Whether it is a cup of plenty or the container of Christ's blood, the Holy Grail has always been a symbol of aspiration and longing. This volume surveys representations of the Holy Grail in literature, art, and film from the Middle Ages to the present day. A substantial introduction tracing the development of the legend is followed by a 200-item bibliography and twenty critical essays, seven of which have been written specially for this volume. The motifs of the Grail, the Quest, the Waste Land, and the Fisher King are explored, as well as the characters of Perceval, Lancelot, Galahad, and Joseph of Arimathea. Specific topics discussed include the origins and symbolism of the legend; the visual treatment of the legend in medieval manuscript illumination and in pre-Raphaelite painting; and the narrative treatment of the legend by medieval writers in French, German, and English, by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, and by twentieth-century novelists and film-makers.

That the works of the ancient tragedians still have an immediate and profound appeal surely needs no demonstration, yet the modern reader continually stumbles across concepts which are difficult to interpret or relate to - moral pollution, the authority of oracles, classical ideas of geography - as well as the names of unfamiliar legendary and mythological figures. A New Companion to Greek Tragedy provides a useful reference tool for the 'Greekless' reader: arranged on a strictly encyclopaedic pattern, with headings for all proper names occurring in the twelve most frequently read tragedies, it contains brief but adequately detailed essays on moral, religious and philosophical terms, as well as mythical genealogies where important. There are in addition entries on Greek theatre, technical terms and on other writers from Aristotle to Freud, whilst the essay by P. E. Easterling traces some connections between the ideas found in the tragedians and earlier Greek thought.

This volume of fourteen interviews covers the prolific and rich career of author Jerome Charyn (b. 1937). Four of the interviews appear in English for the first time, and two interviews appear here in print for the first time as well. As one of his autobiographical volumes claims, Jerome Charyn is a ""Bronx Boy,"" a child born from immigrant parents who went through Ellis Island in the 1920s like so many other travelers without luggage, a ""little werewolf"" who grew up on his own in the chaos of the Bronx ghetto. ""I think I was defined by two things: World War Two and the movies."" His work remains deeply marked by this childhood largely forgotten by the American Dream. If Charyn has spent much of his life in Paris, he has paradoxically never left the Bronx: ""'El Bronx' is there inside my head, and I revisit it the way Hemingway would fish the Big Two-Hearted River in his dreams."" His whole work is a long attempt at evoking his own history and celebrating his lifelong marveling at the power of language--""our second skin""--as well as his deep, unflinching belief in the promises of fiction. Since 1964, Charyn has published more than fifty books ranging from fiction to nonfiction and including short stories, very popular crime novels, graphic novels co-written with European artists, essays on American culture and cinema as well as on New York, autobiography and biography--an ever-changing production that has made it difficult for critics to classify him. And yet in many ways Charyn's writing thrives on constant currents: the words ""voice,"" ""song,"" ""undersong,"" or ""rhythm"" return frequently in his interviews as he explains what literature is to him and ceaselessly asserts that he is trying ""to find a music for a musicless world,"" a language for ""people who cannot speak.""

"Conversations with Steve Martin" presents a collection of interviews and profiles that focus on Martin as a writer, artist, and original thinker over the course of more than four decades in show business. While those less familiar with his full body of work may think of Martin as primarily the "wild and crazy guy" with an arrow through his head, this book makes the case that he is in fact one of our nation's most accomplished and varied artists. It shows the full range of Martin's creative work, tracing the source of his comic imagination from his early standup days, starting in the mid to late 1960s through the films he has written and starred in, and emphasizing his more recent creative outpourings as playwright, essayist, novelist, memoirist, songwriter, composer, musician, and art critic.

"Standup is the hardest material in the world to write for someone else; it's like trying to condense 10 years of experience into 20 minutes of new material.," Martin says. But commenting on his fiction writing, he says. "I think you have to be able to find as a writer that state where you don't know what you're going to say or what the character is going to say or who the characters are. That's the biggest thrill of all. When you start to trust that subconscious thing and you don't censor yourself--just remember you can always throw it away--that's when the good stuff comes out."

The selected materials consist not only of pieces focused primarily on Martin's writings, but also broader profiles and conversations that help explain Martin's development as a writer within the larger context of his many other accomplishments, talents, and performance skills.

"Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning" boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production "Desdemona" and her tenth and latest novel, "Home." These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of "Desdemona" and "Home" within the wider scope of Morrison's career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison's fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in "Home."

In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison's focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from "Home," and framed by two poems: Rita Dove's "The Buckeye" and Sonia Sanchez's "Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo."

