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Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy
In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies—from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night—he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse.
Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early and late, dutifully concerned himself with the production of laughter, the ...Read More
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Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age
Worldmaking Spenser reexamines the role of Spenser's work in English history and highlights the richness and complexity of his understanding of place. The volume centers on the idea that complex and allusive literary works such as The Faerie Queene must be read in the context of the cultural, literary, political, economic, and ideological forces at play in the highly allegorical poem. The authors define Spenser as the maker of poetic worlds, of the Elizabethan world, and of the modern world. The essays look at Spenser from three distinct vantage points. The contributors explore his literary origins in classical, medieval, and ...Read More
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Criteria Of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment
British writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century initiated a critique of human knowledge unrivaled in both its scope and its enthusiasm. Author Kevin L. Cope now attempts to provide a coherent, evocative account of explanatory rhetoric in early modern Britain.
Critics and historians, Cope argues, have done an admirable job of describing the details of the intellectual movements of this period but they have failed to examine the intellectual, social, and psychological implications of explanation itself. Criteria of Certainty makes up for this shortcoming by treating explanation as a composite literary and philosophical mode, as a kind of "master ...Read More
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The Unfolding God of Jung and Milton
In this first extensive Jungian treatment of Milton’s major poems, James P. Driscoll uses archetypal psychology to explore Milton’s great themes of God, man, woman, and evil and offers readers deepened understanding of Jung’s profound thoughts on Godhead. The Father, the Son, Satan, Messiah, Samson, Adam, and Eve gain new dimensions of meaning as their stories become epiphanies of the archetypes of Godhead.
God and Satan of Paradise Lost are seen as the ego and the shadow of a single unfolding personality whose anima is the Holy Spirit and Milton’s muse. Samson carries the Yahweh archetype examined by Jung in ...Read More
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King Lear and the Gods
Many critics hold that Shakespeare’s King Lear is primarily a drama of meaningful suffering and redemption within a just universe ruled by providential higher powers. William Elton’s King Lear and the Gods challenges the validity of this widespread optimistic view. Testing the prevailing view against the play’s acknowledged sources, and analyzing the functions of the double plot, the characters, and the play’s implicit ironies, Elton concludes that this standard interpretation constitutes a serious misreading of the tragedy.
William R. Elton is professor of English at the Graduate School, City University of New York. He has published widely in English Renaissance ...Read More
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Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War
Loving Arms examines the war-related writings of five British women whose works explore the connections among gender, war, and story-telling. While not the first study to relate the subjects of gender and war, it is the first within a growing body of criticism to focus specifically on British culture during and after World War II.
Evoking the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V and then her own father's account of being moved to tears on V-J Day because he had been too young to fight, Karen Schneider posits that the war story has a far-reaching potency. She admits—perhaps ...Read More
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Johnson, Rasselas, and the Choice of Criticism
Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems.
Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve ...Read More
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Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to Paradise Lost
Literary allegory has deep roots in early reading and interpretation of Scripture and classical epic and myth. In this substantial study, Mindele Treip presents an overview of the history and theory of allegorical exegesis upon Scripture, poetry, and especially the epic from antiquity to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with close focus on the Renaissance and on the triangular literary relationship of Tasso, Spenser, and Milton.
Exploring the different ways in which the term allegory has been understood, Treip finds significant continuities-within-differences in a wide range of critical writings, including texts of postclassical, patristic and rabbinical writers, medieval writers, ...Read More
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Henrietta
As an orphan under the care of her selfish aunt who pressures her to convert to Catholicism and enter a loveless marriage, Henrietta learns to live by her wits. Henrietta’s story draws attention to the difficulty for women of earning a living in mid-eighteenth-century England and offers readers strikingly insightful and modern reflections on human nature. Charlotte Lennox was a friend of both Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson and was generally admired by many of their contemporaries. A major influence on Jane Austen, Lennox is an innovator in the tradition of English women’s fiction. Out of print since the late ...Read More
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The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe
Mary Blachford Tighe was born in Dublin in 1772 and became a poet by the age of seventeen. Her enormously popular 1805 epic poem "Psyche; or, The Legend of Love" made her a fixture of English literary history for much of the nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, however, Tighe was better known for her influence on Keats's poetry than the considerable merits of her own work.
The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe restores Tighe to the general canon of English literature of the period. With over eighty-five poems, including the complete Psyche, and extracts from ...Read More
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