Jorge Manrique was the greatest poet of fifteenth-century Castile and one of the three or four greatest in Spanish literature. Frank A. Domínguez offers here an introduction to Manrique's poetry and the first book-length study of him in English in fifty years. After presenting the biographical and historical context of Manrique's poetry, Domínguez examines the poet's love lyrics, describing the large fund of commonplaces and forms that Manrique's verses share with those of other poets of his age. Manrique's highly stylized language and parallel verse structures express the obsession of the lover with the beloved. Moreover, his attention to parallel construe the world's greatest.In treating the Coplas, Domínguez not only offers a sensitive reading of the elegy but also examines questions of text, structure, and style. Like the love lyrics, the Coplas present a high incidence of parallel structures that make for clarity and symmetry. Domínguez also finds that the complex stylistic relationships of the verses provide the Coplas with a unity that is deeper and more fundamental than has generally been perceived.This study, eclectic in its critical approaches, will be the standard English work on Manrique for years to come.

Loving Arms examines the war-related writings of five British women whose works explore the connections among gender, war, and story-telling. While not the first study to relate the subjects of gender and war, it is the first within a growing body of criticism to focus specifically on British culture during and after World War II.Evoking the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V and then her own father's account of being moved to tears on V-J Day because he had been too young to fight, Karen Schneider posits that the war story has a far-reaching potency. She admits -- perhaps for all of us -- that such stories "had powerfully shaped my consciousness in ways I could not completely resist."How a story is narrated and by whom are matters of no small importance. As widely defined and accepted, war stories are men's stories. If we are to hear an "other" story of war, then we must listen to the stories women tell. Many of the war stories written by women insist that war is not the condition of men but rather the condition of humanity, beginning with relations between the sexes.For the five women whose work is examined in Loving Arms -- Stevie Smith, Katharine Burdekin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Doris Lessing -- this latter point was particularly relevant. Their positions as women within a patriarchal, militarist culture that was externally threatened by an overtly fascist one led to an acute ambivalence, says Schneider. Though all five women perceived the war from substantially different perspectives, each in her own way exposed and critiqued the seductive power of war and war stories, with their densely interwoven tropes of masculinity and nationalism. Yet these writers' conflicting impulses of loyalty to England and resistance to the war betray their ambivalence.Loving Arms will interest students of twentieth-century British literature and culture, gender studies, and narratology. Even today, we maintain an unabated love affair with the war story. But unless we listen to what the women had to say fifty years ago, we are doomed to hear only "the same old story."

In his earlier work on King Lear, Mr. Heilman combined a number of critical procedures to form a new and important approach to Shakespearian criticism. His study of Othello displays the maturity of insight and skill in analysis the years have brought him in developing his critical method. Mr. Heilman takes account of stage effects; he traces out literal and symbolic meanings; he analyzes plot relationships; he examines characters in terms of both their psychological and their moral situations, and style in relation to both character and meaning. He traces some effects due to historical meanings which have now been lost by certain words, and he tries to measure the impact of the drama upon, and its significance for, the modern consciousness.Mr. Heilman argues that Othello is at once "a play about love" and "a poem about love," and endeavors to find out how the poetry modifies and even helps determine the nature of the whole. He looks at numerous aspects of "action" (physical activity, psychological movement, intellectual operations) and "language" (speech habits, image types, recurrency in both literal and figurative language), and examines the essentially "dramatic" function of all of these. He finds the dramatis personae interwoven in relationships which may be seen, from one point of view, as "plot" and, from another, as the embodiment of complex themes. He treats Othello and Iago as figures that are not only fitted to a given stage but also represent permanent aspects of humanity-Iago with his "strategies against the spiritual order" and Othello with his "readiness in the victim."

Mark Twain enthusiasts will welcome this study of the great writer's attitude toward the Bible -- and of the influence of Holy Writ upon both the man and the artist. While the theological beliefs of Twain have been well documented, Mr. Ensor's study is the first to consider only his familiarity with the Bible and the extensive use of it in his writings. The Bible elicited by turns pious, skeptical, comical, and even hostile reactions in Twain, but he could not ignore it. Mr. Ensor examines manifestations of these conflicting impulses from the early newspaper articles to the autobiographical dictations; he suggests that from the Bible Twain may have derived three images that recur in his works: the Prodigal Son (Twain often saw himself in the Bad Boy pose); Adam (representing for Twain an unjust loss of innocence he shared with all mankind); and Noah (Twain saw himself as a prophet warning civilization of impending doom).

