Samuel Beckett's work harbors an inevitable complicity with traditional modes and values. His idealist and even nihilist inclinations, for example, are closely related to the abstracting and systematizing tendencies that have predominated in Western thinking. His drama and fiction, in reproducing these tendencies, also help to reinforce and legitimate them. Beckett's work can thus be said to encourage an attitude of stoic resignation or life-denying withdrawal.Sylvie Debevec Henning's study reveals an important countertendency. In examining Beckett's art and literary criticism, his novel Murphy, plays Krapp's Last Tape and Endgame, his only film venture, and the late story "The Lost Ones," she shows that through a variety of double-voiced techniques -- irony, parody, and satire -- Beckett also brings a powerful critical light to bear upon our culture's repeated attempts to reduce or eliminate the more problematic aspects of existence and even mocks our desire to do so. His disquieting and occasionally uproarious interweaving of contradictory perspectives -- somber and carnivalized, established and contestory -- suggests that suffering and anguish are fundamental to life, while it affirms their relation to laughter and creative vigor within a richer, if less settled, cultural context.Drawing upon the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and particularly Bakhtin, Henning argues that Beckett's profound critique of Western intellectual tradition does not necessarily entail the loss of all positive values and beliefs. On the contrary, his use of carnivalesque and dialogized modes signals a revitalizing capacity that has not been fully appreciated.

Many books have been written about Appalachia, but few have voiced its concerns with the warmth and directness of this one. From hundreds of interviews gathered by the Appalachian Oral History Project, editors Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg have woven a rich verbal tapestry that portrays the people and the region in all their variety.The words on the page have the ring of truth, for these are the people of Appalachia speaking for themselves. Here they recollect an earlier time of isolation but of independence and neighborliness. For a nearer time they tell of the great changes that took place in Appalachia with the growth of coal mining and railroads and the disruption of old ways. Persisting through the years and sounding clearly in the interviews are the dignity of the Appalachian people and their close ties with the land, despite the exploitation and change they have endured.When first published, Our Appalachia was widely praised. This new edition again makes available an authentic source of social history for all those with an interest in the region.

This volume is the first to explore broadly many important theoretical and applied issues concerning the mental health of Appalachians. The authors -- anthropologists, psychologists, social workers and others -- overturn many assumptions held by earlier writers, who have tended to see Appalachia and its people as being dominated by a culture of poverty.While the heterogeneity of the region is acknowledged in the diversity of sub-areas and populations discussed, dominant themes emerge concerning Appalachia as a whole. The result of the authors' varied approaches is a cumulative portrait of a strong regional culture with native support systems based on family, community, and religion.Some of the contributors examine therapeutic approaches, including family therapy, that consider the implications of the cultural context. Others explore the impact of Appalachian culture on the impact of Appalachian culture on the development of mental health problems and coping skills and the resulting potential for conflict between Appalachian clients and non-Appalachian health providers. Still others examine cultural considerations in therapeutic encounters and mental health service delivery. The book is rich in case studies and empirical data. The practical, applied nature of the essays will enhance their value for practitioners seeking ways to improve mental health care in the region.

"A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written." So said Robert Frost in instructing readers on how to achieve poetic literacy. George Monteiro's newest book follows that dictum to enhance our understanding of Frost's most valuable poems by demonstrating the ways in which they circulate among the constellations of great poems and essays of the New England Renaissance. Monteiro reads Frost's own poetry not against "all the other poems ever written" but in the light of poems and essays by his precursors, particularly Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson. Familiar poems such as "Mending Wall," "After Apple-Picking," "Birches," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Road Not Taken," and "Mowing," as well as lesser known poems such as "The Draft Horse," "The Ax-Helve," "The Bonfire," "Dust of Snow," "A Cabin in the Clearing," "The Cocoon," and "Pod of the Milkweed," are renewed by fresh and original readings that show why and how these poems pay tribute to their distinguished sources.Frost's insistence that Emerson and Thoreau were the giants of nineteenth-century American letters is confirmed by the many poems, variously influenced, that derive from them. His attitude toward Emily Dickinson, however, was more complex and sometimes less generous. In his twenties he molded his poetry after hers. But later, after he joined the faculty of Amherst College, he found her to be less a benefactor than a competitor. Monteiro tells a two-stranded tale of attraction, imitation, and homage countered by competition, denigration, and grudging acceptance of Dickinson's greatness as a woman poet. In a daring move, he composes -- out of Frost's own words and phrases -- the talk on Emily Dickinson that Frost was never invited to give.In showing how Frost's work converses with that of his predecessors, Monteiro gives us a new Frost whose poetry is seen as the culmination of an in¬tensely felt New England literary experience.

