This Companion contains fifteen chapters by leading international scholars, who together reflect diverse but complementary approaches to the study of Ezra Pound's poetry and prose. They consider the poetics, foreign influences, economics, politics and publication history of Pound's entire corpus, and also situate Pound's work in the context of Modernism, illustrating his influence on contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Taken together, the chapters offer a sustained examination of one of the most versatile, influential and certainly controversial poets of the modern period.

One hundred years after the publication of Looking Backward, Bellamy remains a controversial figure in American literary and social history. The collection of essays in this volume, commemorating the novel's appearance in 1888, attests to his continued importance.

Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

One of a series exploring the lives and work of major artists associated with St Ives, this book looks at the potter Bernard Leach. It provides a critical overview of his art and influences, and places him alongside his contemporaries, both in St Ives and further afield. In the early part of his career Leach spent 12 formative years in Japan, during a period of febrile excitement in the arts, and returned to England in 1920 to set up a studio in St Ives. His influence on the growth of the studio-pottery movement, both in Japan and in the West, has been profound, and his making of ceramics and his teaching of some of the foremost artist-potters of the period gives him a central place in the international history of decorative arts.

Enthält u.a.: Venezuelan Pavilion, Hostess House, Manhattan House, Fort Hamilton, Heinz Company, Lever House, US Konsulat, Istanbul Hilton, Pepsi-Cola, First City National Bank, Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Computer Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Banque Lambert, Nine West 57th Street, Hirshhorn Museum

One of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) is known for his path-breaking studies of ancient Greek and Roman history. The encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient world that Momigliano brought to his work, however, enabled him to make connections between ancient history and the subsequent study of that history. His sweeping vision stretched from antiquity to the present day. In Momigliano and Antiquarianism, Peter N. Miller brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to provide the first serious study of Momigliano's history of historical scholarship. At its core, this collection is devoted to one of Momigliano's most celebrated subjects, the history of antiquarianism, and one of his most audacious claims, that the decay of early modern antiquarianism actually gave birth to the modern cultural sciences - history, sociology, anthropology, art history, archaeology, and history of religion. Filling a gap in the scholarship, this erudite collection will prove fascinating to teachers and students of classics, history, and the human sciences.

For more than forty years, Paul Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Rome has been a foundational work in the field of politics and literature. While many critics assumed that the Roman plays do not reflect any special knowledge of Rome, Cantor was one of the first to argue that they are grounded in a profound understanding of the Roman regime and its changes over time. Taking Shakespeare seriously as a political thinker, Cantor suggests that his Roman plays can be profitably studied in the context of the classical republican tradition in political philosophy. In Shakespeare’s Rome , Cantor examines the political settings of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra , with references as well to Julius Caesar . Cantor shows that Shakespeare presents a convincing portrait of Rome in different eras of its history, contrasting the austere republic of Coriolanus , with its narrow horizons and martial virtues, and the cosmopolitan empire of Antony and Cleopatra , with its “immortal longings” and sophistication bordering on decadence.

This collection of essays pays tribute to Andrew Sarris, the most influential film critic in American film history. A noted film personality, Sarris occupies a unique position, walking the line between popular journalism and more academic scholarship. He began his career in the 1950s with a passion for film and an eloquent style of prose that led him to become a prominent voice in the film world. As a writer and editor for the Village Voice at its prime, Sarris reached and educated a whole generation of readers, and became respected by academics and critics all over the world. The thirty-eight essays assembled here and arranged according to major themes demonstrate the amazing impact Sarris has had on every aspect of the film world: fellow critics, filmmakers, readers, and American popular culture. Contributors include noted critics Leonard Maltin and Molly Haskell, film scholars David Bordwell and James Naremore, and directors Martin Scorsese, Robert Benton, and John Sayles.

In 1935, while Virginia Woolf was alive and building her career as a woman writer, Ruth Gruber published a seminal essay on the novelist that is now seen as the first feminist interpretation of Woolf's writings and life. Seventy years after its original publication, Gruber's seminal critique is available once again, with new material that makes it more relevant for readers today. Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman includes several previously unpublished letters exchanged between Woolf and Gruber, and a new introduction in which Gruber recalls her 1933 meeting with the English writer, examining the questions surrounding Woolf's bi-polar illness and anti-Semitism. In this groundbreaking assessment of Woolf's philosophy, influences, and style, Gruber laid the groundwork for a generation of future feminist analyses. She cogently examines Woolf's concept of gender and her literary influences, adeptly discussing how Woolf constructed a feminine writing style in a realm dominated by men. Above all, she shows how Woolf consciously strove to create as a woman. Virginia Woolf's experimental prose and her struggles with mental illness have made her an enduringly provocative figure, and today, more than sixty years after her suicide, Woolf's writing continues to fascinate and inspire readers.

This book is Stanley Cavell’s definitive expression on Emerson. Over the past thirty years, Cavell has demonstrated that he is the most emphatic and provocative philosophical critic of Emerson that America has yet known. The sustained effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence. Students and scholars working in philosophy, literature, American studies, history, film studies, and political theory can now more easily access Cavell’s luminous and enduring work on Emerson. Such engagement should be further complemented by extensive indices and annotations. If we are still in doubt whether America has expressed itself philosophically, there is perhaps no better space for inquiry than reading Cavell reading Emerson.

'Theater legend Malina has written one of the most interesting studies of the avant-garde theatrical movement published in the last several years.' âe" CHOICE Judith Malina and The Living Theatre have been icons of political theatre for over six decades. What few realise is that she originally studied under one of the giants of twentieth century culture, Erwin Piscator, in his Dramatic Workshop at The New School in New York. Piscator founded the Workshop after emigrating to New York, having collaborated with Brecht to create "epic theatre" in Germany. The Piscator Notebook documents Malinaâe(tm)s intensive and idiosyncratic training at Piscatorâe(tm)s school. Part diary, part theatrical treatise, this unique and inspiring volume combines: complete transcriptions of Malinaâe(tm)s diaries from her time as a student at the Dramatic Workshop, as well as reproductions of various of Piscatorâe(tm)s syllabi and teaching materials; notes on Malinaâe(tm)s teachers, fellow students âe" including Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams âe" and New School productions; studies of Piscatorâe(tm)s process and influence, along with a new essay on the relationship between his teaching, Malinaâe(tm)s work with the Living Theatre and "The Ongoing Epic"; an introduction by performance pioneer, Richard Schechner. The Piscator Notebook is a compelling record of the genealogy of political theatre practice in the early 20th Century, from Europe to the US. But it is also a stunningly personal reflection on the pleasures and challenges of learning about theatre, charged with essential insights for the student and teacher, actor and director. 'Piscator is the greatest theatre man of our time.' âe" Bertolt Brecht

Born in Clinton, Mississippi, Barry Hannah has been a major force in southern literature since the 1970 publication of his first novel, Geronimo Rex, which won the Bellman Foundation Award in fiction. It was followed by his first collection of stories, Airships (1978), winner of the prestigious Arnold Gringrich Short Fiction Award, and the acclaimed novel Ray (1980). The honesty of Hannah's vision and his varied narrative voices have won him comparison to Walker Percy, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. One of the South's most original writers, Hannah explores the human psyche; he may write primarily about his experiences in the South, but his experiments with prose are not restricted to region. In this first full-length critical study of Hannah's works--six novels and two volumes of short stories--Mark Jay Charney deftly explores Hannah's connections with southern writers like Faulkner and Welty by examining both his progression as a fiction writer and his experiments with language, voice, and form. Expertly combining biographical information with critical analysis, Charney correlates Hannah's literary themes and techniques with the influences shaping his life. The book is organized chronologically to illustrate Hannah's growing preoccupation with unconventional narrative form and to delineate the thematic shift from violence and isolation to peaceful alternatives and community acceptance. This book is a most welcome introduction to the works of a writer who promises to remain one of South's most startling and iconoclastic voices.

George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music"—a term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartók, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them. If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varèse, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven. Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process. Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners.

In the visual history of the western world, some images and authors have become real icons for entire generations of painters, photographers, and common people. How could they remain so vivid in our memory, defeating oblivion? What was their secret? In this essay, Max Kozloff talks about one of the most emblematic and fascinating artists of our visual tradition, Johannes Vermeer; about his XVII century Dutch interiors, plunged into a palpable and magic light; and about his ability to create refined images and atmospheres that are still able to move and seduce contemporary society. In this book, the author attempts to decipher the symbols hiding in Vermeer’s paintings and to find out the secret thanks to which his works have managed to remain so popular and appreciated even today.

New translation of Le coeur a gaz (1922) with introduction, commentary, and staging.

Le Proche et Le Lointain (literally The Near and the Far) was first published in France in 1981, and this translation is available to English-speaking readers one of the most significant European contributions to Elizabethan cultural history to appear in recent years. In the conjunction - or conflict - of the 'near' and the 'far' Professor Marienstras discerns an underlying dichotomy of major importance to an understanding of the Shakespearean world. Othello, The Tempest and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore are amongst the works discussed in detail in this highly imaginative series of inter-disciplinary studies, and the author sees in the juxtaposition of nature and culture, sacrifice and sacrilege, purity and impurity, nourishment and poison a structural opposition that renders unified and comprehensible thematic material at first sight random and meaningless.

Excellent Book