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.

Samuel Richardson, the founder of the modern English novel, gave shape to a previously unformed literary genre. Instrumental in the development of this new art form, Ira Konigsberg contends, is the influence of the drama. Although scholars have long suspected the influence of drama on Richardson's writing, this is the first study to examine it in detail. In such matters as material, technique, and structure, Konigsberg seeks to show that Richardson found his precedents in Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama and that it was his integration of these dramatic elements with fiction which caused the mutation in genre that is responsible for the subsequent course of the English novel.

The reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II was a transitional period in German history when the traditions of the nineteenth century were coming into conflict with the emerging cultural, social, and political patterns of the twentieth century. The resulting tensions were clearly reflected in the period's leading satirical journals, Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus.Both journals appealed to a diverse middle-class readership and attracted widespread attention through their flamboyant and sometimes scurrilous attacks on authority. Their satire, expressed through cartoons, anecdotes, verse, and fiction, ranged across nearly every aspect of German life and employed the talents of some of the period's most important writers and artists. That their purpose was essentially serious was shown by the frequent seizures of offending issues and the jail sentences meted out to satirists whose jabs struck too near home.Kladderadatsch, founded in Berlin in 1848, was liberal politically but generally mild in its social satire. It remained for Simplicissimus, founded in Munich in 1896, to launch a more radical critique of bourgeois culture. The primary target of both journals was the absurdities of an essentially weak monarchy personified in a Kaiser who seemed always to be "on stage." Simplicissimus, in addition, delighted in ridiculing a military establishment dominated by class, a repressive educational system, and a hypocritical religious hierarchy. Even the family came in for satirical treatment.Through the history of these two periodicals, Ann Taylor Allen demonstrates the uses of humor in a society that offered few effective outlets for dissent. She also provides important new insights into the role of popular journalism in this critical period.

Renewed arguments over the definition of Romanticism warrant a new look at the narrative poetry of Sir Walter Scott. Nancy Moore Goslee's study, the first full treatment of Scott's poems in many years, will do for his poetry what Judith Wilt's book has done for his novels. Already a subtle reader of the high Romantics and their celebrations of the visionary imagination, Goslee draws upon several recent critical developments for this study of Scott: a growing tendency among critics of his novels to see romance as a positive strength, the broader development of narrative theory, and feminist theory. Like Thomas the Rhymer, the half-historical, half- mythic minstrel who rides off with the elfin queen, Scott's poems repeatedly accept the world of romance and yet challenge it, often wittily, with an array of hermeneutic perspectives upon its function. The perspectives Goslee considers most fully are the development of poetry from a communal, oral performance to a written, published document; the larger, more violent development of Scottish and British history from feudal to modern cultures; and the repeated contrast, in that succession of cultures, between the limited, passive role of most actual women and their active, powerful role as elfin queen or enchantress in the romance.As if drawn toward yet simultaneously repelled by such women, Scott alternates between poems in which enchantresses seem to control their worlds and those in which women are only pawns, desirable for the land they inherit. The poems of the latter group are more realistically historical in plot, turning upon major battles; those of the former are more romantic and magical. Yet both follow similar narrative patterns derived from medieval and especially Renaissance romance. Both, too, show a wandering in more primitive, violent societies which delays the rational, gradual progress seen as cultural salvation by Enlightenment historians.

While the influence of Shakespeare on Sir Walter Scott has long been recognized, the importance of medieval literature in shaping his creative imagination has never before been examined in depth. Jerome Mitchell's new book fills this significant gap through a wide-ranging study of Scott's indebtedness to Chaucer and to medieval romance, especially the Middle English romances, for story-patterns, motifs, character types, style and structure, and detail.Mitchell establishes more completely and accurately than any previous critic the extent of Scott's knowledge of medieval literature. His examination of Scott's poetry, especially the long narrative poems, demonstrates their debt to Chaucer and medieval romance. The heart of the book is a detailed analysis of the Waverley Novels.Scott's debt to medieval literature, Mitchell shows, was vast, profound, and elemental; it is the single most important source area for the Waverley Novels, their warp and woof. Moreover, it is probably the key to Scott's immense appeal -- the very dimension which enabled him to cast an everlasting spell on his contemporaries, even on such great men as Byron and Goethe, and which has charmed generations of readers to the present day.This pioneering book, based on extensive research in Scotland, including Sir Walter Scott's personal library, sheds new light on the narrative substance and texture of Scott's poems and novels. Both the general reader and the serious student will derive from it a more informed appreciation of Scott's impressive achievement.

Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan vividly describe the colorful life and times of one of the South's -- and America's -- most important businesses and provide insight into how luck, management practices, and personalities helped the company rise to international prominence.Universal Leaf Tobacco Company, the world's largest independent leaf tobacco dealer, is one of the major buying arms for tobacco manufacturers worldwide, selecting, purchasing, processing, and storing leaf tobacco. The story opens during the aftermath of the Civil War when Southerners realized once again the worldwide potential of their native crop.The authors follow the company from its incorporation 1918 through one of the first hostile takeover attempts in American business, to its evolution in 1993 into Universal Corporation, a worldwide conglomerate with a number of products including tobacco.Based on scholarly research and over two hundred interviews with past and present Universal employees, this objective saga reveals much about American business and economic history.

Shakespeare has been viewed by critics both as a secular writer who affirmed the dual nature of man and as a Christian allegorist whose work has a submerged but positive and elaborate pattern of Christian meaning. In Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery, Robert H. West explores the philosophical and supernatural elements of five Shakespearean dramas -- Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest. Through his analysis, West discovers Shakespeare's respect for the mysteries of existence but no clear definition of the philosophical and moral context of his play worlds. An artistic motivation leads Shakespeare to use these elements ambiguously to create a dramatic effect rather than to teach a moral or ideological lesson.

In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse.Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early and late, dutifully concerned himself with the production of laughter, the presentation of young people in love, and the exploitation of theatrical conventions that might provide a guaranteed response. Yet these matters were incidental to his main business in writing comedy: to examine the implications of an action in which human involvement in the process of living provides the kind of enlightenment that leads to renewal and the continuity of life.With rare foresight, Shakespeare presented a world in which women were as capable of enlightenment as the men who wooed them, and Bryant shows how the female characters frequently preceded their mates in perceiving the way of the world. In most of his comedies Shakespeare also managed to suggest the role of death in life's process; and in some -- even in plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest -- he gave hints of a larger process, one without beginning or end, that may well comprehend all our visions -- of comedy, tragedy, and history -- in a single movement.

Rossell Hope Robbins collaborated with Carleton Brown in the publishing of the Index of Middle English Verse in 1943. With John L. Cutler, associate professor of English in the University of Kentucky, he has now compiled a supplement to the Index incorporating those texts published since 1943. At the same time, the two have completely revised the Index by including in the Supplement texts previously neglected. The number of entries has been increased to 6,000, and more than half of the 4,500 original entries have been revised. In addition to this basic revision, the appendices of the Index have been corrected and enlarged, especially the listing and locating of privately held manuscripts. Cross references have been inserted abundantly to facilitate easy use of the combined works. Additionally, reference has been made to related specialized studies.The large number of new entries is attributable not only to prolonged manuscript research but also to a broadening of the original criteria for the inclusion of poems. Rather than cutting off entries at 1500, which the authors felt impaired the usefulness of the original Index, Robbins and Cutler included genres that had not concluded but continued into the sixteenth century, as well as poems with uncertain dates they felt would be important for scholars. The Supplement overcomes these barriers by including the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century manuscripts such as the "Tudor songbooks," verse items of only two lines, and tombstone and church bras epitaphs.

Don Juan Manuel, nephew of King Alfonso X, The Wise, knew well the appeal of exempla (moralized tales), which he believed should entertain if they were to provide ways and means for solving life's problems. His fourteenth-century book, known as El Conde lucanor, is considered by many to be the purest Spanish prose before the immortal Don Quixote of Cervantes written two centuries later. He found inspiration for his tales in classical and eastern literatures, Spanish history, and folklore. His stories are not translations, but are his retelling of some of the best stories in existence. The translation succeeds in making the author speak as clearly to the modern reader as to readers of his own time.