The "singing family" of which Jean Ritchie writes is that of her parents, Balis and Abigail Ritchie, and their fourteen children, all born and reared in Viper, Kentucky, deep in the Cumberland Mountains. Jean, the youngest of the clan, grew up to be a world renowned folksinger. But she was hardly unique in the family. All the Ritchies sang -- when they worked, when they prayed, when they rejoiced, even when tragedy struck.Singing Family of the Cumberlands is both an appealing account of family life and a treasury of American folklore and folksong. In the deceptively simple but picturesque language of rural Kentucky, Jean Ritchie tells of a way of life now nearly vanished and of a gentle, upright people shielded from the outside world by forbidding mountain ranges, preserving the traditions of their forebears.Foremost among those traditions were the British folksongs brought from England by James Ritchie in 1768. Even in a region noted for its wealth of folksongs, the Ritchies' inheritance was exceptional. Forty-two of the family's beloved songs are woven through Jean Ritchie's narrative, complete with words and often musical scores. Each song evokes a memory for Jean -- hoeing corn, stirring off molasses, telling ghost stories, singing a dying baby to its eternal rest. Songs lightened the burden of poverty for the Ritchies and brought them joy and solace. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Singing Family of the Cumberlands will delight readers in all walks of life.

The transmission of policy preferences from the mass electorate to the political elite is the subject of Warren Miller's illuminating new book. The elites of whom he writes are the delegates to recent nominating conventions analyzed in their subsequent roles as activists involved in presidential election campaigns. Miller's analysis delineates circumstances and conditions that affect the degree to which the issue preferences of these elite activists are more or less representative of those held by rank-and-file members of the nation's electorate. Miller argues that, although consent and accountability are basic principles in the theory of democratic representation, the ways in which convention delegates are selected are not designed to implement these principles. Nevertheless, empirical analysis demonstrates that they often do so to varying degrees. Delegates selected in primary elections, Miller finds, are more representative of the ordinary voters than are delegates selected by any other means -- except for Democratic super delegates, who are the most representative of all.Miller's analysis explains why elites who campaign on behalf of particular candidates are less representative of mass policy opinions than are those who campaign on behalf of their parties, and why, ironically, the elites who campaign on behalf of specific policies are even less representative of the issue positions of their parties' rank-and-file partisans. Without Consent, a sequel to Parties in Transition, makes an important contribution to the literature on theories of representation by its novel analysis of linkages connecting public opinion and public policy through the presidential campaign elites.

Originally published in 1950, The Enduring Hills was Janice Holt Giles's first novel. It is based in part on her own courtship and introduction to the Kentucky mountain country. Here, Giles introduces Hod and Mary Pierce and begins her Appalachian trilogy. Hod Pierce, a boy not unlike Henry Giles, who grows up on Piney Ridge, where generations of Pierces have made a living from the stubborn soil. Hod loves his people and the land but longs also for wider horizons, for more education, and for the freedom he imagines can be found in the outside world. It takes World War II to carry Hod away from the Ridge and out into the great world, and it is a long time before he comes back. After the war is over, Hod settles into marriage and a factory job in the city. Finally it is Mary, his city-bred wife, who sees at last that to Hod, Piney Ridge will always be home.In her preface to the second edition, Mrs. Giles wrote, "I believe [the story] is timeless and as the hands of the clock have turned and turned, people are turning back to the earth, knowing now that saving this earth is the most important work in the world, that we must all become, as Hod and Mary Pierce did, a man and woman with faith in the earth."Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

