The first major book of feminist critical theory published in the United States is now available in an expanded second edition. This widely cited pioneering work presents a new introduction by the editor and a new bibliography of feminist critical theory from the last decade. This book has become indispensable to an understanding of feminist theory. Contributors include Cheri Register, Dorin Schumacher, Marcia Holly, Barbara Currier Bell, Carol Ohmann, Carolyn Heilbrun, Catherine Stimpson, and Barbara A. White.

In the title poem "Fortress", the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world. All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the solitary noticing consciousness is in control - because the observed world seems beautiful to the observer, great joy is possible despite the sense of difficulty or sorrow. The language here is rich and elegant. Truth is relentlessly addressed.

In her historical novels about Kentucky, Janice Holt Giles has become known for the integrity with which she handles her material and for the realism with which she writes. In The Believers, first published in 1957, she continues her series about the settling of Kentucky with a moving story of love and marriage set in a Shaker community.Rebecca Fowler is only seventeen when she marries Richard Cooper. She cannot remember a time when she has not loved and trusted him and followed where he led. At first the marriage is happy; it is only after their child is stillborn that Richard shows preliminary signs of religious fanaticism in his insistence that this is God's punishment visited upon them. The Shaker missionaries newly arrived in Kentucky find him an easy convert.When Richard joins the Shaker community, Rebecca goes with him, as a dutiful wife should, hoping that her love will ultimately win him back to her and to the larger world. She becomes part of a strange world in which men and women -- even husbands and wives -- live apart, coming together only for meals and for worship. As time passes and she sees Richard's affection recede, only her stubborn honesty gives her the strength to deny lip service to a doctrine she cannot truly accept and, at the last, courage to follow the dictates of her heart.In this novel, Mrs. Giles gives us a unique picture of everyday life in a Shaker village, one of the experiments in utopian communal living that are a part of American history. Realistically but with understanding, she shows us a society animated not only by saintliness but by bigotry and ordinary human frailties.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.

Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood-commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own-a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing "the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true. "Water and light are constant images in this book, apt conduits to the past. Memories are refracted "in the faces of old regrets." But they are not wholly lost for they inform the present; they continue "beating loud." The Folded Heart is a lyrical compression of language, precise, intensely felt.

Colonists and Native Americans alternate in these poems of encounter between the intruding culture and the culture the colonist found. Walking in Stone refers to spiritual sources powerful enough to sink their footsteps into rock.Against such a background, John Spaulding finds voices of encounter (in a way he speaks for them by inheritance-his ancestors came to New England in 1750 and one married a Native American). His poems resemble journal entries, oral testimonies. The "knife people," the "iron men," as the Indians call them, come in "floating islands" across the sea. The colonists saw them as "wild people," "Satan's children." Separately and together in these powerful poems they suffer cold and pestilence, capture and slaughter, and although one is the military victor, both suffer spiritual loss.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is that rare combination, a writer equally admired as poet and critic. The variety of subjects in Green Age is characteristic of her writing: from the opening poem, "Fifty," funny, courageous, and defiant, to a set of birthday poems for a grown daughter; from emulations of the Persian mystic Rumi, to the provactive "Meditation in Seven Days," whose central assumption is that we may find in the Bible traces of a Canaanite goddess whose worship was forbidden with the advent of patriarchal monotheism. But if her subjects may seem formidable, her poems are not. Ostriker is accessible, witty, daring, and humane, and she has become one of the most praised poets of her generation.

According to legend, the Bedouin tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia held poetry competitions during annual fairs near Mecca. The wining poems called Mu'allaqát, or Hanging Odes, were embroidered in gold on banners and suspended from the walls of Arabia's most sacred shrine, Ka'ba. Desert Tracings is a translation of six classical sixth to eighth century odes. Arabic codes (qasidas) traditionally begin with the relationship of the lover to the loved. Usually set at opening in the beloved's abandoned desert campsite, where the only evidence that remains is tent marks and torrent beds in the sand - "naked tracings,/ worn thin, like inscriptions/ carved in flat stones" - the qasida moves gracefully through the thematic parts, the lover's grief, the quest, and the final acceptance of a world deprived of the beloved. Like the oryx-doe trapped within the unyielding cycles of the desert world.As Michael Sells writes in his introduction, the qasidahas been overshadowed in the West by other Arabic literature, such as The Arabian Nights, but the qasidais the primary literary tradition in both pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabia. The remarkable richness of language and range of mood captured in theses translations help explain their enduring fascination.