Walter Clyde Curry, a well-known student of Milton, analyzes the origins and unique construction of the grand stage upon which Milton presents the drama of human destiny in Paradise Lost. Through close examination of four entities -- Heaven of Heavens, Hell, chaos, and the World -- a greatly expanded view is provided of the poet's concept of space and God's relation to total creation. In facing structural and philosophical problems Milton is shown to be neither a materialist, nor an eclectic, nor a pantheist, as many scholars have insisted; he emerges rather as a master syncretist of widely divergent materials and as a devout theopantist. Curry has established a firm basis for a better understanding of the poet's methodology and for a clearer insight into his artistic accomplishments

In this closely reasoned study, John J. Conder has created a new and more vital understanding of naturalism in American literature. Moving from the Hobbesian dilemma between causation and free will down through Bergson's concept of dual selves, Conder defines a view of determinism so rich in possibilities that it can serve as the inspiration of literary works of astonishing variety and unite them in a single, though developing, naturalistic tradition in American letters. At the heart of this book, beyond its philosophic discussion, is Conder's reading of key works in the naturalistic canon, beginning with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" and "The Blue Hotel." The special character of determinism in Crane is, Conder holds, the source of his complexity and striking originality. He finds a stricter determinism in Norris's McTeague. In Dreiser, however, the naturalistic tradition develops toward a fusion of determinism and freedom in a single work, and this fusion in a different guise operates in Dos Passos's view of self in Manhattan Transfer. With Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath the uniting of determinism and freedom finds its fullest realization in the concept of dual selves, one determined, one free. In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! the concept of the dual self appears in its most complex form. The developments in the work of Steinbeck and Faulkner, Conder believes, bring the classic phase of American literary naturalism to a close.Naturalism in American Fiction illuminates a group of major literary works and revives a theoretic consideration of naturalism. It thus makes a fundamental contribution to American studies.

Few inhabitants of the South in 1800 thought of it as a "region" or of themselves as "southerners." In time, the need to defend the entire southern way of life became obsessive for many writers, too often precluding efforts at originality in form or style. Especially after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, southern identity and southern nationalism emerged as the grand themes, and literature became subservient to regional interests. The devastation of the Civil War and the collapse of the Confederacy, instead of pointing southern writers in new directions, only intensified their preoccupation with a now-dead past.The popular genres of the time -- historical romance and "local color" writing -- became tools to voice this preoccupation and have been important influences on America's view of the South and on American literature in general. The myth of the idyllic plantation South has had an extraordinary pervasiveness in the American consciousness. J.V. Ridgely speculates on the ways in which this tarnished but durable myth helped to produce the powerful Southern Renascence of the twentieth century in this concise survey of the literature of America's most distinctive region during a crucial formative period.

Carl R. Osthaus examines the southern contribution to American Press history, from Thomas Ritchie's mastery of sectional politics and the New Orleans Picayune's popular voice and use of local color, to the emergence of progressive New South editors Henry Watterson, Francis Dawson, and Henry Grady, who imitated, as far as possible, the New Journalism of the 1880s. Unlike black and reform editors who spoke for minorities and the poor, the South's mainstream editors of the nineteenth century advanced the interests of the elite and helped create the myth of southern unity. The southern press diverged from national standards in the years of sectionalism, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Addicted to editorial diatribes rather than to news gathering, these southern editors of the middle period were violent, partisan, and vindictive. They exemplified and defended freedom of the press, but the South's press was free only because southern society was closed.This work broadens our understanding of journalism of the South, while making a valuable contribution to southern history.

In all parts of the world and in every age, many of the greatest works of literature have been shaped or inspired by the swirl of historical events. The wars, holocausts, and mushroom clouds of our own era haunt the pages of many twentieth-century writers; events of the past, even the remote past, also inspire many authors, though their work is contemporary in every way. And if we agree with the poet Czeslaw Milosz that "historicity may reveal itself in a detail of architecture, in the shaping of a landscape," we come to recognize that our understanding of a given poem or novel can often be deepened by a reading from this point of view. The essayists in Literature and the Historical Process explore the ways in which history and literature are intertwined in the works of a number of twentieth-century writers. These probing critical readings from the historical point of view not only enlighten us about the works under consideration but, especially when taken together, enrich our understanding of the literary impulse itself.In "Nature, History, and Art in Elizabeth Bishop's 'Brazil, January 1, 1502,'" for example, Barbara Page shows how Bishop "used and rearranged" knowledge derived from her study of Brazil's history. Page's somewhat feminist reading may surprise those who find Bishop's poetic persona hard to identify.Among the other authors considered are Jorge Luis Borges, Michel de Ghelderode, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macauley, Anthony Burgess, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Cesare Pavese, and Czeslaw Milosz.

Today's music, painting, and film share with literature in the development of a new aesthetic, even as these other arts influence (and are influenced by) literary themes and structures. And at the same time the music and art of the past continue to re-echo in twentieth-century letters.The thirteen essays gathered here open a fine and varied view of the ways in which contemporary literature interacts with the other arts. Surrealism in French painting and literature, collage theory and the cutups of William Burroughs, texts of Butor as shaped by works of Duchamp -- this volume offers a rich harvest of perceptive studies on these and other aspects of a fascinating topic.