South from Hell-fer-Sartin, a short creek flowing into the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River, lies one of the of the most isolated regions in Kentucky. There, on the north slope of the Pine Mountain range in Leslie and Perry counties -- probably the last stronghold of white, English-language folk tales in North America -- Leonard W. Roberts recorded this rich collection more than three decades ago. To a people who, at that time, watched dancing hearth fires more often than television, the adventures of Jack in the land of witches and giants, monsters and beautiful princesses, provided first-class entertainment. Here are such old favorites as "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Golden Arm," retold in the idiom of the Kentucky mountains. Here are hauntingly beautiful cantes fables and earthy Irishman jokes. Here are encounters with Indians and marvelous hunting escapades.Roberts introduces his collection, first published in 1955, with a sympathetic description of the mountain way of life. He notes especially the bewildering and rapid changes that came to the Pine Mountain watershed in that decade as the highways and electric lines at last brought in a sophistication that preferred the soap opera to the folk tale. Although the stories Roberts recorded were still a firm part of folk tradition at the time, he believed that within a decade or two they would be forgotten -- a prediction, sadly, by now no doubt fulfilled.Any lover of the vanishing art of tale telling will relish this rich treasury of folklore and humor. Full notes on sources, types, motifs, parallels, and possible origins of the tales make this collection valuable also for folklorists.

Scholars may have widely differing views of the Progressive Era, but all see business as holding the key to the reforms of that period. In this new book Judith Sealander amplifies our understanding of the relationship between business leaders and reform through a detailed examination of Dayton and the Miami Valley of Ohio. She focuses specifically on four progressive projects that made this nine-county region nationally known as a center for reform activism. The four "projects" include an extensive program of employee benefits instituted at the National Cash Register Company; the creation, in the Miami Conservancy District, of a massive flood prevention system; the institution of a new businesslike city-manager government in Dayton; and a new experimental approach to education in the region's public and private schools.Well grounded in the scholarly literature on progressivism and drawing from a rich trove of local manuscript sources, Judith Sealander has provided an integrated analysis of the role of business leadership in these four reform areas that corrects the exaggerated treatment business has often received. She shows how this one group of businessmen functioned as reformers, the "grand plans" they had for changing society, their merger of scientific engineering, business management, and moral fervor, and the benefits and costs of their kind of progressivism.Grand Plans contributes new insights into the Progressive Era and will interest scholars of that period as well as historians of American business, urban affairs, and reform.

Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the major American poets of this century and the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1950). Yet far less critical attention has focused on her work than on that of her peers.In this comprehensive biocritical study, Melhem -- herself a poet and critic -- traces the development of Brooks's poetry over four decades, from such early works as A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, and The Bean Eaters, to the more recent In the Mecca, Riot, and To Disembark. In addition to analyzing the poetic devices used, Melhem examines the biographical, historical, and literary contexts of Brooks's poetry: her upbringing and education, her political involvement in the struggle for civil rights, her efforts on behalf of young black poets, her role as a teacher, and her influence on black letters. Among the many sources examined are such revealing documents as Brooks's correspondence with her editor of twenty years and with other writers and critics.From Melhem's illuminating study emerges a picture of the poet as prophet. Brooks's work, she shows, is consciously charged with the quest for emancipation and leadership, for black unity and pride. At the same time, Brooks is seen as one of the preeminent American poets of this century, influencing both African American letters and American literature generally. This important book is an indispensable guide to the work of a consummate poet.

During the period from 1931 to 1967 -- thirty-six years -- Kentuckians elected only one Republican as governor of the Commonwealth. Yet that man, a former justice of the state's highest court, seldom appears as other than a footnote in the standard histories. That is unfortunate, for Simeon Willis of Ashland made a fine record as governor, assuming the office during World War II and leaving it strengthened in a postwar world. In this new volume in the Public Papers of the Governors of Kentucky series, editor James C. Klotter has assembled 173 documents and public statements, so that the Willis administration may be examined in depth for the first time.Such an examination is long overdue, for Willis sought to accomplish much under difficult circumstances. Hindered by the opposition party's control of the legislature and operating under wartime restrictions, the Willis administration nevertheless made path-breaking moves in education, health care, transportation, and civil rights.Many of the same difficulties Kentucky has faced in more recent years also existed during Willis's term. How he dealt with those puzzles can be instructive for today's citizens and leaders. Willis faced budget problems, sought to increase aid to education, confronted a conflict over the presidency of what is now Morehead State University, and attempted to increase tourism in the state. His calls for change would be echoed by later governors.

