The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic. Peter Gizzi's afterword elucidates some of the fundamental issues of Spicer's poetry and lectures, including the concept of poetic dictation, which Spicer renovates with vocabularies of popular culture: radio, Martians, and baseball; his use of the California landscape as a backdrop for his poems; and his visual imagination in relation to the aesthetics of west-coast funk assemblage. This book delivers a firsthand account of the contrary and turbulent poetics that define Spicer's ongoing contribution to an international avant-garde.

Winner of the 1998 Misha Djordjevic Award for the best book on Serbian culture in English.Editors Gorup and Obradovic have collected stories from thirty-five outstanding writers in this first English anthology of Serbian fiction in thirty years. The anthology, representing a great variety of literary styles and themes, includes works by established writers with international reputations, as well as promising new writers spanning the generation born between 1930 and 1960. These stories may lead to a greater understanding of the current events in the former Yugoslavia.

"In this volume, the contributors -- a veritable Who's Who of Joyce specialists -- provide an excellent introduction to the central issues of contemporary Joyce criticism."

Milton's poems invariably depict the decisive instant in a story, a moment of crisis that takes place just before the action undergoes a dramatic change of course. Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold. Martin Evans identifies this moment of transition as "the Miltonic Moment. "This provocative new study focuses primarily on three of Milton's best known early poems: "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus)," and "Lycidas." These texts share a distinctive perceptual and cognitive structure, which Evans defines as characteristically Miltonic, embracing a single moment that is both ending and beginning.The poems communicate a profound sense of intermediacy because they seem to take place between the boundaries that separate events. The works illuniated here, which also include Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, are all about transition from one form to another: from paganism to Christianity, from youthful inexperience to moral maturity, and from pastoral retirement to heroic engagement. This transformation is often ideological as well as historical or biographical.Evans shows that the moment of transition is characteristic of all Milton's poetry, and he proposes a new way of reading one of the seminal writers of the seventeenth century. Evans concludes that the narrative reversals in Milton's poetry suggest his constant attempts to bring about an intellectual revolution that, at a time of religious and political change in England, would transform an age.

The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Sarah Fielding's first and most celebrated novel, went through several editions, the second of which was heavily revised by her brother Henry. This edition includes Henry's "corrections" in an appendix. In recounting the guileless hero's search for a true friend, the novel depicts the derision with which almost everyone treats his sentimental attitudes to human nature. Acclaimed as an accurate portrait of mid-eighteenth-century London, The Adventures of David Simple sets forth some provocative feminist ideas. Also included is Fielding's much darker sequel, Volume the Last (1753).

Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over thirty years with her darkly comic speculative fiction. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these twenty stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present.

Winner of the 1999 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry given by the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Winner of the Midland Society of Authors Award for Poetry 1999 In this latest, long-awaited collection, Mark Cox delivers a powerful exploration of the vagaries, ironies, and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. With humor, tenderness, a dose of terror, and an occasional swerve into the surreal, these poems probe the evolution of self, self-consciousness, and the interior psychological landscape - the effects of our past patterns and influences on the world of the present. By turns humorous and dark, straightforward and oblique, these poems are inventive and intelligent without forsaking accessibility.

Fernando Pessoa (1888--1935) is perhaps the most engaging of the great Western modernists of this century. Born in Portugal but raised and educated in southern Africa, Pessoa wrote poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.George Monteiro provides refreshingly new interpretations of Pessoa's Mensagem ( Message) and the modernist novella 0 Banqueiro Anarquista ( The Anarchist Banker). But he is primarily interested in tracing Pessoa's influence on a wide range of contemporary writers.Among those Monteiro finds putting Pessoa's work to their own surprising -- and sometimes comic -- uses are Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsberg, John Wain, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and earlier poets including Thomas Merton, Edouard Roditi, and Roy Campbell. In addition, the complete text of Campbell's pioneering biocritical study of Pessoa is published here for the first time.

