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Circle of Fire: Dickens' Vision and Style and the Popular Victorian Theater
This study explores the theater actually known and frequented by Dickens in order to show in terms of concrete structural analysis of his novels the nature of the predominantly “dramatic” or “theatrical” quality of his genius. Author William F. Axton finds that the three principal dramatic modes or “voices” that were characteristically Victorian were burlesquerie, grotesquerie, and the melodramatic, and that the novelist’s vision of the world around him was drawn from ways of seeing transformed from those elements in the popular playhouse of his day—as revealed in the structure and theme of Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, ...Read More
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The Osier Cage: Rhetorical Devices in Romeo and Juliet
By studying the diction of Romeo and Juliet, Robert O. Evans examines this, the most rhetorical of Shakespeare’s plays, in terms of an Aristotelian critical category, which has been neglected in modern times. Inherent in his methodology is the assumption that Romeo and Juliet is best regarded as drama, not as pure poetry, though essentially it is the rhetorical brilliance of the poetry that is considered.
Evans begins with an analysis of the important speeches of Romeo and Juliet and defines the controlling devices Shakespeare wove into them, especially oxymoron. He then follows with a discussion of the role of ...Read More
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Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert
George Herbert has always been regarded as a man of singular piety and a poet of uncommon technical ability. Until recent times, however, he was usually thought to have written prosodically ingenious but conceptually thin verse. Mary Ellen Rickey, through a close examination of Herbert’s poetry, reveals the high concentration of ideas in his verse and the richness of his imagery.
Mary Ellen Rickey is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She is author of Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw.
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The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality
In their concern with the perennial controversy between the two great areas in which men seek knowledge, three eminent literary scholars and a distinguished journalist in these essays address themselves to the question, “Do the humanities provide a form of understanding of reality that the sciences do not?”
Monroe C. Beardsley maintains that the humanities considered as contributors to knowledge must deal with the same subject matter as the sciences, but literature and the arts can enlarge our powers of understanding human nature, although not in the way the sciences do (under empirically or logically verifiable laws). Northrop Frye, while ...Read More
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Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse: Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins
Rossell Hope Robbins collaborated with Carleton Brown in the publishing of the Index of Middle English Verse in 1943. With John L. Cutler, associate professor of English in the University of Kentucky, he has now compiled a supplement to the Index incorporating those texts published since 1943. At the same time, the two have completely revised the Index by including in the Supplement texts previously neglected. The number of entries has been increased to 6,000, and more than half of the 4,500 original entries have been revised.
In addition to this basic revision, the appendices of the Index have been ...Read More
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The University in the American Future
In these four notable essays based on Centennial lectures, four eminent scholars analyze the tensions affecting university education today and the forces which will shape the American university of the future.
Kenneth D. Benne, director of the Human Relations Center of Boston University, describes the fragmentation which has come to characterize the university in 1965 in three divergent philosophies of university education and calls for the universities to undertake a radical change of their social organization. For, he says, only by restoring the community of learning can the universities exercise their proper leadership in resolving the conflicts and tensions of ...Read More
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Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations
This collection of fourteen essays by American and English scholars—many of them hitherto unpublished and all of them selected with a view to avoiding the duplication of essays already familiar and available—offers new testimony of the range and accomplishments of Graham Greene’s talent. The essays vary from considerations of general topics to critical analyses of single novels, from a discussion of Greene as a writer of Christian tragedy to a witty, irreverent assessment of The Power and the Glory. The authors here are chiefly concerned with the novels, though frequent allusions reveal something of the nature and importance of the ...Read More
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Hippolyta's View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare's Plays
Scholars have already demonstrated that Shakespeare ‘s language abounds in Biblical allusions and references, but Mr. Bryant now undertakes to show us how such details may bear on the full meaning of the plays. Seeking to interpret Shakespeare’s plays as Christian poetry, Mr. Bryant has developed in this significant work a new critical approach which may have far-reaching consequences for future Shakespearean scholarship.
In an introductory essay the author shows that the typological view of Scripture was a familiar one to the Christians of Shakespeare ‘s time; he suggests that for Shakespeare, as for many of his contemporaries, the Bible ...Read More
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Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw
Richard Crashaw’s use of rhyme is one of the distinctive aspects of his poetic technique, and in the first systematic analysis of his rhyme craft, Mary Ellen Rickey concludes that he was keenly interested in rhyme as a technical device. She traces Crashaw’s development of rhyme repetitions from the simple designs of his early epigrams and secular poems to the elaborate and irregular schemes of his mature verse.
Mary Ellen Rickey is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky.
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The Frontier Mind
In Kentucky, the first frontier beyond the Appalachians, Arthur K. Moore finds a unique ground for examining some of the basic elements in America’s cultural development. There the frontier mind acquired definite form, and there emerged the forces that largely shaped the American West.
Moore reveals the Kentucky frontiersman as a colorful, exciting figure about whom there gathered a golden haze of myth from which historians have never been able to free him. He finds that “noble savage” did not possess those high qualities of mind and spirit which both his contemporaries and present-day writers have attributed him. He especially ...Read More
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