Literary Criticism
In Defense of Reason
Three Classics of Contemporary Criticism
By Yvor Winters
Introduction by Kenneth Fields Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works—Primitivism and Decadence, Maule’s Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense—of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position.…
In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer – On Sale
Cultural Narrative and Redemption on the American Frontiers, 1830-1930
By Joel Daehnke
Westward expansion on the North American continent by European settlers generated a flurry of writings on the frontier experience over the course of a hundred years. Asserting that the dominant ideology of America's Manifest Destiny embodied a tense, often contradictory union of Christian and secular republican views of social progress, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer investigates the ambivalence of the frontier as it was inscribed with redemptive, historical significance by a host of frontier writers.…
Inaugural Wounds – On Sale
The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives
Desire, Jacques Lacan suggests, is a condition or expression of our wounded nature. But because such desire is also unconscious, it can be expressed only indirectly, for what we consciously desire is hardly ever what we really want.…
Isak Dinesen
The Life and Imagination of a Seducer
Born into a Victorian Danish family, Karen Christentze Dinesen married her second cousin, a high-spirited and philandering baron, and moved to Kenya where she ran a coffee plantation, painted, and wrote.…
Isak Dinesen – On Sale
Critical Views
Edited by Olga Anastasia Pelensky
This historical overview of criticism of the famous Danish writer is the first such collection available in English. Composed of selections from major critics and scholars both here and abroad (including Aage Henriksen, Eudora Welty, Curtis Cate, Abdul JanMohamed, and Lionel Trilling, among others) Isak Dinesen would have suited the self-absorbed artist, who so delighted in being continually appropriated and invented within different forms of critical discourse that it became a source of amusement and distraction for her.…
James Wright
The Poetry of a Grown Man; Constancy and Transition in the Work of James Wright
By Kevin Stein
Although some critics have identified two phases in the poetry of James Wright and have isolated particulars of his movement from traditional to more experimental forms, few have noted also the elements of constancy in the evolution of his poetry.…
John Reed and the Writing of Revolution – On Sale
John Reed (1887-1920) is best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and as champion of the communist movement in the United States. Still, Reed remains a writer almost systematically ignored by the literary critical establishment, even if alternately vilified and lionized by historians and by films like Warren Beatty's Reds.…
José María Arguedas – On Sale
Reconsiderations for Latin American Studies
Edited by Ciro A. Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval
José María Arguedas (1911-1969) is one of the most important authors to speak to issues of the survival of native cultures. José María Arguedas: Reconsiderations for Latin American Cultural Studies presents his views from multiple perspectives for English-speaking audiences for the first time.…
Lord of a Visible World
An Autobiography in Letters
By H. P. Lovecraft
Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz
In Lord of a Visible World, the editors have amassed and arranged the letters of this prolific writer into the story of his life. The volume traces Lovecraft's upbringing in Providence, Rhode Island, his involvement with the pulp magazine Weird Tales, his short-lived marriage, and his later status as the preeminent man of letters in his field.…
The Midwestern Pastoral
Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland
The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience.…
The New Short Story Theories
Edited by Charles E. May
The first edition of May’s Short Story Theories (1976) opened with an essay entitled “The Short Story: An Underrated Art.” Almost two decades later, the short story suffers no such slight.…
Nietzsche and Emerson
An Elective Affinity
George J. Stack traces the sources of ideas and theories that have long been considered the exclusive province of Friedrich Nietzsche to the surprisingly radical writings of the American essayist and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.…
The Novel of the Future – On Sale
By Anaïs Nin
In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in literature, film, art, and dance—to arrive at a new synthesis for the young artist struggling against the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of modern fiction.…
On Poets and Poetry
William Pritchard’s collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. One of them, Philip Larkin, answered and interviewer’s question about what he had learned from his study of other poets by snapping back, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think: That’s marvelous; how is it done?” Although Pritchard has been talking with student about poets for more than fifty years, his practice in writing has Larkin’s question in mind: how to describe convincingly the way it’s done, the “marvelous” creations of Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Robert Lowell, or Larkin himself.…
Available February 2009 (est.)
The Other John Updike
Poems, Short Stories, Prose, Play
John Updike has won a National Book Award and has earned both critical and popular acclaim. At the moment, his reputation rests largely on his novels, especially Rabbit, Run; The Centaur; Of the Farm; and The Coup.…
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism – On Sale
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.…
A Paris Year
Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932
The Depression that follows the 1929 stock market crash is emptying Paris of many American expatriates. Two exceptions are Dorothy and James T. Farrell, the naïve young couple who have fled their home in Chicago for the fabled liberation that Paris seems to offer.…
Pebbles, Monochromes and Other Modern Poems, 1891-1916
Edited by Edwin Cady
By W.D. Howells
For William Dean Howells, the 1880s throbbed with literary warfare over theory and criticism (realism), and social justice. But the terrible climax was more personal and came in the death of his daughter in 1889.…
The Poetry of Resistance
Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition
Does the artist have a responsibility to mirror the conflicts and problems of society in his or her work? Perhaps more than most, the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has been faced with this question. Living in Belfast since 1957, Heaney decided to leave Northern Ireland altogether in 1972, his residency there spanning fifteen years of social upheaval and violence.…
Praising It New
The Best of the New Criticism
Edited by Garrick Davis
Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to the approach advocated by the New Critics.…
