As Wallace Stevens once wrote, "a poem should be part of one's sense of life". This book provides a record of readerly and critical explorations of the poems and life of the American poet. The author reads Stevens's poems in the context of both the existing critical works and the commentaries provided by the poet himself (essays, letters, occasional notes and posthumous texts), and aims to prove that his artistic development was informed by two contradictory existential projects: teleological, based on Stevens's assumption of a higher self which in its turn helps to illuminate the meaning and dynamics of the actual existence, and critical, appearing at the very moment when one questions his or her identity and assumes life to be an open and unfinished process.

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

In the last twenty years, how has U.S.-American writing and the reading public responded to the complexity of an American culture resolutely situated in a larger, highly politicized, globalized world undergoing radical change? The 20th-century modes of realism and postmodernism have been succeeded by writerly practices that are that are invested in the idea of embodied 'authenticity' and that are relatable to neorealism, whether it be via outright affirmation or critical experimentation and appropriation. The individual case studies mark the ways in which postmillennial U.S.-American writing is marked by an ongoing awareness toward complexity and the entanglement of writers and the reading public with pressing political concerns, and, at times oppressive, social and economic discursive and structural formations. These contributions further attest to how narrative and structural complexity, grammatical and lexical sophistication, and social nuance endure as the main literary modes of confronting 21st-century political life. This volume is thus of interest for both the study of U.S.-American political culture and U.S.-American literature.

As part of the contemporary reassessment of trauma that goes beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, Laurie Vickroy theorizes trauma in the context of psychological, literary, and cultural criticism. Focusing on novels by Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, and Chuck Palahniuk, she shows how these writers try to enlarge our understanding of the relationship between individual traumas and the social forces of injustice, oppression, and objectification. Further, she argues, their work provides striking examples of how the devastating effects of trauma?whether sexual, socioeconomic, or racial?on individual personality can be depicted in narrative.Vickroy analyzes the ways in which her selected texts engage readers both cognitively and ethically to reveal their own roles in systems of power and how they internalize the ideologies of those systems.

Violence against women in plays bywomen has earned little mention. This revolutionary collection fills that gap, focusing on plays by American women dramatists, written in the last thirty years, that deal with different forms of gender violence. Each author discusses specific manifestations of violence in carefully selected plays: psychological, familial, war-time, and social injustice. This book encompasses the theatrical devices used to represent violence on the stage in an age of virtual, immediate reality as much as the problematics of gender violence in modern society.

The first book in a decade from a poet whose blank verse speaks "with the precise qualifications of Henry James, and conveys the muted but implicit drama of Edward Hopper"--Anthony Hecht.. In this, his first collection since the acclaimed Little Voices of the Pears , Herbert Morris gathers fifteen recent poems in his two signature modes, the dramatic monologue and the meditative reverie. His subjects include a resplendent apricot gown once worn by Lillian Gish ("Chaplin enthralled, Griffith smitten, ecstatic"); a poignant human detail in Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac ; and a host of variations on the Peaceable Kingdom , the obsessive lifework of the painter Edward Hicks. Mr. Morris's blank verse, for decades now a glory of American poetry, here achieves a new level of mastery.

This collection of essays addresses a number of facets of George Orwell, examining both Orwell the man of letters and Orwell the political man. In his preface, Courtney Wemyss asserts that Orwell may not receive the recognition he is due because at present he is appreciated for the wrong reasons. The author of other fine novels (such as Burmese Days and Coming up for Air), Orwell should also be recognized for his literary criticism, book reviews, and documentaries, which depict the England of his times in the manner of Samuel Pepys. The Less-recognized--and equally important--facets of George Orwell's works and impact on English culture presented in this collection will prove informative to Orwell specialists and to scholars of twentieth-century English literature and politics.

Women writers have often felt alienated from both the Bible and the canonical literary tradition that has been built on its foundation. Yet contemporary American women writers seem to be as haunted by the Bible as their nineteenth-century predecessors. This study of feminist biblical revision argues that women writers' contentious dialogues with the Bible ultimately reconstruct the writers' own basis of authority. The author traces the evolution of this phenomenon from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and analyzes biblical revision in works by Emily Dickinson, H.D., Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison.

A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters. Contesting readings of twentieth-century American poetry as hermetic and narcissistic, Morris interprets the lyric as a scene of instruction and thus as a public-oriented genre. American poets from Robert Frost to Sherman Alexie bring aesthetics to bear on an exchange that asks readers to think carefully about the ethical demands of reading texts as a reflection of how we metaphorically "read" the world around us and the persons, places, and things in it. His survey focuses on poems that foreground scenes of conversation, teaching, and debate involving a strong-willed lyric speaker and another self, bent on resisting how the speaker imagines the world.

