Focusing on style as a means of thematic expression, Donald A. Ringe in this study examines in detail the affinities that exist between the paintings of the Hudson River school and the works of William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper. The emphasis on physical description of nature that characterizes the work of these writers, he finds, is not simply an imitation of European models, nor is it merely nonfunctional decoration. Rather, he demonstrates that the authors' concern with description of the physical world derives from the late eighteenth-century theory of knowledge, and specifically from the concepts of the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy.Recognizing the differing limitations and opportunities presented by the media in which these two groups of artists worked, Ringe traces deeper parallels in their treatment of spatial and temporal relationships. Having at their disposal the suggestive powers of language, the writers succeeded in making of the pictorial mode an effective means of expressing moral and intellectual themes of fundamental concern to the nineteenth-century American. A full understanding of this characteristic mode of expression, Ringe concludes, is essential to accurate interpretation of the literary works of the first generation of American romantics.

In the symbolic language of ballads, a lady's costly dress tells of the beauty of the body beneath it or of the wearer's happiness; a lost hawk or hound foreshadows the hunter's fate long before the plot reaches a turning point. In her original and far-reaching study of such familiar narrative elements, Edith Randam Rogers adds much to our understanding of poetic expression in the ballad tradition.In focusing on individual motifs as they appear in different ballads, different languages, and different periods, Rogers proves the existence of a reliable lingua franca of symbolism in European balladry. Lines or even whole stanzas that have defied interpretation often come to life when the reader is aware of the meaning of a particular motif in such an international vocabulary of images. Thus this book makes available important new critical tools sure to have significant results for ballad scholarship.

In this flavorful and perceptive study of the American orator, Barnet Baskerville makes an inquiry into American attitudes toward orators and oratory and the reflection of these attitudes in speaking practices. He examines the role of the orator in society and the kinds or qualities of oratory that were dominant in each period of American history, and he looks into the nature and importance of oratory as perceived by audiences and by speakers themselves. By examining this "public image" of the orator, the author is able to tell us much about the people who drew that image.

Henry Clay's career spanned a half century of a great formative period in American history. This compilation of ten volumes includes Clay's letters, letters to Clay, his speeches, and other documents identified as his personal composition.

This supplement to The Papers of Henry Clay contains documents discovered too late to be included in the proper chronological sequence in earlier volumes. Spanning the years from 1793 to 1852, the items shed important light on Clay's early years in Kentucky, his legal career, and his work for the Bank of the United States.Material dealing with the "Corrupt Bargain" charge is particularly rich, and many of the letters that appear in this volume fill gaps in exchanges already published. Clay's correspondence with Benjamin Watkins Lee of Virginia and Mary Bayard, wife of Delaware senator Richard Henry Bayard, is especially interesting.An essay on Clay portraits by Clifford Amyx, professor emeritus of art at the University of Kentucky, provides a detailed discussion of the paintings, statues, busts, engravings, and daguerreotypes that featured Clay as the subject. Appended to the essay is a calendar listing each major work, the artist, date of completion, and present location.A comprehensive bibliography of works cited in the entire series will benefit researchers seeking information in addition to that provided in the annotations. This supplement is an essential addition to the earlier volumes in the series.

In volume 5 of The Papers of Henry Clay, the second of the series to cover Clay's role as Secretary of State, problems arising from domestic political pressures become significant in the conduct of national affairs both at home and abroad.With the president absent from Washington one-third of the year, Clay's burden and his personal role in the conduct of office are evident. His health becomes precarious, he neglects to take action to forestall embarrassing ministerial faux pas in several areas, and he misjudges the gravity of British alienation—all of these handicaps to the future course of his administration here become manifest.

By studying the diction of Romeo and Juliet, Robert O. Evans examines this, the most rhetorical of Shakespeare's plays, in terms of an Aristotelian critical category, which has been neglected in modern times. Inherent in his methodology is the assumption that Romeo and Juliet is best regarded as drama, not as pure poetry, though essentially it is the rhetorical brilliance of the poetry that is considered. Evans begins with an analysis of the important speeches of Romeo and Juliet and defines the controlling devices Shakespeare wove into them, especially oxymoron. He then follows with a discussion of the role of Friar Laurence, whom the author finds is a catalyst between the warring houses and between the lovers and the outer world of Verona. Evans concludes with an examination of Mercutio's famous Queen Mab speech, which, he points out, has an integral relationship to the structure of the tragedy as a whole.An analysis of the rhetorical devices of the play, Evans believes, demonstrates the thesis that the tragic effect of Romeo and Juliet is one of fulfillment, with the tragedy arising from the character of the protagonists rather than from circumstance.