The speaker in Irene McKinney’s poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The center sequence of poems in the Emily Dickinson persona explores and magnifies that great and enigmatic figure. The poems are firmly grounded in concern for the ways in which the elemental powers are at work in the earth and in us: on the surface of our lives, and deeper in the underworld of the coalmines. In McKinney’s poems, the human world is never seen as separate from the natural one.

The First World War is a watershed in the intellectual and spiritual history of the modern world. On the one hand, it brought an end to a sense of optimism and decency bred by the prosperity of nineteenth-century Europe. On the other, it brought forth a sense of futility and alienation that has since pervaded European thought. That cataclysmic experience is richly reflected in the work of writers and artists from both sides of the conflict, and this study provides a detailed analysis of two basic themes -- death and degradation -- that mark the literature about the war.From their accounts most men entered the war lightheartedly, filled with ideals of patriotism and glory, but these generous feelings were soon quelled as the war settled into a stalemate, its operations reduced to simply grinding away the opposing forces. In these operations, Alfredo Bonadeo shows, men became mere aggregations thrown against one another, wasted with no appreciable effects or gains, save carnage itself.This cheapening and disregard for human life and being Bonadeo finds rooted not only in the conditions of war but, significantly, in a contempt for the common man prevailing in European political and intellectual circles. This attitude is revealed most plainly in his analysis of the Italian literature, which hitherto has received little note. Italian leaders saw the war as an opportunity to expiate a sense of national guilt, and here the inconclusive campaigns made their futility all the greater.Out of the torn fields of the First World War grew the seeds of a second, greater conflict, but, Professor Bonadeo concludes, the flowering of the seeds was aided by the degradation of man's spirit on those fields. The grim focus of this book, the dead voices it evokes, leads to a new appreciation of the meaning of the Great War.

“The work would be of great value to philosophers engaged in the conceptual analysis of coercion, to political scientists studying the state or other coercive institutions, and to advanced readers interested in the field of peace research.”—Choice

American literature is no longer the refuge of the solitary hero. Like the society it mirrors, it is now a far richer, many-faceted explication of a complicated and diverse society -- racially, culturally, and ethnically interwoven and at the same time fractured and fractious.Ten women writing fiction in America today -- Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle -- represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is distinctively American. Their differing perspectives on literature and the American experience have produced Erdrich's stolid North Dakota plainswomen; Didion's sun-baked dreamers and screamers; the urban ethnics -- Irish, Jewish, and black -- of Gordon, Schaeffer, and Bambara; Oates's small-town, often violent, neurotics; Lurie's intellectual sophisticates; and the southern survivors and victims, male and female, of Phillips, Settle, and Godwin.The ten original essays in this collection focus on the traditional themes of identity, memory, family, and enclosure that pervade the fiction of these writers. The fictional women who emerge here, as these critics show, are often caught in the interwoven strands of memory, perceive literal and emotional space as entrapping, find identity elusive and frustrating, and experience the interweaving of silence, solitude, and family in complex patterns.Each essay in this collection is followed by bibliographies of works by and about the writer in question that will be invaluable resources for scholars and general readers alike. Here is a readable critical discussion of ten important contemporary novelists who have broadened the pages of American literature to reflect more clearly the people we are.

In Woman of the River one of the major voices in Latin American poetry confronts the political realities of contemporary Central America. Many of the poems are political, direct, and condemnatory of the United States’ presence in Latin America, and they are rich, human documents rooted in Alegria’s knowledge of and love for her subjects. As Carolyn Forche has written of Alegria’s previous selection of poems, Flowers from the Volcano: “These poems are testimonies to the value of a single human memory, political in the sense that there is no life apart from our common destiny. They are poems of passionate witness and confrontation. Responding to those who would state that politics has no place in poetry, she would add her voice to that of Neruda’s: we do not wish to please them . . . .” She carries within her the ancient blood of the Pipiles and laces her language with mesitizo richness.”

Kate Daniels’s central myth is that of Niobe, the mother in Greek mythology whose children were killed by the gods because of her great pride in them. She taps the lasting power of the ancient story in poems about personal loss and political insanity. Though the subjects are frequently grim, the final effect of the book is not, since Daniels’s central theme is endurance, the discovery of what we need to survive.

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.

Mark Irwin's boyhood near the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, haunts his poetry. This book of three elegies explores the nature of remembered time and space-personal, historical, geological-against the progression of time-evolution, germination, cell division, nuclear fission, the decay of memory and feeling. This, the poet says, is a kind of "fossil record" of science's impact on the modern world. Entropy (the tendency of atoms towards disorder) becomes a god, a blueprint for possibility. Disorder-frenzy, darkness, chaos-leads to evolution and evolution to order, harmony, and beauty. A star burns and sunlight falls on the world.

"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.