In this stimulating study, the author explores how Conrad, T.S.Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Huxley and others responded to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith. Assuming that artists and writers, in coping with those problems, would develop techniques in many ways comparable, even where there was no direct contact, he positions Modernist literature within the context of contemporary painting, architecture and sculpture, thereby providing some fascinating insights into the nature of the literary works themselves.

This first full-length study of Susan Howe illuminates the historical, autobiographical, and theoretical influences that underlie the work of this enigmatic and important contemporary American poet. In Led by Language , poet and scholar Rachel Tzvia Back offers a close and detailed reading of Susan Howe's provocative and powerful poetry. Howe's work is dense, often difficult, but always distinctive, and Back's volume explains a number of features crucial to understanding her poems. In this complete survey of Howe's major work, from 1978's Secret History of the Dividing Line to 1999's Pierce-Arrow , Back highlights the key strategies underlying Howe's work: linguistic experimentation, historical motifs, autobiographical references, and visual experimentation with types, fonts, and images. One of the book's most compelling arguments is Back's case for reading Howe's work autobiographically. An obsession with history characterizes Howe's poetry--historical figures from Mary Magdalene to Melville haunt her work--and Back deftly demonstrates the intensely personal nature of much of the historical terrain Howe traverses. This study debunks the myth of Howe's impenetrability, making her work accessible to a wide range of readers. Back has created a thorough guide to reading and understanding this important poet, and her book will be welcomed by students and scholars of contemporary poetry, American literature, literary theory, and cultural studies.

Bad objects are a contrarian's delight. In this volume, leading French feminist theorist and literary critic Naomi Schor revisits some of feminist theory's most widely discredited objects, essentialism and universalism, with surprising results. Bilingual and bicultural, she reveals the national character of contemporary theories that are usually received as beyond borders, while making a strong argument for feminist theory's specific claims to universalism. Written in a distinctive personal and self-reflective mode, this collection offers new unpublished work and brings together for the first time some of Schor's best-known and most influential essays. These engagements with Anglo-American feminist theory, Freud and psychoanalytic theory, French poststructuralists such as Barthes, Foucault, and Irigaray, and French fiction by or about women--especially of the nineteenth century--also address such issues as bilingual identity, professional controversies, female fetishism, and literature and gender. Schor then concludes with a provocative meditation on the future of feminism. As they read Bad Objects , Anglo-American theoreticians who have been mainly preoccupied with French feminism will find themselves drawn into French literary and cultural history, while French literary critics and historians will be placed in contact with feminist debate.

In the Fall of 1992, Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, won England's prestigious Evening Standard award as the season's Best Play. By the Spring of 1993, Millennium had come to Broadway and won its highest honor, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the distinguished Pulitzer Prize for drama as well. Through its epic theatrical panorama of the intimate and political dynamics that arise when individuals, histories, and cultures intersect, Millennium captured the imagination and the conscience of all who saw it. Its ability to deeply move the audience in personal, communal, and political ways was admirably (and astoundingly) matched by the subsequent production of the play's second part, Perestroika, which brought Kushner yet another Evening Standard award and Tony Award for Best Play (1994). Tony Kushner has, almost overnight, become the premier American male playwright to "represent" the 1990s, as David Mamet and August Wilson dominated critical attention in the 1980s. The phenomenally positive response to Angels in America was matched by the equally enthusiastic reception of its young, politically engaged playwright, who impressed journalists and scholars with his eloquent intellect, wit, and moral convictions. Kushner spoke for a younger generation of American artists and activists whose art is intimately connected to social vision and "revolutionary" possibilities in the public and private sectors. His role as a generational (read "national," "liberal," "socialist," "Jewish," "queer") spokesman has provided him with a public platform from which to address concerns that lie at the center of national debate. In a short time Kushner has capturedand retained a nation's fascination, and his opinions are widely sought out on a wide range of topics. And, most often, the platform from which Kushner expresses his ideas is the personal interview, in which he boldly confronts Americans to rethink, even to reinvent, themselves as the Millennium approaches. Tony Kushner in Conversation is the first book to compile Kushner's most significant interviews of the past decade, tracing his career from its early years to his maturing artistic and political visions. The collection includes pieces that first appeared in an amazingly broad range of periodicals as well as interviews not previously published, such as his appearance on PBS on The Charlie Rose Show. In addition to Angels in America, Tony Kushner is author of Slavs! and is currently finishing work on Henry Box Brown, scheduled to have its world premiere at the Royal National Theatre in the summer of 1997. Robert Vorlicky is Associate Professor of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Jean Baudrillard meets Cookie Mueller in this gathering of French theory and new American fiction. Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)'s most beloved and prescient works. Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.

"In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017"--

In this extensively revised and updated edition of her classic work, Look Back in Gender, Michelene Wandor confirms the symbiotic relationship between drama and gender in a provocative look at key, representative British plays from the last fifty years. Repositioning the text at the heart of hteatre studies, Wandor surveys plays by Ayckbourn, Beckett, Churchill, Daniels, Friel, Hare, Kane, Osborne, Pinter, Ravenhill, Wertenbaker, Wesker and others. Her nuanced argument, central to any analysis of contemporary drama, discusses: *the imperative of gender in the playwright's imagination *the function of gender as a major determinant of the text's structural and narrative drives *the impact of socialism and feminism on post-war British drama, and the relevance of feminist dynamics in drama *differences in the representation of the fmaily, sexuality and the mother, before and after 1968 *the impact of the slogan that the 'personal is political' on contemporary form and content.