During the late nineteenth century rapid social and economic changes negated the prevailing conception of the city as a uniform whole. Confronted with this disparity between the old urban definition and the new city of the late nineteenth century, social thinkers searched for a new concept that would correspond more closely to the divided urban community around them. Borrowing an analogy from natural history, these thinkers conceived of the city as an organism composed of interdependent neighborhoods and sought to translate this concept into ways of dealing with the dislocations and problems in urban life. In this new study of American urban history Patricia Melvin traces the growth of the idea of the organic city and the developing emphasis on the neighborhood as the basic urban unit. An early expression of the idea was the settlement house movement, but the most effective application of the idea, Melvin shows, was the social unit organization scheme worked out by Wilbur C. Phillips. As a social planner and organizer, Phillips first tried his approach in New York, then in Milwaukee, and finally in Cincinnati. Although initially successful in dealing with specific issues, Phillips's efforts eventually foundered on friction among ethnic groups and on the opposition of city politicians. Finally, in the 1920s the whole concept of the organic city was supplanted by a new view of the city based not upon a cooperative but upon a competitive model.The Organic City contributes new understanding to an important period of American urban history. Moreover, it shows clearly how important is the role of concepts in shaping the perception of social realities and the attempts to deal with them.

In 1976 a dozen hopeful young Mexican dramatists -- most of them studying with Emilio Carballido -- began staging plays, primarily in small, out-of-the-way theater, and publishing them, mostly in university magazines with limited distribution. Until now, more than twenty years later, there has been no comprehensive study devoted either to this original group of writers or to those who followed in the same generation, and no central source of information about them or their production. Although they continue to produce more plays every year, they represent a lost generation. Ronald Burgess now offers the first extensive study of this group of playwrights and their work. Included is discussion of over 200 plays by more than 40 writers, but the work of nine key playwrights is examined in depth. Most of these dramatists concern themselves with the state of Mexico today, reacting to current social conditions with depictions ranging from violence to guarded hope to anguished hopelessness. Many look to their nation's history and culture for explanations.In his illuminating study, Burgess places this theatrical generation in the context of contemporary Mexican society and literature, employing a wide variety of analytic approaches to highlight essential characteristics of these representative authors.

While much has been written in recent years on death and dying, there has been little treatment of how people cope with death in the absence of religious belief, and virtually no examination of the potential political repercussions of a wider acceptance of mortality in American society. Alfred Killilea's strikingly original book revolves around a central irony: though the subject of death has been largely shunned in American culture lest it rob life of meaning and contentment, confronting death may be crucial to enable us as individuals and as a society to affirm life, even to survive, in this nuclear age.Killilea argues that the denial of death has fostered a disavowal of limits in general, and that a greater awareness of our mortality would provide a much needed catalyst for change in our political response to narcissism and nuclearism. He traces how, from John Locke to the present, a politics and an economics based on growth for the sake of growth have required an avoidance of human vulnerability. Our confrontation with mortality, Killilea argues, would goad us to question our roles as mere acquirers and to take more seriously the need for equality and community in our society.In charting how we can come to terms with death and how profoundly our attitudes toward death affect our attitudes toward politics, Killilea vides lucid and authoritative commentaries on such provocative thinkers as Earnest Becker, Robert Jay Lifton, Michael Novak, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Jonathan Schell. Scholars in many fields as well as interested lay readers will find the treatment of these issues and thinkers compelling. This easily accessible book is an urgent reminder that the most valuable spur to the examined life extolled by Socrates is the knowledge that we will die.

Philippe de Vigneulles (1471--1528), cloth merchant and hosier from the city of Metz, wrote a collection of comic short stories which he called Cent Nouvelles ou contes joyeux. The work constitutes an important step in the development of the nouvelle form in France. In an extended explication, Ms. Kotin analyzes the tales for the modern reader, historically, generically, structurally, and in terms of their human significance.Inscribed in a tradition of short narrative forms in late medieval and early Renaissance France, these tales remake or recast traditional narrative patterns into new forms. Philippe de Vigneulles's tales constitute a "recit" of human life, supported by the sympathetic presence of the author and his beloved city of Metz.

This book is the first to consider the work of Herman Melville's later years as a whole, in the light of his life and reading during those years and of the intellectual and artistic ambience of the later nineteenth century. With the exception of Billy Budd, almost all of the writing Melville produced between 1857 and 1891 is poetry. Until now little attention has been given to the poetry and it has been customary to view Melville's final masterpiece, Billy Budd, against the background of the earlier fiction -- almost as if the writing of the intervening thirty-four years had not existed. William H. Shurr, who has studied the poems with close attention to the Melville manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, contends that Melville's poetry merits more attention and appreciation than has hitherto been accorded it. Concerned principally with the maturation of Melville's darker themes, he has been the first to study the carefully designed sequences in which Melville published his poems. He has also discovered in the poems thematic patterns -- among them Melville's heterodox Christology and his concept of a particular kind of individualism found in what he calls the "transcendent act" -- that shed new light on the complexities of Billy Budd.