A leading figure in modern southern literature, described by Newsweek as "one of the best American storytellers," Peter Taylor secured a national following through his long relationship with the New Yorker and his widely read volumes from the 1980s, The Old Forest and Other Stories and A Summons to Memphis. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's portrayals of the battles of strong-willed fathers and mothers with their equally strong-willed sons are at the center of his achievement in fiction.David Robinson presents Taylor as a writer deeply concerned with the interworkings of family relationships, and emphasizes his role as chronicler of the shifts in southern culture in this century. World of Relations provides an important critical assessment of the work of one of the South's greatest writers, and includes the first extensive critical discussion of Taylor's last two works, The Oracle of Stoneleigh Court (1993) and In the Tennessee Country (1994).

At Zero Point presents an entirely new way of looking at Restoration culture, discourse, and satire. The book locates a rupture in English culture and epistemology not at the end of the eighteenth century (when it occurred in France) but at the end of the seventeenth century. Rose Zimbardo's hypothesis is based on Hans Blumenberg's concept of "zero point" -- the moment when an epistemology collapses under the weight of questions it has itself raised and simultaneously a new epistemology begins to construct itself. Zimbardo demonstrates that the Restoration marked both the collapse of the Renaissance order and the birth of modernism (with its new conceptions of self, nation, gender, language, logic, subjectivity, and reality). Using satire as the site for her investigation, Zimbardo examines works by Rochester, Oldham, Wycherley, and the early Swift for examples of Restoration deconstructive satire that, she argues, measure the collapse of Renaissance epistemology. Constructive satire, as exemplified in works by Dryden, has at its discursive center the "I" from which all order arises to be projected to the external world. No other book treats Restoration culture or satire in this way.

Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men's and women's places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women's conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions.

As its title proclaims, Eve’s Striptease delivers a female voice that seeks to “find out for (her)self/ all the desires a body can hold.” Through artful acts of revelation and concealment, these poems test experience against the notions of love and loss that tradition and religion have taught us. These narrative and lyric poems celebrate desire, marriage, and domestic life; they visit sexual terror and consider sickness and death. Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, this work suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Kasdorf writes of a life’s migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing - sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.

Winner of the 1999 Paterson Poetry PrizeOver the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning—one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s—combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Walter Pater and others changed the nature of thought concerning the human body and the physical environment that had shaped it. In response, the 1890s saw the publication of a series of remarkable literary works that had their genesis in the intense scientific and aesthetic activity of those preceding decades -- texts that emphasized themes of degeneration and were themselves stylistically decompositive, with language both a surrogate for physical deformity and a source of anxiety. Susan J. Navarette examines the ways in which scientific and cultural concerns of late nineteenth-century England are coded in the horror literature of the period. By contextualizing the structural, stylistic, and thematic systems developed by writers seeking to reenact textually the entropic forces they perceived in the natural world, Navarette reconstructs the late Victorian mentalité. She analyzes aesthetic responses to trends in contemporary science and explores horror writers' use of scientific methodologies to support their perception that a long-awaited period of cultural decline had begun. In her analysis of the classics Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, Navarette shows how James and Conrad made artistic use of earlier "scientific" readings of the body. She also considers works by lesser-known authors Walter de la Mare, Vernon Lee, and Arthur Machen, who produced fin de siècle stories that took the form of "hybrid literary monstrosities." To underscore the fascination with bodily decay and deformation that these writers explored, The Shape of Fear is enhanced with prints and line drawings by Victor Hugo, James Ensor, and other artists of the day. This elegantly written book formulates a new canon of late Victorian fiction that will intrigue scholars of literature and cultural history.

A 25th anniversary edition of a book cited by Modern Language Journal as "notable for the original and interesting choice of poems and for the accuracy and poetic quality of the translations." Work by 14 Brazilian poets, including the late João Cabral de Melo Neto, is presented en face with translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Ashley Brown, Jane Cooper, Richard Eberhart, Barbara Howes, June Jordan, Galway Kinnell, Jean Longland, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Louis Simpson, Mark Strand, Jean Valentine, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright.Selected by Books for College Libraries (1988).

By the end of the nineteenth century, rhetoric had not yet been established as a legitimate discipline. Fred Newton Scott (1860-1931) spent his life broadening the scope of rhetoric studies through his imaginative, interdisciplinary research. Scott was both a pragmatic reformer and a visionary scholar who used empirical methods and cognitive psychology to expand this field. In this study, Donald Stewart and his wife Patricia examine Scott's essays, speeches, and books to write the first comprehensive biography of the man who became one of the most influential figures in language studies during the early twentieth century.