This book examines time travel in literature and other cultural production in the Americas, particularly as concerns fictional journeys between the present and the eras of the Conquest and slave trade. An investigation into time travel provides meaningful new perspectives on several issues of ongoing hemispheric importance. Combining in innovative ways the tools and approaches of postcolonial and popular culture studies as well as comparative literary analysis, this is an ambitious, interdisciplinary study that develops--across several related discursive sites--an argument about the centrality of time travel in the Latin American and Caribbean imagination.

In this comparative approach to the works of two major contemporary Egyptian writers, Mona Mikhail identifies existentialism as a major force in their work. Her close examination of the images and metaphors that recur in the short fiction of those two writers shows strong affinities with the works of Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus, concentrating on a central preoccupation with the theme of death as a constant in he works of all four writers. Mikhail shows how Mafouz and Idris not only successfully incorporate myth and folklore but also draw upon the rich heritage of classical Arabic Literature as a source for their work.

African American writers have created a rich literature that reflects their experiences and achievements. In many instances, whites figure prominently in these works, frequently portrayed as oppressors. Through a careful examination of works by black writers, Davis constructs a typology of white images in the African American imagination. The book argues that these images repeatedly occur in works by black writers. Some of these stereotypes include the overt bigot, the hypocrite, the liberal, and the good-hearted weakling.

While black writers are often explicit in representing the racism of the overt bigot, Davis notes that African American literary works are much more complex in their exposition of the hidden forms of bigotry manifested by covert white racists. The volume suggests that black authors believe that racism is not merely a form of thought or behavior, but a manifestation of identity. While Davis gives detailed attention to the works of Charles Chesnutt, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, she also looks at several other black writers and examines discussions of whites in contemporary critiques of race by such authors as Derrick Bell and Ellis Cose.

In November 1988 Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In this study of his writings only now being widely translated into English, Haim Gordon, an Israeli professor committed to intercultural dialogue, examines Mahfouz's work from an existential perspective. While Mahfouz is first and foremost a storyteller, he gives the reader an extra "baksheesh." By telling stories of persons from all walks of life--civil servants, peasants, pimps, lawyers, and businessmen--Mahfouz depicts the existential problems that Egyptians face today. Using a Socratic approach, Gordon questioned Mahfouz directly in a series of personal interviews conducted over the past ten years. In these interviews Gordon probed the existential themes in the characters, plots, and issues raised in Mahfouz's stories. The result is an intimate and highly personal look at life in Egypt. As a very involved and critical onlooker, Haim Gordon addresses the problems facing contemporary Egyptians as portrayed in Mahfouz's stories: the Egyptian's flight from freedom and confrontation, the "niggar" situation of Egyptian women, the debilitating effects of poverty, the blatant oppression of political rights, the degradation of true faith and the lack of spirituality. Mahfouz's stories reveal that which western scholars unintentionally, and politicians intentionally conceal--daily life in Egypt.

Though one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century, Saul Bellow has continually elicited conflicting responses from critics. Some critics have seen him as America's greatest contemporary writer, while others have discounted him as discouragingly redundant. Not even his novel Herzog, generally considered his worthiest achievement, has gone unchallenged. The expansion of critical theory in the last decade has added to the controversy over Bellow's works. The reviews and essays gathered in this volume illustrate the many disparate critical responses and approaches to Saul Bellow over the last 50 years, from the late 1940s into the 1990s. Representative samples of criticism from the earliest reviews to the most recent assessments trace the different critical phases and approaches to Bellow's work over time. The selections included also reflect larger trends in literary criticism over the last half century and chart the history of the critical community's response to Bellow. The selections are arranged chronologically in clusters devoted to particular works.

Over the last decade, migration flows from Central and Eastern Europe have become an issue in political debates about human rights, social integration, multiculturalism and citizenship in Great Britain. The increasing number of Eastern Europeans living in Britain has provoked ambivalent and diverse responses, including representations in film and literature that range from travel writing, humorous fiction, mockumentaries, musicals, drama and children's literature to the thriller. The present volume discusses a wide range of representations of Eastern and Central Europe and its people as reflected in British literature, film and culture. The book offers new readings of authors who have influenced the cultural imagination since the nineteenth century, such as Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and Arthur Koestler. It also discusses the work of more contemporary writers and film directors including Sacha Baron Cohen, David Cronenberg, Vesna Goldsworthy, Kapka Kassabova, Marina Lewycka, Ken Loach, Mike Phillips, Joanne K. Rowling and Rose Tremain. With its focus on post-Wall Europe, "Facing the East in the West "goes beyond discussions of migration to Britain from an established postcolonial perspective and contributes to the current exploration of 'new' European identities.

As an essayist, philosopher, ex-pencil manufacturer, notorious hermit, tax protester, and all-around original thinker, Thoreau led so singular a life that he is in some ways a perfect candidate for the historical and biographical treatments made possible by the Historical Guides to American Authors series format. William E. Cain, the volume editor, includes contributions on his relationship with 19th century authority and concepts of the land, which should help the volume's reach beyond those who read Thoreau for illumination to those general readers who love him for embodying the spirit of American rebellion.