In Furiously Funny, Tucker finds that comic rage developed from black oral tradition and first shows up in literature by George Schuyler and Ralph Ellison shortly after World War II. He examines its role in novels and plays, following the growth of the expression to comics and stand-up comedy and film, where Richard Pryor, Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock have all used the technique. Connecting through humor to what is familiar in both mainstream and African American culture, works of comic rage are at the center of American racial dialogue. The simultaneous expression of comedy and militancy enables artists to reject white stereotypes of blackness and also to confront white audiences with America's legacy of racial oppression. Tucker shows how this important art form continues to expand in new ways in the twenty-first century.

Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel's account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces. Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.

Baltimore native Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an essayist, literary critic, magazine editor, novelist, and journalist. Starting as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the century, Mencken eventually became associated with the Baltimore Sun and his work for the newspaper spanned five decades. In H.L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography, S.T. Joshi provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive bibliography of the writings of H. L. Mencken ever assembled. It presents detailed information on his book publications from 1903 to the present, with a full list of editions and reprints. Most significantly, it presents for the first time a comprehensive annotated listing of his magazine and newspaper work (including more than 1,500 anonymous editorials for the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Evening Sun, and other papers, which have never been listed in any previous bibliographies), a thorough index to his book reviews, and a full list of interviews Mencken gave during his lifetime. Word counts of nearly every item in the bibliography have been supplied, and the book has been thoroughly indexed by name, title, and periodical. Because every item has been annotated, scholars and students can, for the first time, gain an idea of the subject-matter of all Mencken's writings, especially his magazine and newspaper work. The indexes will allow users to locate any given item with ease. The chronological arrangement of each section allows users to understand the growth and development of Mencken's work, making this volume an invaluable resource.

Literary fashions come and go, but some hang around longer than others, like Gothic literature which has existed ever since The Castle of Otranto in 1764. During this long while, it has spread from England, to the rest of Great Britain, and across to the continent, and off to America and Australia, filling in the gaps more recently. Most of it is in English, but hardly all, and it has adopted all styles, from romanticism, to modernism, to postmodernism and even adjusted to feminist and queer literature, and science fiction. We have all, read some Gothic tales or if not read then seen them in the cinema, since they adapt well to film treatment, and it would be hard to find anyone who has not heard of ghosts and vampires, let alone Count Dracula and Frankenstein. On the other hand, some of us are inveterate Gothic fans, reading one book or story after the other. The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature follows this long and winding path, first in an extensive chronology and then a useful introduction which explains the nature of Gothic and shows how it has evolved. Obviously, the dictionary section has entries on major writers, and some of the best-known works, but also on geographical variants like Irish, Scottish or Russian Gothic and Female Gothic, Queer Gothic and Science Fiction. This is provided in over 200 often substantial and always intriguing entries. More can be found in a detailed bibliography, including general works but also more specialized ones on different styles and genres, and also specific authors. This book should certainly interest the fans but also more serious researchers.

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) reigns as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning series The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for Neverwhere, Coraline, and the award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, children, comics readers, and viewers of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media, making him a celebrity around the world. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to comics, his work remains underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. In this book, the thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, examine the work of Gaiman and his many illustrators. The essays discuss Gaiman's oeuvre regarding the qualities that make his work unique in his eschewing of typical categories, his proclamations to "make good art," and his own constant efforts to do so however the genres and audiences may slip into one another. The Artistry of Neil Gaiman forms a complicated picture of a man who has always seemed fully assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own voice far later in life.

In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary Renaissance in Southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women's liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature. With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade Southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including in her study well-known authors-including Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker-as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the Southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the South in a formative role.

That the works of the ancient tragedians still have an immediate and profound appeal surely needs no demonstration, yet the modern reader continually stumbles across concepts which are difficult to interpret or relate to - moral pollution, the authority of oracles, classical ideas of geography - as well as the names of unfamiliar legendary and mythological figures. A New Companion to Greek Tragedy provides a useful reference tool for the 'Greekless' reader: arranged on a strictly encyclopaedic pattern, with headings for all proper names occurring in the twelve most frequently read tragedies, it contains brief but adequately detailed essays on moral, religious and philosophical terms, as well as mythical genealogies where important. There are in addition entries on Greek theatre, technical terms and on other writers from Aristotle to Freud, whilst the essay by P. E. Easterling traces some connections between the ideas found in the tragedians and earlier Greek thought.