This collection of essays probes the values in a variety of authors who have had in common the fact of popularity and erstwhile reputation. Why were they esteemed? Who esteemed them? And what has become of their reputations, to readers, to the critic himself? No writer here has been asked to justify the work of his subject, and reports and conclusions about this wide variety of creative writers vary, sometimes emphasizing what the critic believes to be enduring qualities in the subject, in several cases finding limitations in what that writer has to offer us today.

Is Faith Darwin Asbury really Grace Paley? Or is it coincidental that the personal history, politics, and relationships of the fictional Asbury seem to mirror those of the well-known author? And do other characters in Paley's stories represent individuals she has known, in scenes and entire episodes she has experienced? A writer who translates her life into art not only saves her own life, according to Paley, but offers others the revelation of its meaning. That idea is at the core of Judith Arcana's biographical reading of this strongly autobiographical writer. Grace Paley's Life Stories interweaves details about Paley with critical discussions of her works, examining her as a woman, mother, activist, and Jew. Arcana visited and interviewed Paley at her homes in Vermont and New York over a period of several years. She also interviewed Paley's family, friends, and colleagues. Such extensive research is unmatched in Paley scholarship; Arcana's focus on the political crucible of Paley's consciousness is rare in contemporary literary criticism.

Stavans (Latin American and Latino culture, Amherst College, Massachusetts) offers an extended essay on Mexican poet and intellectual Paz (1914-98). Earlier versions have been published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Husband and wife, parents and grandparents, Grace Paley and Robert Nichols are two writers and activists who constantly engage the world. Here and Somewhere Else, including uncollected or unpublished fiction by both Paley and Nichols, encompasses diverse countries and cultures, and counterpoints stories and poems that reveal engaged artists inventing different ways to illuminate political themes and issues.

Language writing, the most controversial avant-garde movement in contemporary American poetry, appeals strongly to writers and readers interested in the politics of postmodernism and in iconoclastic poetic form. Drawing on materials from popular culture, avoiding the standard stylistic indications of poetic lyricism, and using nonsequential sentences are some of the ways in which language writers make poetry a more open and participatory process for the readers. Reading this kind of writing, however, may not come easily in a culture where poetry is treated as property of a special class. It is this barrier that Bob Perelman seeks to break down in this fascinating and comprehensive account of the language writing movement. A leading language writer himself, Perelman offers insights into the history of the movement and discusses the political and theoretical implications of the writing. He provides detailed readings of work by Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein, among many others, and compares it to a wide range of other contemporary and modern American poetry. A variety of issues are addressed in the following chapters: "The Marginalization of Poetry," "Language Writing and Literary History," "Here and Now on Paper," "Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice," "Write the Power," "Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: Bruce Andrews and the World (Trade Center)," "This Page Is My Page, This Page Is Your Page: Gender and Mapping," "An Alphabet of Literary Criticism," and "A False Account of Talking with Frank O'Hara and Roland Barthes in Philadelphia."

Book by

Product Description The latest edition of this accessible economic history presents a comprehensive survey of Britain's economic history in the twentieth centry. Extended to provide an overview of the Thatcher years and an examination of the government's radical departures in economic policy during the years 1979-1990, the text has also been revised to incorporate the latest findings from a wide range of literature and comment. Review 'Pollard's book should continue to serve its audience well.' Business History; 'The extraordinary breadth of Professor Pollard's reading and research will make the book indispensable for those interested in the economic history of the period.' English Historical Review About the Author Sidney Pollard is at Bielefeld University.

The Agony of Greek Jews tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. Bowman focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. His book contains new archival material and interviews with survivors. It supersedes much of the general literature on the subject of Greek Jewry.

"In Gilligan Unbound, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar and literary critic proves once and for all that popular culture can be every bit as complex, meaningful, and provocative as the most celebrated works of literature - and a lot more fun. Paul Cantor analyzes and interprets a wide variety of classic television programs with the same seriousness, care, and creativity he would Hamlet or Macbeth to reveal how dramatically America's image of itself has evolved from the 1960s to the present." "Cantor demonstrates how, during the 1960s, Gilligan's Island and Star Trek reflected America's faith in liberal democracy and our willingness to project it universally. Gilligan's Island, Cantor argues, is based on the premise that a representative group of Americans could literally be dumped in the middle of nowhere and still prevail under the worst of circumstances. Star Trek took American optimism even further by trying to make the entire galaxy safe for democracy. Despite the famous Prime Directive, Captain Kirk and his crew remade planet after planet in the image of an idealized 1960s America." -- From publisher's website.

A collection of articles published previously, discussing the growth of radical nationalism and fascism since the end of the 19th century and focusing on its expression in literature and in the arts. The following discuss antisemitism as well: