A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't."Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives."

The position Frances Burney (1752-1840) holds as a novelist, journalist, and letterwriter is now undisputed, thanks to reevaluations of the canon in recent years. Yet Burney was always intrigued by, and wrote for, the stage. Though only one of Burney's dramas was performed in her lifetime, Barbara Darby places the plays in the context of performance and feminist theory, challenging past assertions about Burney that were based entirely on her novels and journals. Darby maintains that in exposing the failure of such practices and institutions as courtship, marriage, family, government, and the church, Burney's dramas often exceed her novels in the depth of their social commentary.In her four comedies and four tragedies, Burney uses stage space, dialogue, blocking, and gesture to highlight the ways power is distributed among society's members. According to Darby, these plays show that the eighteenth-century female experience was dominated by physical, psychic, and emotional regulation that included bodily punishment and the limitation of personal choice.Placing Burney alongside other prominent female playwrights of the period, Darby brings to light a substantial body of work, revealing that Burney's drama was not a casual sideline to her novel writing. Frances Burney, Dramatist, expands our appreciation of the extent to which eighteenth-century women playwrights used the stage as a forum.

Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture. These essays consider the work of twenty-one of the foremost southern writers whose most important fiction has appeared in the last quarter of this century. As the region's contemporary writers have begun to gain a wide audience, critics have begun to distinguish what Hugh Holman has called "the fresh, the vital, and the new" in southern literary culture. Southern Writers at Century's End is the first volume to take an extensive look at the current generation of southern writers.Authors considered include: James Lee Burke, Fred Chappell, Robert Drake, Andre Dubus, Clyde Edgerton, Richard Ford, Kaye Gibbons, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, Mary Hood, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Richard Marius, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Tim McLaurin, T.R. Pearson, Lee Smith, Anne Tyle,r Alice Walker, and James Wilcox.

Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden’s fruit: \u201cIn the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen.\u201dVaz’s beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. \u201cListen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose,\u201d on character sings, \u201cthat the song might be more beautiful.\u201d Such a verse might describe Vaz’s own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject’s ambiguities and her characters’ conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life’s discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

Evangelical churches sing hymns written between 1870 and 1920 so often that many children learn them by rote before they are able to read religious texts. A cherished part of communal Christian life and an important and effective way to teach doctrine today, these hymns served an additional social purpose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they gave evangelical women a voice in their churches. When the sacred music business expanded after the Civil War, writing hymn texts gave publishing opportunities to women who were forbidden to preach, teach, or pray aloud in mixed groups. Authorized by oral expression, gospel hymns allowed women to articulate alternative spiritual models within churches that highly valued orality. These feminized hymns are the focus of \u0022I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent.\u0022 Drawing upon her own experience as a Baptist, June Hadden Hobbs argues that the evangelical tradition is an oral tradition--it is not anti-intellectual but antiprint. Evangelicals rely on memory and spontaneous oral improvisation; hymns serve to aid memory and permit interaction between oral and written language. By comparing male and female hymnists' use of rhetorical forms, Hobbs shows how women utilized the only oral communication allowed to them in public worship. Gospel hymns permitted women to use a complex system of images already associated with women and domesticity. This feminized hymnody challenged the androcentric value system of evangelical Christianity by making visible the contrasting masculine and feminine versions of Christianity. When these hymns were sung in church, women's voices and opinions moved out of the private sphere and into public religion. The hymns are so powerful that they are suppressed by some contemporary fundamentalists today. In Sing for I Cannot Be Silent June Hadden Hobbs employs an interdisciplinary mix of feminist literary analysis, social history, rhetoric and composition theory, hymnology, autobiography, and theology to examine hymns central to worship in most evangelical churches today.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) are among the most enduring works in the English language. In the decades following their publication, writers on both sides of the Atlantic produced no fewer than two hundred imitations, revisions, and parodies of Carroll's fantasies for children. Carolyn Sigler has gathered the most interesting and original of these responses to the Alice books, many of them long out of print. Produced between 1869 and 1930, these works trace the extraordinarily creative, and often critical, response of diverse writers. These writers -- male and female, radical and conservative -- appropriated Carroll's structures, motifs, and themes in their Alice-inspired works in order to engage in larger cultural debates. Their stories range from Christina Rossetti's angry subversion of Alice's adventures, Speaking Likenesses (1874), to G.E. Farrow's witty fantasy adventure, The Wallypug of Why (1895), to Edward Hope's hilarious parody of social and political foibles, Alice in the Delighted States (1928). Anyone who has ever followed Alice down the rabbit hole will enjoy the adventures of her literary siblings in the wide Wonderland of the human imagination.

Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more.By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing during the first two decades of the century was a sign of things to come, the period between the two world wars was the crucial one for the South's literary development: a literary revival in Richmond came to fruition; at Vanderbilt University a group of young men produced The Fugitive, a remarkable, controversial magazine that published some of the century's best verse in its brief run; and the publication and widespread recognition of Faulkner (among others) inaugurated the great flood of southern writing that was to follow in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. With more than forty years of experience writing and reading about the subject, and friendships with many of the figures discussed, J. A. Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide the first comprehensive account of southern American literature since 1900. Bryant pays attention to both the cultural and the historical context of the works and authors discussed, and presents the information in an enjoyable, accessible style. No lover of great American literature can afford to be without this book.

"Deep in the center of every tree, you'll find the heartwood. The characters in this new book by poet Nikky Finney are the heartwood of their small Kentucky communities. You'll meet Buck Jones and Mae Bennet, whose anger has twisted them up inside, Queenie Sims and Arizona Scott, who can see the good in people, and Trina Sims and Jenny Bryan, two young women who discover how much they are alike despite their different skin color.

il cuore : the heart is a major new collection of poetry by Kathleen Fraser, one of the most significant poets of the last generation and a writer of unusual courage and inventiveness. From the intimacy of early poems to the syntactic play of her much-praised book, when new time folds up (1993), Fraser's work examines fields of possibility, where the visual, theoretical, and lyrical collide. This book provides a generous selection of work both new and old, tracing the development of her poetics over the last three decades. Rich with detail, these poems radicalize intention by embracing error, as in "boundayr," and reassert language innovation as a feminist strategy. They lead us toward "the infinity of a door only slightly ajar" and have established Fraser as one of America's preeminent experimental writers.

Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

The Cold War -- that long ideological conflict between the world's two superpowers -- had a profound effect not only on nations but on individuals, especially all those involved in setting and implementing the policies that shaped the struggle. Donald Nuechterlein was one such individual and this is his story.Although based in fact, the narrative reads like fiction, and it takes the reader behind the scenes as no purely factual telling of that complex story can. Presented as the story of David and Helen Bruening and their family, A Cold War Odyssey carries us across three continents. Against a backdrop of national and international events, we follow the Bruenings through five decades as David's governmental and academic assignments take them to all corners of the world.In the tradition of Herman Wouk's Winds of War, the Bruenings' personal and professional odyssey offers us a microcosm of world history in the second half of the twentieth century. Through the acute eyes of these participant observers, we see the partitioning of Europe after World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Watergate and Iran, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the end of the Cold War. With each succeeding episode, our understanding of the causes and consequences of international struggle is deepened through the Bruenings' experience.

Those who have traveled know the experience of extended time and sharpened perception. Muriel Rukeyser's account of Puck Fair — the last existing pagan festival of the goat — captures just that state of consciousness. Set in County Kerry, Ireland, The Orgy evokes this great American poet's journey of sensual and psychological transformation in the midst of a lush account of Irish culture and tradition. With a preface by Sharon Olds.

A Romance of the Republic, published in 1867, was Lydia Maria Child's fourth novel and the capstone of her remarkable literary career. Written shortly after the Civil War, it offered a progressive alternative to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Writer, magazine publisher and outspoken abolititionist, Child defied the norms of gender and class decorum in this novel by promoting interracial marriage as a way blacks and whites could come to view each other with sympathy and understanding. In constructing the tale of fair-skinned Rosa and Flora Royal -- daughters of a slaveowner whose mother was also the daughter of a slaveowner -- Child consciously attempted to counter two popular claims: that racial intermarriage was "unnatural" and that slavery was a benevolent institution. But Child's target was not merely racism. Her characters are forced both to reconsider their attitudes toward "white" and "black" and to question the very foundation of the patriarchal society in which they live.

Miracle tales, in which people are rewarded for piety or punished for sin through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, were a popular literary form all through the Middle Ages. Milagros de Nuestra Sehora, a collection of such stories by the Spanish secular priest Gonzalo de Berceo, is a premier example of this genre; it is also regarded as one of the four most important texts of medieval Spain. Difficulties in translating this work have made it unavailable in English except in fragments; now Spanish-language scholars Richard Terry Mount and Annette Grant Cash have made the entire work accessible to English readers for the first time. Berceo's miracle tales use the verse form cuaderna via (fourfold way) of fully rhymed quatrains -- which Berceo may even have invented -- and are told in the language of the common man. They were written to be read aloud, most likely to an audience of pilgrims, and are an outstanding example of oral religious narrative. The total work comprises twenty-five miracles, preceded by a renowned Introduction that celebrates the Virgin in rich symbolic allegory. Mount and Cash's translation is highly readable, yet it retains the original meaning and captures Berceo's colloquial style and medieval nuances.An introduction placing the miracles in their medieval context and a bibliography complement the text.

Renaissance Europe was the scene of flourishing and innovative dramatic art, and seventeenth-century Spain enjoyed its own Golden Age of the stage. According to traditional studies of this period, however, men seemed to be the only participants. Now in Dramas of Distinction, Teresa Scott Soufas offers the first book-length critical study of five important women playwrights: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marfa de Zayas y Sotomayor. By locating the plays within their period, Soufas avoids universalizing women without regard to history. Her approach transcends the simple measurement of women authors against male models. Confronting the issue of female silence demanded by seventeenth-century Spanish patriarchy, Soufas compares the drive to limit and contain theater space to Renaissance society's efforts to limit and contain women. Yet these dramatists still found ways to question their own roles and male authority. Caro and Cueva investigate the difficult relationship between women and monarchy. Azevedo explores the ways Renaissance women become commodities in the marriage market. Cross-dressed women characters add carnivalesque implications to three plays in which gender identities are unstable. Finally, Enrfquez challenges the precepts of Lope de Vega's comedia nueva as she attempts to adhere to classical formal principles and reject the public playhouse.As a companion to the recently published anthology Women's Acts, also edited by Soufas, this study significantly contributes not only to Hispanic studies but also to women's studies, Renaissance studies, and comparative literature.

The Falling Hour is the fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn, one of the most highly regarded poets of his generation. It is a fiercly elegiac and even apocalyptic book, culminating in a series of blistering elegies written after the sudden death of Wojahn’s wife, the poet Linda Hull. In these poems, the process of mourning and lamentation is examined in all of its intricacy, rage, and sorrowful ambivalence.