A History of Canadian Fiction is the first one-volume history to chart its development from earliest times to the present day. Recounting the struggles and the glories of this burgeoning area of investigation, it explains Canada's literary growth alongside its remarkable history. Highlighting the people who have shaped and are shaping Canadian literary culture, the book examines such major figures as Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Thomas King, concluding with young authors of today whose major successes reflect their indebtedness to their Canadian forbearers.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs and symbols, a review quiz, and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy explores the wide-ranging oeuvre of this seminal author, examining Owens's work and his importance in literature and Native studies. Of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish American descent, Owens's work includes mysteries, novels, literary scholarship, and autobiographical essays. Louis Owens offers a critical introduction and thirteen essays arranged into three sections: "Owens and the World," "Owens and California," and "The Novels." The essays present an excellent assessment of Owens's literary legacy, noting his contributions to American literature, ethnic literature, and Native American literature and highlighting his contributions to a variety of theories and genres. The collection concludes with a coda of personal poetic reflections on Owens by Diane Glancy and Kimberly Blaeser. Libraries, students, scholars, and the general public interested in Native American literature and the landscape of contemporary US literature will welcome this reflective volume that analyzes a vast range of Louis Owens's imaginative fictions, personal accounts, and critical work.

This book focuses on a prominent female poet of eighteenth century China, Qu Bingyun. Qu was a leader of a famous group of female poets known as the Female Disciples of Yuan Mei. This book explores the development of Qu as a poet and examines her unique poetry with special attention to her dynamic interaction with her contemporaries. It concludes that Qu, driven by her instinct as a woman and the nature of writing as a social process, constantly sought connections with others to form literary networks. It was during the course of this interaction with others that Qu's poetic career blossomed. This book demonstrates how Qu, a fragile woman, used her awesome poetic power to simplify the complex family interactions and endeared herself to those close to her; how she became widely admired in her region and beyond; how she transformed her illness and mundane everyday life into aesthetic creations; and how she created close ties to all the people around her. This book also shows that Qu's poetry powerfully exposed a gentrywoman's domesticity to the world in every detail. Qu's intensity extended into her entire literary network, creating patterns that were rarely seen before and since. Honoring the female experience as the source of autonomous art, Qu was a revolutionary of women's literature and became a prominent representative of female writers who broadened Chinese poetry in many ways.

On the Dark Side of the Archive examines nineteenth-century nation building through narratives that are not part of the romantic or realist traditions, specifically those associated with the critique of traditional ideas often portrayed in Decadentism and modernismo. The study focuses on the "non-canonical" works of turn-of-the-century authors-including Jose Maria Vargas Vila, Horacio Quiroga, Clemente Palma, and Jose Marti-and concludes with a study that compares the literary portrayal of doomed societies in the nineteenth century with the work of contemporary authors, such as Fernando Vallejo. Gonzalez Espitia establishes a critique of the concept of nation building in the romantic narratives of South America. These narratives are generally characterized by underlying erotic discourses meant to set the recently liberated countries of Latin America on a path toward class harmony, racial integration, socially beneficial marriage, and demographic expansion. An analysis of nation-building narratives understood as erotic discourses must also consider novels that manifest a dynamics of self-destruction. The authors included in this book subvert the idea of "nation" as a clear, positive, and fruitful space, bringing a dose of reality to this elusive concept. These authors design alternative futures for Latin America, futures that were seen as fruitless, obscure, contemptible, or doomed.

""The Scarlet Letter" has proved our most enduring classic," writes Sacvan Bercovitch, "because it is the liberal example par excellence of art as ideological mimesis. To understand the office of the A is to see how culture empowers symbolic form, including forms of dissent, and how symbols participate in the dynamics of culture, including the dynamics of constraint." With an approach that both reflects and contests developments in literary studies, Bercovitch explores these connections from two perspectives: first, he examines a historical reading of the novel's unities; and then, a rhetorical analysis of key mid-nineteenth-century issues, at home and abroad. In order to highlight the relation between rhetoric and history, he focuses on the point at which the scarlet letter does its office at last, the moment when Hester decides to come home to America. In "The Office of "The Scarlet Letter,"" Bercovitch argues that the process by which the United States usurped "America" for itself, symbolically, is also the process by which liberalism established political and economic dominance. In the course of his study, he offers sustained discussions of Hawthorne's irony and ambiguity, of aesthetic and social strategies of cohesion, and of the conundrums of liberal dissent. Winner of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowe prize, "The Office of "The Scarlet Letter"" provides a theoretical redefinition of the function of symbolism in culture and an exemplary literary-ideological reading of a major text.

This final volume of Vernon Louis Parrington's Pultzer Prize-winning study deals with the decay of romantic optimism. It shows that the cause of decay is attributed to three sources: stratifying of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which, with teachings of the sciences and lessons of intellectuals, has resulted in the questioning of democratic ideals. Parrington presents the movement of liberalism from 1913 to 1917, and the reaction to it following World War I. He notes that liberals announced that democratic hopes had not been fulfilled; the Constitution was not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be; and while Americans had professed to create a democracy, they had in fact created a plutocracy. Industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class and the rise of critical attitudes towards the ideals and handiwork of that class are examined in great detail. Parrington's interpretation of the literature during this time focuses on four divisions of development: the conquest of America by the middle class; the challenge of that overlordship by democratic agrarianism; the intellectual revolution brought about by science and the appropriation of science by the middle class; and the rise of detached criticism by younger intellectuals. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights Parrington's life and explains the importance of this volume.

