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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Literary reference works
In conferring upon Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019)
the 2013 Rea Award for the Short Story, the jury said that at the
then age of ninety-two, she "has thrived at the height of her
powers to a degree that is unparalleled in modern letters." Over a
celebrated six-decade career, Spencer published every type of
literary fiction: novels and short stories, a memoir, and a play.
Like her best-known work, The Light in the Piazza, most of her
narratives explore the inner lives of restless, searching southern
women. Yet one mercurial male character, Edward Glenn, deserves
attention for the way he insists on returning to her pages.
Speaking of Edward in unusually personal terms, Spencer admitted a
strong attraction to his type: the elusive, intelligent southern
man, "maybe an unresolved part of my psyche." In The Edward Tales,
Sally Greene brings together the four narratives in which Edward
figures: the play For Lease or Sale (1989) and three short stories,
"The Runaways" (1994), "Master of Shongalo" (1996), and "Return
Trip" (2009). The collection allows readers to observe Spencer's
evolving style while offering glimpses of the moral reasoning that
lies at the heart of all her work. Greene's critical introduction
helpfully places these narratives within the context of Spencer's
entire body of writing. The Edward Tales confirms Spencer's place
as one of our most beloved and accomplished writers.
Defoe's The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was almost always
published together with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures
of Robinson Crusoe. Only after 1950 was the first volume printed
alone-a shorter work for some classes. But in addition to
fulfilling the promise of the first volume, The Farther Adventures
is an exciting adventure novel by itself. Crusoe returns to his
island to learn about his colony, and then travels to Madagascar,
India, and China before returning to England after some exciting
encounters. Complete with an introduction, line notes, and full
bibliographical notes, this is an edition like no other.
The Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) is best
known for his revival of physiognomy, or the ancient art of judging
character from physical appearance. His writings on physiognomy,
rapidly translated into the major European languages, made him a
celebrity in his lifetime. Although they were always controversial,
Lavater's theories had a pervasive and long-lasting influence on
art, literature, medicine, and the emerging social sciences.
Physiognomy in Profile affirms and assesses Lavater's contribution
to European culture in the two hundred years since his death. It
examines how his vision of physiognomy as a viable method of
interpreting the modern world has repeatedly been affirmed and
challenged. Even today, at the turn of the twenty-first century,
this study reveals that Lavater's ideas have a surprising
resilience. The book adopts a cross-disciplinary approach, focusing
on the novel, press and periodical literature, painting, drawing,
photography, caricature, encyclopedias, and medical texts. It
brings together the work of scholars from North America, Europe,
and Australia.
Panepiphanal World is the first in-depth study of the forty short
texts James Joyce called "epiphanies." Composed between 1901 and
1904, at the beginning of Joyce's writing career, these texts are
often dismissed as juvenilia. Sangam MacDuff argues that the
epiphanies are an important point of origin for Joyce's entire body
of work, showing how they shaped the structure, style, and language
of his later writings. Tracing the ways Joyce incorporates the
epiphanies into Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, MacDuff describes the defining
characteristics of the epiphanies-silence and repetition,
materiality and reflexivity-as a set of recurrent and inter-related
tensions in the development of Joyce's oeuvre. MacDuff uses fresh
archival evidence, including a new typescript of the epiphanies
that he discovered, to show the importance of the epiphanies
throughout Joyce's career. MacDuff compares Joyce's concept of
epiphany to Classical, Biblical, and Romantic revelations, showing
that instead of pointing to divine transcendence or the awakening
of the sublime, Joyce's epiphanies are rooted in and focused on
language. MacDuff argues that the Joycean epiphany is an apt
characterization of modernist literature, and that the linguistic
forces at play in these early texts are also central to the work of
Joyce's contemporaries including Woolf, Beckett, and Eliot. A
volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G.
KnowlesAn Open Access edition of this book was published with the
support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
The interconnected themes of land and labour were a common recourse
for English literary writers between the sixteenth and twentieth
centuries, and in the twenty-first they have become pressing again
in the work of nature writers, environmentalists, poets, novelists
and dramatists. Written by a team of sixteen subject specialists,
this volume surveys the literature of rural working lives and
landscapes written in English between 1500 and the present day,
offering a range of scholarly perspectives on the georgic
tradition, with insights from literary criticism, historical
scholarship, classics, post-colonial studies, rural studies and
ecocriticism. Providing an overview of the current scholarship in
georgic literature and criticism, this collection argues that the
work of people and animals in farming communities, and the land as
it is understood through that work, has provided writers in English
with one of their most complex and enduring themes.
This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of
prayer to grapple with profoundly human ideas in Finnegans Wake-the
dreamlike masterpiece that critics have called his "book of the
night." Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about
how Joyce composed this work to suggest why he wrote and arranged
it as he did.Jaurretche provides a sequential reading of the four
chapters and corresponding themes of the Wake from the perspective
of prayer. She examines image, manifested by the letters of the
alphabet and the Book of Kells; magic, which Joyce equates with the
workings of language; dreams, which he relates to poetry; and
speech, glorified in the Wake for its potential to express emotions
and ecstasy. Jaurretche also delves into writings about prayer by
important thinkers from antiquity to the present, including Origen
of Alexandria, Giambattista Vico, and Giordano Bruno. She
demonstrates how these philosophers influenced Joyce's view that
prayer can imbue language with power.This book is an illuminating
and much-needed interpretation of a work that abounds with echoes
and cadences of sacred language. Jaurretche's insights will guide
readers' understanding of the style and structure of Finnegans
Wake. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by
Sebastian D. G. Knowles.
Offering guidance and inspiration to English literature
instructors, this book faces the challenges of real-life teaching
and the contemporary higher education classroom head on. Whether
you're teaching in a community college, a state school, a liberal
arts college, or an Ivy League institution, this book offers
valuable advice and insights which will help you to motivate,
incentivize and inspire your students. Addressing questions such
as: 'how do you articulate the value of literary education to
students (and administrators, and parents)?', 'how can a class
session with a fatigued and underprepared group of students be made
productive?', and 'how do you incentivize overscheduled students to
read energetically in preparation for class?', this book answers
these universal quandaries and more, providing a usable philosophy
of the value of literary education, articulating a set of learning
goals for students of literature, and offering plenty of practical
advice on pedagogical strategies, day-to-day coping, and more. In
its sum, Teaching Literature in the Real World constitutes an
experience-based philosophy of teaching literature that is
practical and realistic, oriented towards helping students develop
intellectual skills, and committed to pedagogy built on explicit,
detailed, and observable learning objectives.
This eighteenth and final volume in the Cambridge Edition of the
Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a variorum edition of The Great
Gatsby (1925), the author's masterpiece. The variorum text is based
on multiple witnesses including the extant holograph of the novel
and Fitzgerald's revised galley proofs; the first edition and later
impressions from the first-edition plates; and importantly,
Fitzgerald's personal copy of the novel, which bears corrections
and revisions in his hand. This edition removes instances of
over-correction in later editions of the novel, where there are
numerous examples of textual corruption, thus giving control of the
text back to Fitzgerald. This critical edition includes an
introduction, tracing the history of the novel, an emended text,
emendation tables, Fitzgerald's 1935 introduction, and fourteen
illustrations. Historical annotations provide identifications of
persons, places, events, popular songs, and literary works - all
now made available to readers, teachers, critics, and scholars.
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