The Papers of Henry Clay span the crucial first half of the nineteenth century in American history. Few men in his time were so intimately concerned with the formation of national policy, and few influenced so profoundly the growth of American political institutions.The year 1837 found Henry Clay hard at work in a successful effort to organize and strengthen the new Whig party. In his attempt to provide for it an ideological core, he emphasized restoration of the Bank of the United States, distribution of the treasury surplus to the states, continued adherence to his Compromise Tariff Act of 1833, and federal funding of internal improvements. The achievement of these goals, Clay reasoned, would mitigate the severe impact of the Depression of 1837 and sweep the Whigs into the White House in 1840.Soon after the election of 1836, Clay began running again for the presidency. By 1838 it was clear to him that he would have to come to grips politically with the long-muted slavery question. This he did in February 1839 in a Senate speech that was so proslavery, anti-abolitionist, and racially extremist that it cost him the Whig presidential nomination at the Harrisburg convention in December 1839. William Henry Harrison was nominated in his stead and won handily. But one month after his inauguration Harrison died and Vice President John Tyler, a states' rights Democrat turned Whig, was elevated to the presidency.Senator Clay emerged from his disappointment at Harrisburg as the acknowledged leader of the Whig party and further unified it in a wide-ranging assault on the Tyler administration's refusal to support Whig principles. By the end of 1843 Tyler had been broken, the Whig party was Clay's to lead, and the Kentuckian was again in the presidential lists. Confident that 1844 would surely be his year, Clay unfortunately failed to see the formation and growth of the black cloud that was Texas annexation.Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Along the isolated headwaters of the Kentucky River -- Cutshin and Greasy creeks -- folklorist Leonard Roberts found the Couches, a remarkable mountain family of gifted memory and imagination. For half a century they had preserved the traditional ways of their forebears -- the farming methods, the household arts, and the games, ballads, dances, and tales that were their chief entertainment.In Up Cutshin and Down Greasy, brothers Dave and Jim Couch, born about the turn of the century, recall clearly their childhood days on Sang Branch of Greasy and Clover Fork of Big Leatherwood. Dave, a professional moonshiner and bottlegger in his younger days, tells of his brushes with the law. Jim engaged in lumbering and coal mining, with a little moonshining on the side. His accounts of mine accidents, in particular the one that cost him his leg, give an insight into the minds of those who risk their lives underground for the sake of high pay.First published in 1959, the book is available once again in paperback to pleasure a new generation of readers.

Today Fanny Burney's venture into authorship would not be questionable. She was, after all, a daughter of a celebrated musician, and the Burney family was know to the circle of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale. Yet as Kristina Straub ably shows, the public recognition which followed the publication of her first novel placed Fanny Burney in a situation of disturbing ambiguity. Did she become famous or notorious? Was she a prodigy or a freak? In this study of Burney, Straub not only describes and analyzes the disturbing transition of a writer's self-awareness as a woman and a literary artist from private to public terms, but also reveals in Burney's works a hitherto unacknowledged complexity."

"God knew that it would take brave and sturdy people to survive in these beautiful but rugged hills. So He sent us His very strongest men and women." So begins the heartwarming story of Verna Mae and her father, Isom B. ""Kitteneye"" Slone, an extradordinay personal family history set in the hills around Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky.

The Kentuckians of Janice Holt Giles's title were that hardy band of angels who straggled through Cumberland Gap in the 1770s and carved their farms from the wilderness of Virginia's westernmost country. In her historical novel, first published in 1953, Giles invited the reader to experience the danger and beauty of life on the American frontier.Many of the frontiersmen were hunters in search of escape from an ever-advancing civilization, seeking freedom and space. Such a man was David Cooper, who had hunted the Kentucky wilderness with Daniel Boone before the first settlers crossed the Appalachians. No love of land or home or woman had been strong enough to hold David -- until he met Bethia. It was for her that he cleared his patch of forest, planted crops, and built a cabin. Too late, he learned that the girl he had dreamed of marrying was the wife of his enemy.David and Bethia belonged to a generation that never knew or expected security, and the background of their story is one of turmoil: Outnumbered and ill-equipped, early settlers were hard put to defend their forts; and, although united in war against the British and their Indian allies, they were often at odds among themselves. Many, including Boone, held land grants from Judge Henderson's Transylvania Company. Others, like David, based their claims on the authority of Virginia. Few today realize how close the British came to winning out.In her research, Giles studied the journals of the early Kentuckians and has retold their story in their own easy-flowing, cadenced prose. Only the three central characters are fictional. All subsidiary characters and historical events are authentic, set against the background of a country the author knows and loves.Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.