By examining the representation of urban space in contemporary British fiction, this book argues that key to the political left's strategy was a model of action which folded politics into culture and elevated disenfranchisement to the status of a political principle.

Banta draws upon essays in Vanity Fair by noted journalists, literary figures, and cultural critics in order to examine the manner by which major cultural and historical events in the Untied States and Britain led to the invention of previously non-existent words to express the rampant changes within society.

In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas' minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza Perez, Ana Castillo, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, she argues that the individual harm experienced by Latinas needs to be understood in relation to the collective histories of aggression against their communities.

This study confronts current influential theories that science fiction is either an American phenomenon or an international one. The study rejects the idea that British science fiction is distinguishable only by its pessimistic outlook--while also rejecting the idea that other designations, such as "scientific romance" or "speculative fiction," better fit the British product. Instead, the study traces the evolution of British science fiction, showing how H. G. Wells synthesized various strains in English literature, and how later writers, conscious of this Wellsian tradition, built upon Wells's literary achievement. An introduction defines what might reasonably be placed under the heading British science fiction, and why. Chapter 1 examines previous critical ideas about the nature of British science fiction, revealing that most of them are based on untested assumptions. Chapter 2 explores the significance of the dominant motif of the island in British SF --a motif that suggests that British SF and mainstream English literature have been long and fruitfully intertwined. Chapters 3 and 4 deal respectively with British disaster fiction before and after the Second World War. They focus on why British science fiction has so frequently seemed obsessed with catastrophe. Chapter 5, a polemical conclusion, deals with the future of British science fiction based on its current predicament. Ultimate Island forms a theoretical counterpart to the author's recently-published British Science Fiction: A Chronology 1478-1990 (Greenwood 1992), which defines the historical scope of the field.

Marriage was historically not only a romantic ideal, but a tool of exploitation of women in many regards. Women were often considered commodities and marriage was far away from the romantic stereotypes people relate to it today. While marriages served as diplomatic tools or means of political legitimization in the past, the discourses about marital relationships changed and women expressed their demands more openly. Discourses about marriage in history and literature naturally became more and more heated, especially during the "long" 19th century, when marriages were contested by social reformers or political radicals, male and female alike. The present volume provides a discussion of the role of marriage and the discourses about in different chronological and geographical contexts and shows which arguments played an important role for the demand for more equality in martial relationships. It focuses on marriage discourses, may they have been legal or rather socio-political ones. In addition, the disputes about marriage in literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented to complement the historical debates.

"The Modernist God State" seeks to overturn the traditional secularization approach to intellectual and political history and to replace it with a fuller understanding of the religious basis of modernist political movements. Lackey demonstrates that Christianity, instead of fading after the Enlightenment, actually increased its power by becoming embedded within the concept of what was considered the legitimate nation state, thus determining the political agendas of prominent political leaders from King Leopold II to Hitler.
Lackey first argues that novelists can represent intellectual and political history in a way that no other intellectual can. Specifically, they can picture a subconscious ideology, which often conflicts with consciously held systems of belief, short-circuiting straight into political action, an idea articulated by E.M. Forster. Second, in contrast to many literary scholars who discuss Hitler and the Nazis without studying and quoting their texts, Lackey draws his conclusions from close readings of their writings. In doing so, he shows that one cannot understand the Nazis without taking into account the specific version of Christianity underwriting their political agenda.

While "the male condition" is increasingly the focus of critical inquiry, the first images to come to most minds are those associated, ironically enough, with the resoundingly heterosexual men's movement - sweat lodges, primal screams, etc. As these images quickly become cliched, a more progressive and less primitivist movement continues to gather strength, namely one that examines the experiences and writings of homosexual men. In this groundbreaking work, Mark Lilly takes us on an unprecedented tour, reintroducing us, in clear, lively and non-technical language, to famous texts and familiarizing us for the first time with less well-known writings, from the standpoint of gay experience, sensibility and sexual desire. In gay men's writing, tenderness lies side by side with rage; existential rejection of convention rubs shoulders with sexual hedonism. Beginning with Wilde's and Byron's existentialist outlaw, the theme of social rebellion, and the fight against conformity, form a common link among the literary works of the twentieth century. But mainstream academic criticism has shown itself for the most part incapable of engaging gay work without distorting or ignoring its most central features. Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century presents us with a unified analysis of certain central authors and texts in order to investigate shared themes and patterns. James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Jean Genet, Joe Orton, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt: all figure central in the book, as do such subjects as the love poetry of the First World War and the poems of Constantine Cavafy. One of those rare titles that is written toappeal to non-specialists but also contains scholarship so original it is must reading for anyone interested in gay writing, Lilly's work is, to date, the most unified treatment of gay men's writing.