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People's Revolutionary Government. The United States under President Reagan infamously invaded Grenada in 1983, staying until the New National Party won election, effectively dealing a death blow to socialism in Grenada.With Comrade Sister, Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced different narratives of the Grenada Revolution. Reimagining this period with women at its center, Laurie Lambert shows how the revolution must be recognized for its both productive and corrosive tendencies. Lambert argues that the literature of the Grenada Revolution exposes how the more harmful aspects of revolution are visited on, and are therefore more apparent to, women. Calling attention to the mark of black feminism on the literary output of Caribbean writers of this period, Lambert addresses the gap between women's active participation in Caribbean revolution versus the lack of recognition they continue to receive.

"Conversations with William H. Gass" captures the imagination and philosophical acumen of one of America's most important aestheticians, critical theorists, fiction writers, and essayists.

From his first major novel, "Omensetter's Luck" (1966), to his numerous collections of essays and philosophical inquiries, to his controversial novel "The Tunnel" (1995), Gass (b. 1924) has proved himself a meticulous craftsman. Throughout these interviews, he reveals an aesthetic that combines ideas from sources as disparate as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, and Plato.

The interviews make clear the unity behind Gass's views is by his own design. Conversations retrace his undergraduate years at Kenyon College and his subsequent philosophical investigation of metaphor at Cornell University.

Gass has never strayed from his belief that metaphor is central and fundamental to thought and to aesthetics. In these interviews he reiterates time and again his belief that the ultimate understanding of the relationship of language to the world pivots on one's understanding of metaphor.

n interviews, in profiles, and in his own essays, Gass does not hide from questions about his art and personal motivations, no matter how frequently they are asked, nor does he toy with his interviewers. Revealing how he never shies from an intellectual joust, this collection includes a rousing, contentious debate with John Gardner, fellow literary pundit and fiction writer.

The distinction of Gass's prose is matched by the clarity and brilliance of the mind behind it. These talks allow an unobstructed view. Anyone interested in Gass's writing will delight in hearing the brutally honest voice of the mind that produced it.

The detective novel is both a product of the twentieth century and a response to the needs of readers forced to deal with social and political insecurities of the time. Thus codes of modernity are the essence of the genre, and its plausibility relies upon the degree of the readers' expectations, demands, and vicarious experiences. Even one of mystery fiction's hallmarks, the seemingly improbable but consequential encounter with strangers, is assimilated in the modern sensibility, which has been shaped by concepts of trust and confidence, of rationalism and emotion, of expertise and amateurism, and of ideology and morality. This intelligent and probing analysis of the detective novel shows how the fictional world portrayed by the mystery writer is perceived as parallel with the actual world. This apparent unity of the fictional thriller and veritable circumstance would make it possible for some high-ranking diplomat to outwit his adversaries by emulating the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Similarly, a professor of medicine might assign students the study of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories as exercises in detection or in drawing inferences, for like the work of Holmes the practice of medicine connects visible symptoms to their invisible causes. In the light of this concept of modernity Mystery Fiction and Modern Life examines works by Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Tony Hillerman, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Anthony Price, and others.

Professor Douglas Gifford, Emeritus Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, explores James Hogg's most famous work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This shocking tale of a minister's son who believes himself chosen by God to punish those he sees as evil-doers, and who has a mysterious guide in all his atrocities, has been labelled a Gothic story - yet it has more in common with traditional Scottish folk-tales, but with the alternative possibility of an astonishingly modern reading, in which there are no devils and no wonders, only the delusions of a diseased mind. Professor Gifford guides the listener through the turns and twists of the novel, accompanied by atmospheric readings of selections from the text by John Shedden. Both psychological and supernatural elements are explored, along with the background to Hogg and his works. This double-disk audio CD makes an excellent tool for classroom use or for home study.

The seventeenth edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled. Key Features: each entry provides full career history and publication details appendices section lists international prizes, organizations and poetry publications, lists of Poets Laureate.

This book explores traditional approaches to the play, which includes an examination of the play in light of current history, in the context of Renaissance England, and in relation to Shakespeare's other Roman plays as well as structural examination of plot, language, character, and source material. Julius Caesar: Critical Essays also examines the current debates concerning the play in Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, queer, and gender contexts.