh the work of novelists who established their reputations before 1960, such as Doris Lessing and William Golding; they also discuss the work of more recent novelists, among them Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter and Graham Swift. The contributors are drawn from various parts of the English-speaking world, and provide a variety of original perspectives on the novelists concerned.
The Fiction of Josef Škvorecký: (pdf)
by Paul I Trensky Michaela Harnick Bruce Craig Pramod K. Nayar
George Orwell (Palgrave Modern Novelists Series)
by Valerie MeyersThis book examines Orwell's six novels in detail and identifies Orwell's contribution to the form and technique of the novel. Orwell got started as a novelist by imitating literary models, especially Dickens, Kipling, Wells and D.H.Lawrence. Later he adapted the voice, style and subject-matter of his essays and political journalism to the novel. This book not only places Orwell's attempts to incorporate politics into fiction in the context of the literature of the 1930s and 1940s, but also shows how his novels have influenced writers up to the present.
Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture: Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard (Edinburgh Studies in Culture and Society)
by John OrrThis study examines the historical relationship between tragicomedy in the modernist theatre and the performative culture of Western consumer societies. While discussing a wide range of playwrights, it focusses specifically on the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard. Their plays, it is argued, illuminate the forms of pleasure, fear, performance and corruption which dominate our daily lives. Tragicomedy is seen as unique becuae of the existential playfulness and confusion of its protagonists, and because of its muted vision of apocalypse in the nuclear age.
Wordsworth and Coleridge: Critical Perspectives
by P. CampbellLyrical Ballads have always been wedded to controversy. Though the judgments of the periodicals and the ensuing authorial reaction have long since been superseded by a plethora of scholarly interpretations, the debate still focuses on their elusive, paradoxical character. Are the poems traditional or experimental, a random collocation or an organised sequence? Patrick Campbell surveys the critical fluctuations of nearly two centuries while privileging recent approaches which have sought fresh perspectives on the volume - contextual, formalist and genre based, psycho-analytic, materialist, maverick.
Christopher Marlowe
by Roger SalesThis study locates Marlowe's career as dramatist and spy within the stage-play world of Elizabethan society. It also reconstructs the roles that spectators played in the choreography of power. It then shows how religious and political hostility towards the Elizabethan public theatres was based on fears that they offered competing spaces for spectacle. It is argued that Marlowe's major plays confirm such fears since they often debate official positions. This encourages spectators to enter into their own dialogues with authority. Relationships between the drama and the dramatised society are explored further through a consideration of such topics as punishment, gender, sexuality, colonisation, witchcraft and diseases.
D. H. Lawrence’s Manuscripts: The Correspondence of Frieda Lawrence, Jake Zeitlin and Others (pdf)
by Michael Squires
On Literary Theory and Philosophy
by Richard Freadman Lloyd ReinhardtThe principle aim of this book is to explore the relationship between contemporary literary theory and analytic philosophy. The volume addresses this issue in two ways: first, through four exchanges between, on the one hand, proponents of avant-garde literary theory and, on the other, proponents of analytic philosophy (or of related literary critical positions); and second, through three cross-disciplinary essays on the relationship in question. Central topics in the volume include Self, Ethics, Interpretation, Language and characterisations of 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy.