Jorge de Montemayor's great pastoral novel La Diana (1559), one of the fountainheads of Spanish Renaissance literature, has often been regarded as a work written merely to amuse an effete courtly world. Bruno M. Damiani argues here that, far from being simply a "pastoral dream," Diana has profound socio-historical and religious dimensions, and that Montemayor's intentions in it were largely moral and instructive. The timeless, idyllic nature which forms the essence of the pastoral is, in the case of Diana, inextricably bound up with the grace and sophistication of urban Spanish culture. Indeed, this study shows, Montemayor's shepherds and shepherdesses exist not in an imaginary Arcadian land but in the very real Spain and Portugal of their author's own time, and many of the characters are disguises for actual persons of the Spanish court, including perhaps the author himself.Similarly, the philosophical and religious concerns of Renaissance Spain are fully explored in the lives of Montemayor's sorrowing rustics. Symbolically they are sinners who have fallen from grace and must undertake a spiritual pilgrimage, one which ultimately leads them to an understanding of the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity.Mustering a wealth of classical, biblical, medieval, and Renaissance sources, the author reveals the underlying fabric of Diana, an inter-twining of allegory, symbolism, and imagery intended to instruct Monte-mayor's readers in the path of virtue. Damiani's analysis of this important work offers us a clearer view of the intellectual life of Renaissance Spain.

In 1973 the Australian novelist Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the year that his great novel of family ties and change, The Eye of the Storm, was published and became a bestseller in America and Europe. Yet White is still not widely known or read, and few writers of today have provoked so many contradictory judgments.Now Peter Wolfe has written the first book-length study of the work of this brilliant and haunting novelist. The study offers a subtle, penetrating examination of White's style, his skill in building narrative tension, and also the depth and complexity reflected in his characterization, which, in his novels, always dominates action. Fittingly, for a writer whose novels bear the indelible stamp of Australia, the study also examines White's psychological use of setting and the intense sense of place found in his work.No other critical study of White covers such a broad range of his writing. Peter Wolfe considers here the entire canon of the novels. The Tree of Man, Voss, The Vivisector, The Eye of the Storm, A Fringe of Leaves, and The Twyborn Affair (White's most recent novel) are all discussed. White's themes and settings range from the power and immensity of the wilderness of the Australian outback to the dislocations wrought in traditional values by postwar industrialization and urban sprawl.Laden Choirs makes accessible to an American audience a writer of the first rank, whose work lies at the heart of modernist concerns. Literary students and scholars who wish to explore the world of Patrick White will find this book an essential key.

No other American novelist has written so fully about language -- grammar, diction, the place of colloquialism and dialect in literary English, the relation between speech and writing -- as William Dean Howells. The power of language to create social, political, and racial identity was of central concern to Americans in the nineteenth century, and the implications of language in this regard are strikingly revealed in the writings of Howells, the most influential critic and editor of his age.In this first full-scale treatment of Howells as a writer about language, Elsa Nettels offers a historical overview of the social and political implications of language in post-Civil War America. Chapters on controversies about linguistic authority, American versus British English, literary dialect, and language and race relate Howells's ideas at every point to those of his contemporaries -- from writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and James Russell Lowell to political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay.The first book to analyze in depth and detail the language of Howells's characters in more than a dozen novels, this path-breaking sociolinguistic approach to Howells's fiction exposes the fundamental contradiction in his realism and in the America he portrayed. By representing the speech that separates standard from nonstandard speakers, Howells's novels -- which champion the democratic ideals of equity and unity -- also demonstrate the power of language to reinforce barriers of race and class in American society.Drawing on unpublished letters of Howells, James, Lowell, and others and on scores of articles in nineteenth-century periodicals, this work of literary criticism and cultural history reaches beyond the work of one writer to address questions of enduring importance to all students of American literature and society.

To examine the social and cultural significance of the athlete hero in American literature, Robert J. Higgs turns to the works of Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Higgs views the athlete in literature not as an artistic creation but as one who reflects the tastes, attainments, beliefs, and ideals of his society. The athletes he describes as Apollonian are the know-it-alls, of whom Lardner's Busher Keefe is an example; the Dyonisian, as exemplified by Irwin Shaw's Christian Darling, worships his body as an end in itself. The Adonic seeks knowledge for the sake of self-realization and lives in a world of tension, pain, struggle, and hope. Such a figure is Wolfe's Nebraska Crane. Higgs finds in contemporary American literature a clear rejection of the Apollonian and Dyonisian models and an acceptance of the Adonic.

In this first detailed and comprehensive account of Leopardi's theory of poetry, G. Singh assesses both the literary and critical attainments of a poet whose eminence ranks him with Dante and Petrarch. Singh's analysis, which employs extensive reference to Leopardi's work in order to illustrate the author's own comments, sets forth Leopardi's views on the larger questions of tradition, inspiration, and the imagination in poetry. Later chapters are concerned with the more specific matters of the poetic image, style, and language.

"If Bakhtin is right," Wayne C. Booth has said, "a very great deal of what we western critics have spent our time on is mistaken, or trivial, or both." In Literature and Spirit David Patterson proceeds from the premise that Bakhtin is right. Exploring Bakhtin's notions of spirit, responsibility, and dialogue, Patterson takes his reader from the narrow arena of literary criticism to the larger realm of human living and human loving. True to the spirit of Bakhtin, he draws the Russian into a vibrant dialogue with other thinkers, including Foucault, Berdyaev, Gide, Lacan, Levinas, and Heidegger. But he does not stop there. He engages Bakhtin in his own insightful and unique dialogue, meeting the responsibility and taking the risk summoned by dialogue.Literature and Spirit, therefore, is not a typically cool and detached exercise in academic curiosity. Instead, it is a passionate and penetrating endeavor to respond to literature and spirit as the links in life's attachment to life. The author demonstrates that in deciding something about literature, we decide something about the substance and meaning of our lives. Far from being a question of commentary or explication, he argues, our relation to literature is a matter of spiritual life and death. The reader who comes before a literary text encounters the human voice. And Patterson enables his reader to hear that voice in all its spiritual dimensions.Unique in its questions and in its quest, Literature and Spirit addresses an audience that goes beyond the ordinary academic categories. It appeals not only to students of literature, philosophy, and religion, but to anyone who seeks an understanding of spiritual presence and meaning in life. Through his affirmation of what is dear, Patterson responds to the needful question. And in his response he puts the question to his audience: Where are you? Literature and Spirit thus speaks to those who face the task of answering, "Here I am."

Written in 1929--1930, when Federico García Lorca was visiting Columbia University, Poet in New York stands as one of the great Waste Land poems of the 20th century. It expresses, as Betty Jean Craige writes in this volume,"a sudden radical estrangement of the poet from his universe" -- an an estrangement graphically delineated in the dissonant, violent imagery which the poet derives from the technological world of New York.Craige here describes -- through close analysis of the structure, style, and themes of individual works in Poet in New York -- the chaos into which this world plunges the poet, and the process whereby he is able, gradually, to recover his identity with the regenerative forces of nature. Her study demonstrates that, though seemingly unique in form and motifs, Poet in New York is integral with Lorca's overall poetic achievement.

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.