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Literary Criticism
An elegant medieval guide to verse composition and rhetoric, presented in a new authoritative edition and English translation.
The Art of Making Verses, Ars versificatoria, was composed by the thirteenth-century English poet and teacher Gervase of Melkley, who studied under John de Hauville. He belongs to a select company of French and English scholastic poets including not only de Hauville but also Alan of Lille and Bernardus Silvestris. The educational treatise was probably begun around 1200 and completed in 1220. Gervase departs from established critical texts on poetry by Matthew of Vendôme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf; instead, he seeks to teach the art of verse in an entirely new way. The method outlined in Ars versificatoria instructs elementary students how to compose in three progressively more difficult modes: literal but still artful language, metaphor, and irony or paradox. This edition presents a new and improved Latin edition based on the manuscripts, a new translation into English, and thorough annotation of the most original of the medieval Latin treatises on poetry.
--bell hooks bell hooks was a prolific, trailblazing author, feminist, social activist, cultural critic, and professor. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell used her pen name to center attention on her ideas and to honor her courageous great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. hooks's unflinching dedication to her work carved deep grooves for the feminist and anti-racist movements. In this collection of 7 interviews, stretching from early in her career until her last interview, she discusses feminism, the complexity of rap music and masculinity, her relationship to Buddhism, the "politic of domination," sexuality, and love and the importance of communication across cultural borders. Whether she was sparking controversy on campuses or facing criticism from contemporaries, hooks relentlessly challenged herself and those around her, inserted herself into the tensions of the cultural moment, and anchored herself with love.
A New York Times Notable Book
A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year
An authoritative edition of Oscar Wilde's critical writings shows how the renowned dramatist and novelist also transformed the art of commentary.
Though he is primarily acclaimed today for his drama and fiction, Oscar Wilde was also one of the greatest critics of his generation. Annotated and introduced by Wilde scholar Nicholas Frankel, this unique collection reveals Wilde as a writer who transformed criticism, giving the genre new purpose, injecting it with style and wit, and reorienting it toward the kinds of social concerns that still occupy our most engaging cultural commentators. "Criticism is itself an art," Wilde wrote, and The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde demonstrates this philosophy in action. Readers will encounter some of Wilde's most quotable writings, such as "The Decay of Lying," which famously avers that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life." But Frankel also includes lesser-known works like "The American Invasion," a witty celebration of modern femininity, and "Aristotle at Afternoon Tea," in which Wilde deftly (and anonymously) carves up his former tutor's own criticism. The essays, reviews, dialogues, and epigrams collected here cover an astonishing range of themes: literature, of course, but also fashion, politics, masculinity, cuisine, courtship, marriage--the breadth of Victorian England. If today's critics address such topics as a matter of course, it is because Wilde showed that they could. It is hard to imagine a twenty-first-century criticism without him.
James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, "If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one."
The Culture of Love interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians. As public opinion, family pressure, and religious conviction loosened, men and women took charge of their love. Stephen Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, deadly serious, and abruptly over.
Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes in each: from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as well as past lovers. While Victorians viewed jealousy as a "foreign devil," moderns began to acknowledge responsibility for it. Desire lost its close tie with mortal sin and became the engine of artistic creation; women's response to the marriage proposal shifted from mere consent to active choice. There were even new possibilities of kissing, beyond the sudden, blind, disembodied, and censored Victorian meeting of lips. Kern's evidence is mainly literature and art, including classic novels by the Brontës, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Hardy, Forster, Colette, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Musil as well as the paintings and sculptures of Millais, Courbet, Gérôme, Rodin, Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Valadon, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The book's conceptual foundation comes from Heidegger's existential philosophy, in particular his authentic-inauthentic distinction, which Kern adapts to make his overall interpretation and concluding affirmation of the value of authenticity: "The moderns may have lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even some of their heroism, but in exchange became more reflective of what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to make that loving more their very own."
I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature
II. Dante's Early Poetry
III. The Subject of the "Comedy"
IV. The Structure of the "Comedy"
V. The Presentation
VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality
Notes
Index
Winner, 2025 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize, Association for Philosophy and Literature
Finalist, 2025 PEN Open Book Award, PEN America An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life. In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown's famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial "hollow earth theory" from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison. Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.
The war between the Heike and Genji clans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is among the most compelling and significant moments in Japan's history, immortalized in The Tale of the Heike. Beyond the events recorded in this canonical text, the conflicts of the surrounding years are crucial to medieval Japanese culture and history. In 1156, power began to slip away from the court nobility in Kyoto. A shogunate was later founded in Kamakura, and in 1221, it won a decisive victory over the court.
