Charles Moorman reexamines several major works of the western heroic tradition: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Nibelungenlied, the Norse sagas, and the Arthurian cycle. Disregarding the usual limited definitions which have controlled the study of heroic literature, he draws together these disparate works by proposing a theme common to them all: the opposition of two major figures whom he names king and captain.The figure of the king arises from the community with its need for responsible government, while the captain, derived from myth, is a highly individualistic, irresponsible heroic figure. The tension which Moorman sees between them is used as a means of reinterpreting the works under study. Though widely separated in time and cultural milieu, The Illiad, and The Song of Roland, for example, can be compared by interpreting both the Agamemnon-Achilles and the Oliver-Roland relationships as conflicts between king and captain. These essays will prove illuminating for layman and scholar alike.

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.

In a time of increasing campaign costs and decreasing state political party activity, legislative party campaign committees have grown to play a major role in the politics of elections in a large number of American states. Anthony Gierzynski's book focuses on these committees.In this first multi-state analysis, Gierzynski explores the nature and practices of the committees through interviews with legislative leaders and staff and through statistical analyses of campaign finance data from ten representative states. In addition to direct cash contributions, legislative caucus campaign committees provide candidates with a multitude of support and services and usually target their resources on close races where they will have the greatest impact. Leadership PACs, the campaign committees of individual legislators, also allocate their resources strategically.The existence of such committees and the fact that the caucus campaign committees resemble political parties in both structure and behavior leads Gierzynski to pose interesting normative and practical questions. The answers to such questions have major implications for political parties and legislative politics.

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.

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.

Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area lies in western Kentucky and Tennessee, between two huge lakes formed by dams on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.Some 170,000 acres bounded by 300 miles of shoreline, Land Between the Lakes is blessed with a rich variety of plant and animal life. Conceived and administrated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, it is a unique recreational experiment which has drawn admiring visitors from around the world. Frank E. Smith, director of TVA, tells the story of the transformation of submarginal land into a large-scale, multiple-use recreation facility that provides recreation and entertainment for thousands of visitors as well as producing a positive, dynamic stimulus to the continued economic development of the entire Tennessee Valley. Planned for fullest use of human and land resources, Land Between the Lakes is of utmost importance to recreational planners, conservation specialists, administrators, and to millions of Americans who seek their recreation in the out of doors.

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.

This comprehensive study highlights the importance of legislative and extralegal committees in the political and institutional development of early American history, showing how the colonial experience modified a basic British institution, using it in the cause of legislative supremacy and, eventually, independence. The book illuminates the role played by committees in the growth of colonial self-government, tracing the committee system to its origins in the parliamentary committees of medieval England, then following the permutations of the committee system through the decades in which self-government emerged in South Carolina. Solid, penetrating, the book offers new depths of insight into an important process that had vital importance to the growth of representative government in America.

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.

This is a book about American intellectuals as would-be social reformers and what happens to them in the arena of practical politics. Specifically, it examines the lives of ten highly idealistic Christian socialist and anarchist intellectuals of the 1890s who were profoundly influenced -- indeed inspired -- by the prophetic social messages and exemplary lives of Tolstoy, Mazzini, and Ruskin. The ten Americans -- including ministers, journalists, professors, and poets -- were constantly thwarted in their efforts to apply the Golden Rule and the ethics of Jesus not only to the socioeconomic institutions of their society, but to their own lives as well. These ten Christian knights rode high on clouds of words, carrying swords of good intentions, tilting at windmills often of their own despair. As a result, they paid the price (as Emerson said) of being "too intellectual." This is, indeed, a story of noble dreams, frustration, agonizing self-doubts and, ultimately, of failure.Peter J. Frederick develops his argument by comparing and contrasting the intellectuals in pairs, examining the many forms frustrated activism can take. His study emerges as a critique of the Social Gospel movement from a New Left perspective; implicitly, it is a critique of the contemporary New Left, approached with empathetic understanding. Ethical, decisive action, he concludes, is essential not only for effective reform but for the psychic well-being of the intellectual.

Many critics hold that Shakespeare's King Lear is primarily a drama of meaningful suffering and redemption within a just universe ruled by providential higher powers. William Elton's King Lear and the Gods challenges the validity of this widespread optimistic view. Testing the prevailing view against the play's acknowledged sources, and analyzing the functions of the double plot, the characters, and the play's implicit ironies, Elton concludes that this standard interpretation constitutes a serious misreading of the tragedy.

"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."

These three volumes of Kentucky election statistics at last make this basic tool of political research easily accessible to scholars, journalists, teachers, political candidates and others interested in primary and general election returns. In Kentucky, as in many other states, these figures have been available only in the Secretary of State's office, and there has been no compilation of percentages and pluralities necessary for comparative purposes.The source of all the statistics in these volumes is the official records in the office of the Secretary of State in Frankfort, Kentucky. All returns are listed by county.Volume 1 includes presidential elections from 1952 through 1960 and primaries and elections for the U.S. Senate from 1920 through 1960.Volume 2 includes gubernatorial primaries and elections from 1923 through 1959.Volume 3 includes primaries and elections for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1920 through 1960.

These three volumes of Kentucky election statistics at last make this basic tool of political research easily accessible to scholars, journalists, teachers, political candidates and others interested in primary and general election returns. In Kentucky, as in many other states, these figures have been available only in the Secretary of State's office, and there has been no compilation of percentages and pluralities necessary for comparative purposes.The source of all the statistics in these volumes is the official records in the office of the Secretary of State in Frankfort, Kentucky. All returns are listed by county.Volume 1 includes presidential elections from 1952 through 1960 and primaries and elections for the U.S. Senate from 1920 through 1960.Volume 2 includes gubernatorial primaries and elections from 1923 through 1959.Volume 3 includes primaries and elections for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1920 through 1960.

These three volumes of Kentucky election statistics at last make this basic tool of political research easily accessible to scholars, journalists, teachers, political candidates and others interested in primary and general election returns. In Kentucky, as in many other states, these figures have been available only in the Secretary of State's office, and there has been no compilation of percentages and pluralities necessary for comparative purposes.The source of all the statistics in these volumes is the official records in the office of the Secretary of State in Frankfort, Kentucky. All returns are listed by county.Volume 1 includes presidential elections from 1952 through 1960 and primaries and elections for the U.S. Senate from 1920 through 1960.Volume 2 includes gubernatorial primaries and elections from 1923 through 1959.Volume 3 includes primaries and elections for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1920 through 1960.

Kentucky Illustrated brings together a substantial portion of the pictorial scenes published during Kentucky's first century, many of them rare prints reproduced here for the first time since their original publication. From the frontier days of Daniel and Squire Boone to the rise of the railroads that opened the state to visitors who toured its landmarks and bathed in its springs, more than two hundred views offer a picture of Kentucky's growth and civilization.Until the 1890s, Kentucky was sketched in the words of adventurers, travelers, and journalists, but all most Americans knew of the face of Kentucky was the occasional engraving that appeared in popular publications such as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Monthly. The camera was not widely used and photographs could not yet be reproduced for mass distribution, so each illustration was captured by an artist and translated by an engraver before it reached the imagination of the viewer.Readers will enjoy chapters on the frontier, the Civil War, education and religion, urban and rural life, making a living, the natural world, and roads, rivers, and rails. State historian James C. Klotter provides an overview of Kentucky history that enhances the illustrations, and Joe Nickell's description of early print methods allows readers to appreciate fully the art form as it was practiced in the nineteenth century. Captions include both historical background and information on artists, lithographers, and printers. This handsome collection of rare early views will delight all Kentuckians as well as historians, teachers, librarians, and students.