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Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery
Shakespeare has been viewed by critics both as a secular writer who affirmed the dual nature of man and as a Christian allegorist whose work has a submerged but positive and elaborate pattern of Christian meaning. In Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery, Robert H. West explores the philosophical and supernatural elements of five Shakespearean dramas—Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest.
Through his analysis, West discovers Shakespeare’s respect for the mysteries of existence but no clear definition of the philosophical and moral context of his play worlds. An artistic motivation leads Shakespeare to use these elements ambiguously to create ...Read More
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Ben Jonson's 'Dotages': A Reconsideration of the Late Plays
Although there has been a general revival of interest in Ben Jonson’s dramatic work in the past twenty years, little critical effort has been directed to his late plays—dismissed by John Dryden as the “dotages” of an aging mind. Through a close reading of The Devil Is an Ass, The Staple of News, The New Inn, and The Magnetic Lady in light of Jonson’s own theories of comedy, author Larry S. Champion demonstrates that they reveal the same precise construction and dramatic control found in his acclaimed masterpieces. Furthermore, these works reflect Jonson’s continued emphasis upon realism and satiric attack, ...Read More
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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 Browning Critics
The poetry of Robert Browning has been the subject of extensive literary criticism since his death in 1889. Two well-known Browning scholars here present the best of Browning criticism, bringing together from many sources representative evaluations of the poet and his poetry. The twenty-one essays here have been arranged chronologically so that the reader can follow the development of Browning studies and the fluctuations of his poetic reputation. They express varied points of view and are typical of the critical methods used by the Browning scholars. Included are essays by George Santayana, John J. Chapman, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Elmer ...Read More
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The Book of Kyng Arthur: The Unity of Malory's Morte Darthur
Beginning with a consideration of Malory’s ingenious chronology, this study shows that Malory achieved thematic and structural unity by selecting from the great mass of Arthurian legend three narrative strands—the intrigues of Lancelot and Guinevere, the Grail quest, and the feud between the houses of Lot and Pellinore—using these to illustrate a single theme—the rise, flowering, and downfall of an ideal civilization. This selection and use of diverse materials, Charles Moorman asserts, indicates clearly that Malory set to work with a preconceived plan and that he did achieve his purpose, to write the “haole book of Kyng Arthur.”
Charles Moorman ...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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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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Toward an Augustan Poetic: Edmund Waller's "Reform" of English Poetry
The almost universal adulation given Edmund Waller in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—an adulation which, often as not, attached to his reform of poetry—has been commonly accepted with little question of the grounds on which it is based. In this essay Alexander Ward Allison presents for the first time a specific analysis of the changes from Jacobean modes which Waller made, suggesting in the course of his analysis that the seventeenth century saw not a dissociation of sensibility, but rather a new fusion, of which Waller is a type.
By a careful and detailed reading of the poems, ...Read More
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