The three war tales translated in this book tell the story of these critical decades, vividly recording stages in the passage from rule by the imperial court in Kyoto to rule by the warrior government in Kamakura. "The Tale of the Hōgen Years" recounts a deposed emperor's disastrous attempt to regain the throne in 1156. "The Tale of the Heiji Years" narrates a bloody clash between rival courtier factions in 1159. "An Account of the Jōkyū Years" records Kamakura's victory over the imperial attempt to overthrow it in 1221. These works do not simply complete the story of The Tale of the Heike--they are classics of Japanese literature in their own right. Royall Tyler's lively translation masterfully conveys the nature of medieval Japanese warfare, rendering aristocratic power politics and the brutal realities of violence with equal aplomb. The Dawn of the Warrior Age is an essential book for readers interested in premodern Japanese history and literature.
A Dialogue of Voices was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his notions of dialogics and genre, has had a substantial impact on contemporary critical practices. Until now, however, little attention has been paid to the possibilities and challenges Bakhtin presents to feminist theory, the task taken up in A Dialogue of Voices. The original essays in this book combine feminism and Bakhtin in unique ways and, by interpreting texts through these two lenses, arrive at new theoretical approaches. Together, these essays point to a new direction for feminist theory that originates in Bakhtin-one that would lead to a feminine être rather than a feminine écriture.
Focusing on feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Teresa de Lauretis, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig in conjunction with Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and chronotope, the authors offer close readings of texts from a wide range of multicultural genres, including nature writing, sermon composition, nineteenth-century British women's fiction, the contemporary romance novel, Irish and French lyric poetry, and Latin American film. The result is a unique dialogue in which authors of both sexes, from several countries and different eras, speak against, for, and with one another in ways that reveal their works anew as well as the critical matrices surrounding them.Karen Hohne is an independent scholar and artist living in Moorhead, Minnesota. Helen Wussow is an assistant professor of English at Memphis State University.
Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. "Of course, and as usual," she recalls, "I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed." Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life--and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted and enraptured by the force of his writing.
In this book, Kristeva embarks on a wide-ranging and stimulating inquiry into Dostoyevsky's work and the profound ways it has influenced her own thinking. Reading across his major novels and shorter works, Kristeva offers incandescent insights into the potent themes that draw her back to the Russian master: God, otherness, violence, eroticism, the mother, the father, language itself. Both personal and erudite, the book intermingles Kristeva's analysis with her recollections of Dostoyevsky's significance in different intellectual moments--the rediscovery of Bakhtin in the Thaw-era Eastern Bloc, the debates over poststructuralism in 1960s France, and today's arguments about whether it can be said that "everything is permitted." Brilliant and vivid, this is an essential book for admirers of both Kristeva and Dostoyevsky. It also features an illuminating foreword by Rowan Williams that reflects on the significance of Kristeva's reading of Dostoyevsky for his own understanding of religious writing.
Hailed as a "genius-enchantress" (Karen Russell) and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, the celebrated novelist Andrea Barrett has for decades reached backward to find inspiration from the past and written acclaimed and prizewinning works of historical fiction. In Dust and Light, the first work of nonfiction of her extraordinary career, Barrett draws from that deep well of experience to explore the mysteries, methods, and delights of the form.
Inspiration found in the past, she argues, can illuminate fiction, just as dust scatters light and makes the unseen visible. Barrett writes of lessons gleaned from the classic work of some of her guiding lights (Willa Cather, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf), as well as the work of such contemporary masters as Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Colm Tóibín, and Jesmyn Ward. She reveals how she created some of her own beloved works, taking readers on a fascinating journey into some of the largest questions in the genre: How does a writer find meaningful subject matter beyond the confines of their life? How are scraps of history found, used, misused, manipulated, and transformed into a fully formed narrative? And what are the perils as well as the potential of this process?
Building on pieces originally published in leading literary magazines and featured in The Best American Essays, Dust and Light is an elegant exploration of the hazy borderlands of fiction sewn from the materials of history. Filled with profound insights, it will be a delight for any devoted fiction readers, and of great use to aspiring writers too.
Facing a transformed socio-political landscape after the An Lushan Rebellion (756-763), Tang dynasty elites questioned inherited understandings of tradition and anxiously reflected on their relations to both recent and ancient pasts. Du Fu (712-770), widely considered China's greatest poet, presciently addressed these concerns in his late work on memory and the means by which the past survives.
In Elegies for Empire, Gregory Patterson maps out a poetics of memory in Du Fu's poems from his prolific period of residence in Kuizhou, a remote border town in the Yangzi River Three Gorges. Patterson argues that, for Du Fu, memory held the promise of rebuilding frameworks of belonging under conditions of displacement and dynastic crisis. Remembering also led the poet to think through the material underpinnings on which cultural transmission depends; therefore, these late poems are distinguished by a highly creative, often melancholy engagement with the forms and media that preserve memory, such as monuments, paintings, and poetry. Elegies for Empire elucidates the vital roles of place, memory, and media in poems that are among the most influential in the Chinese literary tradition.
Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
In this groundbreaking book, Matsuoka Shinpei--a leading scholar of noh theater--provides a detailed account of the birth of one of Japan's most celebrated art forms. Although noh has often been associated with the elite, Embodied Performance explores its links to a wider popular culture, revealing a rich and colorful public space where courtiers and commoners mingled. Matsuoka traces noh's connections to popular and religious dances, linked verse, and chigo (beautiful temple boy) culture, emphasizing performance and the body. He describes the world of noh playwright Zeami as well as his views on dramaturgy and performance--and argues that Zeami was once a chigo. Matsuoka shows how religious rituals and cultural forms like ecstatic dance prayer and plays about demons in hell attracted people on the margins. Such activities, Matsuoka contends, drew on the tension between wild acrobatic movement and corporeal restraint, influencing the development of noh as well as the art of flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Janet Goff's translation makes available in English a classic work of Japanese scholarship that will be invaluable to those interested in medieval Japanese culture, noh, and theatrical practice.
Facing threats like climate change and nuclear warfare, science fiction authors have conjured apocalyptic scenarios of human extinction. Can such gloomy fates help us make sense of our contemporary crises? How important is the survival of our species if we wind up battling for an Earth that has become an unhabitable hellscape? What other possible futures do narratives of the end of humanity allow us to imagine?
Michael Bérubé explores the surprising insights of classic and contemporary works of SF that depict civilizational collapse and contemplate the fate of Homo sapiens. In a lively, conversational style, he considers novels by writers including Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Liu Cixin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, as well as films that feature hostile artificial intelligence, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and the Terminator and Matrix franchises. Bérubé argues that these works portray a future in which we have become able to see ourselves from the vantage point of something other than the human. Though framed by the possibility of human extinction, they are driven by a vision of the "ex-human"--a desire to imagine that another species is possible. For all science fiction readers worried about the fate of humanity, The Ex-Human is an entertaining yet sobering account of how key novels and films envision the world without us.
Faulknerista collects more than twenty years of critically influential scholarship by Catherine Gunther Kodat on the writings of one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, William Faulkner. Initially composed as freestanding essays and now updated and revised, the book's nine chapters place Faulkner's work in the context of current debates concerning the politics of white authors who write about race, queer sexualities, and the use of the N-word in literature and popular culture. The Faulknerista of the title is a critic who tackles these debates without fear or favor, balancing admiration with skepticism in a manner that establishes a new model for single-author scholarship that is both historically grounded (for women have been writing about Faulkner, and talking back to him, since the beginning of his career) and urgently contemporary.
Beginning with an introduction that argues for the critical importance of women's engagement with Faulkner's fiction, through comparative discussions pairing it with works by Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, and David Simon, Faulknerista offers a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, written in an accessible style and aimed at stimulating discussions of Faulkner's work and the rich interpretive challenges it continues to present.
New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts.
Sinfield is often provocative. He "rewrites" Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.
Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as "inaccessible," "irrelevant," or "intimidating." She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question, and cultivate community. Lifting the veil on her own creative process, Smith shows us how reading and writing poetry allows us to better confront life's many uncertainties and losses, build camaraderie with strangers, and understand ourselves more fully. In six insightful chapters, she grounds readers in the technical elements of the craft and provides close readings of the works of contemporary poets such as Joy Harjo, Danez Smith, and Francisco Márquez, alongside classic poems by Dickinson, Keats, Millay, and others. By reimaging and reexamining the age-old art form, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation, and hope through poetry for poetry fans and newcomers to the art form.
The landmark book that situates Blake's poetry within the intellectual movements of his day and unlocks his symbolism for modern readers
Since it was first published, Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry has established itself as the defining commentary on the poetic vision of William Blake. Frye gives a complete solution to the riddles of Blake's longer poems--the so-called "Prophecies"--and demonstrates how Blake's works form a coherent mythical pattern that broadens our conception of literature. He explains how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, life, and art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. With an incisive foreword by scholar and literary critic Nicholas Halmi, this Princeton Classics edition shows how Blake reflects the literary and the intellectual atmosphere of his time while holding renewed meaning for us today.
Incomplete but invaluable excerpts from otherwise lost orations.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106-43 BC), Roman advocate, orator, politician, poet, and philosopher, about whom we know more than we do of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In Cicero's political speeches and in his correspondence, we see the excitement, tension, and intrigue of politics and the important part he played in the turmoil of the time. Although Cicero's oratory is well attested--of 106 known speeches, fifty-eight survive intact or in large part--the sixteen speeches that survive only in quotations nevertheless fill gaps in our knowledge. These speeches attracted the interest of later authors, particularly Asconius and Quintilian, for their exemplary content, oratorical strategies, or use of language, failing to survive entire not because they were inferior in quality or interest but due to factors contingent on the way Cicero's speeches were read, circulated, and evaluated in (especially late) antiquity. The fragmentary speeches fall, like Cicero's career in general, into three periods: the preconsular, the consular, and the postconsular, and here are presented chronologically, numbered continuously, and their fragments arranged, insofar as possible, in the order in which they would have occurred, followed by unplaced quotations. Each speech receives an introduction and ample notation. This edition, which completes the Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero, includes all speeches with attested fragments, together with testimonia. Based upon Crawford's edition of 1994, the sources have been examined afresh, and newer source-editions substituted where appropriate.