In this book, Walter Foreman studies the closing scenes of Shakespeare's tragedies, considering the tragic structure of the plays and the shapes the tragic characters give their lives by the way they encounter death.Foreman sees in the variety of tragic endings of the plays evidence that Shakespeare consciously experimented with tragic forms, for when he repeated he also changed, and changed more than superficially. Further, Foreman believes that these varieties and extensions of dramatic form were fundamentally a way of experiencing a various, often mysterious world. Extending and exploring the possibilities of tragic form, the playwright created dramatic worlds that mirror the possibilities of our own.Among the tragedies, Foreman finds three -- Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra -- that are more complex than the rest. He devotes the three final chapters of his book to the closing scenes of these plays and his readings of them are richly rewarding, giving new insights into Hamlet's acceptance of death, Lear's isolation in a moral storm, and Cleopatra's triumphant staging of her own death.

In 1952, Frank L. Klingberg's article on introvert and extrovert American foreign policy moods projected an American turn toward introversion in the late 1960s. After this came to pass, Jack Holmes began to develop a theory of how these moods might work in a more specific sense. His mood/interest theory points to a basic conflict between politico-military interests and the foreign policy moods of the American electorate.Holmes presents a pioneering account of the over-whelming impact of public moods on foreign policy. Policy-making structures, executive-legislative relations, presidential personality, pragmatism, moralism, elitism, conservatism, international economics, and humanitarianism are related to the mood/interest pattern. Major points are illustrated with examples from 1776 to the present.Holmes's analysis indicates that American moods are continuing unabated according to past patterns, so that American foreign policy may undergo some surprising changes in the next decade. One of the author's hopes is that emphasis on the importance of national moods will help avoid future extremes.This book is bold in its assertions and points to major problems in the analysis of American foreign policy. Whether or not the reader agrees with the entire analysis, he or she will be challenged to think about American foreign policy in new and perhaps revealing ways.

"I got to be a millionaire afore I know'd it hardly," remarked the Wall Street financier Daniel Drew (1797-1879).An uneducated farm boy from Putnam County, New York, he became in turn a successful cattle drover, a circus clown, tavern keeper, a shrewd Hudson River steamboat operator, and an unscrupulous speculator. As the colorful "Uncle Daniel" of Wall Street-his whiskered face seamed with wrinkles and twinkling with steel-gray eyes -- time and again he disrupted the financial markets with manipulations whereby he either won or lost millions of dollars. Having "got religion" upon hearing a scary hell-fire sermon at the age of fourteen, Drew was also a fervent Methodist. Rumors of his financial operations--epic struggles that pitted him against Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk, and that subjected him to threats of arrest and even kidnapping, and on one occasion to a most undignified flight from the state-baffled and disturbed the Methodists, who admittedly had little grasp of Wall Street but knew firsthand Brother Drew's tearful repentance at prayer meetings and his generosity in founding churches and seminaries.With its dual commitment to religion and rascality, Drew's career is a rich study in contradictions, an exciting chronicle of high drama and low comedy capped by bankruptcy. To understand Drew in his complexity, the author argues, is to get a grip on the heady and exploitative age that produced him -- the yesterday of "smartness" and "go ahead" that helped engender the America of today. Based on primary sources, this is the first full-fledged biography of Drew, who hitherto has been known chiefly through a fictionalized and fraudulent account of 1910.

Thomas Mann predicted that no manner or mode in literature would be so typical or so pervasive in the twentieth century as the grotesque. Assuredly he was correct. The subjects and methods of our comic literature (and much of our other literature) are regularly disturbing and often repulsive -- no laughing matter. In this ambitious study, John R. Clark seeks to elucidate the major tactics and topics deployed in modern literary dark humor. In Part I he explores the satiric strategies of authors of the grotesque, strategies that undercut conventional usage and form: the de-basement of heroes, the denigration of language and style, the disruption of normative narrative technique, and even the debunking of authors themselves. Part II surveys major recurrent themes of grotesquerie: tedium, scatology, cannibalism, dystopia, and Armageddon or the end of the world.Clearly the literature of the grotesque is obtrusive and ugly, its effect morbid and disquieting -- and deliberately meant to be so. Grotesque literature may be unpleasant, but it is patently insightful. Indeed, as Clark shows, all of the strategies and topics employed by this literature stem from age-old and spirited traditions.Critics have complained about this grim satiric literature, asserting that it is dank, cheerless, unsavory, and negative. But such an interpretation is far too simplistic. On the contrary, as Clark demonstrates, such grotesque writing, in its power and its prevalence in the past and present, is in fact conventional, controlled, imaginative, and vigorous -- no mean achievements for any body of art.