Max Frisch, with his countryman Friederich Diirrenmatt, shares the place of eminence in contemporary Swiss literature. Indeed, he ranks high among the recent leading writers in the German language. But, although several of his works -- novels and plays -- have been translated into English, he remains little known in America. In this collection of essays an international group of scholars provides a fresh introduction to this noted author.The three leading essays review Frisch's work in the forms he has used most extensively -- drama, narrative fiction, and the personal diary. The remaining nine essays focus on specific works or topics. Among the works examined are I'm Not Stiller, A Wilderness of Mirrors, Wilhelm Tell, and the recent Man in the Holocene. Among the topics are Frisch's use of language and images, his treatment of women, and the element of parody. Concluding the volume is the most complete bibliography on Frisch to appear in English to date.

The most neglected of the English Renaissance playwrights are the major Carolines -- Philip Massinger, John Ford, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. Writing in the 1620s and 1630s, always in the shadow of their great precursors, Shakespeare and Jonson, they have often been dubbed mere purveyors of slick, escapist sensationalism who avoided the great issues of their day and turned away from the impending breakdown of English society. Ira Clark's revisionist book shows us these dramatists and their time whole, particularly through analysis of their treatment of sociopolitical issues -- issues that find echoes in twentieth-century concerns. For each of these playwrights, Clark sketches his known social circle, describes characteristic social and political stances and dramatic techniques, and provides a detailed reading of an exemplary play. In considering their artistry, he notes their variations on traditional dramatic characters, situations, and styles. Where their predecessors had offered deep psychological portrayals, the Carolines, he finds, present characters whose roles grow out of their social relations. The issues they engage range from the sovereignty of King or Parliament and the criteria for social mobility to parental dominion and the rights of women and children. Their presentations range from conservatism -- Ford's distilled and Shirley's playful -- through Massinger's accommodation, to Brome's extemporaneous experimentation.The Carolines' theatrical world, Clark argues, is accessible to modern readers through the social theories of our time, which depend on their "world as a stage" trope for such concepts as symbolic interactionism and the ritual inculcation of social cohesion. This important book sheds new light on both the artistic and the political climate of seventeenth-century England.

In this eminently readable book, G. Douglas Atkins continues the efforts undertaken in Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading to open eighteenth-century texts to the insights of recent critical theory. Through close readings of most of Pope's major poems, Atkins demonstrates how the powerful theoretical movement known as deconstruction enriches, challenges, and significantly modifies our understanding of the work of the greatest poet of the eighteenth century. The first full-scale deconstructive study of Augustan poetry, Quests of Difference at once offers a fresh and compelling reading of Pope and makes an important contribution to constructive criticism.Though it will be of particular interest and importance to specialists in both eighteenth-century studies and criticism and theory, Quests of Difference is written with the general reader in mind. All readers will appreciate the intelligence and balance of Atkin's approach as well as the clarity, informality, and grace that distinguish his writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" tells of a beautiful girl who has, from birth, absorbed the poison from the flowers of her father's garden. In this allegorical tale of the fallen Garden of Eden, William H. Shurr finds a metaphor for the fate of many American writers, for whom the heritage of calvinism has been the poisoned fruit of the Garden of the New World. For many American writers, the legacy of the Puritan Fathers has been a pervasive sense of sinfulness and guilt in a violent and unforgiving universe. In this new study Shurr examines how these writers have coped with this heritage.

Milton, the arch-Puritan and outspoken critic of the stereotyped rituals of the established churches, has been regarded by most scholars as a writer who is unlikely to have employed liturgical materials in his poetry. Thomas B. Stroup shows to the contrary that Milton made extensive use of Christian liturgy not only as material within the body of his poems but also as a force in shaping them. In a survey of both Milton's major works and his minor poems, prayers of thanksgiving, the General Confession, similarities to hymns, echoes from canticles, and many other rites and ceremonies of the church are noted. But what is even more significant is the way in which these liturgical forms are used by the poet, for their appearance is not incidental to the works but contributes to their structural development. The reflections of the rites and ceremonies and the allusions to them seem to have been chosen deliberately as a means of heightening the poems' action and deepening their meaning.

Richard Crashaw's use of rhyme is one of the distinctive aspects of his poetic technique, and in the first systematic analysis of his rhyme craft, Mary Ellen Rickey concludes that he was keenly interested in rhyme as a technical device. She traces Crashaw's development of rhyme repetitions from the simple designs of his early epigrams and secular poems to the elaborate and irregular schemes of his mature verse.