The Country of the Blind challenges the reigning conception of Ibsen as social critic. It offers new and unique interpretations stressing his preoccupation with the limitations and failings of humankind that do not change, in particular one's reluctance or inability to confront unpleasant truths about one's self and the consequent attempts to conceal those truths from self and from others. The result, in the plays considered, is that his personae are not what they appear to be. We shall observe that Mrs. Alving is not an heroic figure who has sacrificed all for her beloved son; that the "virtuous" parson Manders may in fact be the father of Oswald; that neither Gregers Werle nor Dr. Thomas Stockmann are the idealists they profess to be; that Hedda Gabler and Halvard Solness are the very antitheses of the persons they imagine themselves. This gulf between illusion and actuality is evident even in the case of secondary agents, confirming the supposition that Ibsen believed self-deception inseparable from the human condition. The protagonists' stratagems necessarily interact, forbidding each knowledge of each and all knowledge of the meaning of external circumstance. They are, and they remain, ignorant of their own nature, and of the character of their closest associates, imprisoned by the maze they have jointly fashioned. The book should be of interest to the general reader, to companies interested in performing the plays analyzed, to Ibsen scholars, and as a text for courses in Ibsen.

The Design of The Waste Land offers a detailed, comprehensive explanation of T.S. Eliot's enigmatic poem. It relates The Waste Land to earlier and later poems by Eliot, demonstrating that the major poems describe a continuous spiritual odyssey or quest undertaken by the same individual, initiated by the moment of ecstasy in the Hyacinth garden. Blistein's analysis of Eliot's sources reveals that the protagonist's glimpse of "the heart of light" is equivalent to drinking from the Grail, or communing with God. The incarnate deity momentarily transforms the Hyacinth garden into the likeness of the Edenic paradise. With the inevitable passing of the moment of communion, the protagonist in effect is expelled from the paradisiacal garden as mankind was from Eden. By contrast, the familiar world appears to him a wasteland. The protagonist seeks to drink again from the divine Source and return again to the garden as it was when transfigured by the divine presence. His is a quest for Grail and Homeland.