This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
'Conceiving the City' looks at how major writers and artists represented London in fiction, poetry, essays, and art. It shows that late-Victorian fin-de-siècle London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art as writers and artists broke with earlier tradition and bent realism into exciting new shapes.
Books studying the presence of Spain in American literature, and the possible influence of Spain and its literature on American authors, are still rare. In 1955 appeared a pioneer work in this field – Stanley T. Williams’ The Spanish Background of American Literature. But that book went no further than W.D. Howells’ Familiar Spanish Travels, published in 1913. The Last Good Land covers most of the twentieth century, including such groups as the Lost Generation and African American writers and exiles. It also considers then recent revolution in Spanish cultural and historical thought introduced by Américo Castro, which several American writers discussed in this volume may be said to have anticipated. Recent studies have expanded on Williams’ volumes, but in the majority of cases these works limit their scope to a single period (the nineteenth century, the Spanish Civil War), a movement (predominantly Romanticism) or authors known for their interest in Spain (Irving, Hemingway). The result is often a lack of continuum, or the exclusion of such authors as Saul Bellow, William Gaddis or Richard Wright. Within American literature itself, The Last Good Land contains revisions of traditional interpretations of certain writers, including Hemingway. The variety of authors treated, both in respect to ethnicity and gender, guarantees a varied and global view of Spanish culture by American writers.
Venice holds a unique place in literary and cultural history. Barnes looks at the themes of war, occupation, resistance and fascism to see how the political background has affected the literary works that have come out of this great city. He focuses on key British and American writers, including Byron, Ruskin, Pound and Eliot.
Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: “I’d say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I’m sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot’s early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot’s poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot’s friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot’s Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot’s poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.
Until now, Bergson's widely acknowledged impact on American literature has never been comprehensively mapped. Author Paul Douglass explains and evaluates Bergson's meaning for American writers, beginning with Eliot and moving through Ransom, Penn Warren, and Tate to Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, and others. It will be a standard point of reference. Bergson was the continental philosopher of the early 1900s, a celebrity, as Sartre would later be. Profoundly influential throughout Europe, and widely discussed in England and America in the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties, Bergson is now rarely read. His current "obsolescence," Douglass argues, illuminates the Western shift from Modern to post- Modern. Ambitious in scope, this book remains admirably close to Bergson himself: what he said, where that fits in the historical context of philosophy, why his ideas moved across the Atlantic, and how he affected American writers. At the book's heart are readings of Eliot's criticism and poetry, analyses of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and evaluations of Ransom's, Tate's and Penn Warren's criticism. This impressively researched and beautifully written study will remain of lasting value to students of American literature.
"Cohen has succeeded in showing a fusion of Ozick's writing as sacred and comic. Defining humor broadly, Cohen persuasively argues that levity and liturgy are natural companions, enriching each other, especially in the creative imagination of Cynthia Ozick." -- Midstream "... a thoughtful introduction to a monumental though underrated writer." -- SHOFAR "This study is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly criticism of Ozick and focuses on her comedic style." -- Choice "Cohen has written an important... book, one that celebrates Ozick's 'liturgical laughter,' emphasizing on every occasion the connection between the comic and the sacred. It is a connection we should be reminded of often." -- Belles Lettres "Cohen's readings of these stories reveal their many levels and meanings in a language as acute and perceptive as that of Ozick herself."Â -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch Magazine "In presenting Ozick as a 'comedian of ideas,' Sarah Blacher Cohen has raised the study of Ozick to a new level." -- Alan L. Berger "[Cohen] understands Ozick's hybrid conception of human nature, her realization that the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow and that the ironic mode... is the best way of telling the truth." -- Daniel Walden
"It's fitting that Alice B. Toklas, 'wife' and literary impresario of Gertrude Stein, should be the subject of a biography . . . and this is a good one, sensitive and lively. . . . it's clear from this portrait that through her possessive affection she not only had a dominant influence on Stein's life but (for good or ill) on her highly idiosyncratic prose. With her acid tongue, shrewd judgment, vitality, and intense loyalty she was a fairly remarkable person in her-self."--Publishers Weekly. "Linda Simon writes beautifully of Alice's early years in California, of her Polish-Jewish family, of her growing alienation from her surroundings and gravitation toward artists, of her awareness of the isolating burden homosexuality would force on her. . . . entertaining, thoroughly researched. and well-written. . . .with a clear gaze fixed on undistorted truth."--Saturday Review. "A study that shows Toklas as she must have been, not 'Miss Stein's obedient shadow,'. . . but a multifaceted and complex creature with her own tastes and standards. . . . [her story] is an emotionally stirring experience."--Washington Post Book World. Linda Simon, in her preface to this Bison Book edition, calls Alice B. Toklas "a woman who, through a mixture of determination and good luck, invented a new narrative for her life" at a time when options for women were few. Simon is the author of Thornton Wilder: His World (1979), Good Writing (1988), and other books. She is now working on a biography of William James.
Firmly rejecting the unabashed subjectivity and accompanying impenetrability of much contemporary verse , Alan Holder’s Sky Gazer, from first to last, makes its poems steadily available to the reader, assumed to be “a creature of feeling” and addressed directly. The reader is onboard for a train ride or in-step for a woodland walk. It continually registers that great commonality of human experience, the four seasons. The poems share the sights that come the poet’s way—so much of what he sees assumes the status of spectacle—the source of many of those arresting sights being the heavens, which Holder never tires of contemplating. He has a fondness for long, winding verse sentences; some poems consist of but a single one. Again and again, Holder alludes, sometimes implicitly, to works by great figures of the literary past—Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Melville, Twain, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Dylan Thomas—using them as springboards to go his own way. Repeatedly, his poems raise questions that do not admit of answers. Sky Gazer takes seriously one of the prescriptions for poetry that Stevens sets forth in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: “It Must Give Pleasure.” “Firmly rejecting the unabashed subjectivity and accompanying impenetrability of much contemporary verse, Alan Holder’s Sky Gazer, from first to last, makes his free form verse steadily available to the reader, assumed to be ‘a creature of feeling’ and often addressed directly. The reader is onboard for a train ride or in-step for a woodland walk. Sky Gazer continually registers that great commonality of human experience, the four seasons. The poems share the sights that come the poet’s way-so much of what he sees assumes the status of spectacle-the source of many of those arresting sights being the heavens, which Holder never tires of contemplating. He has a fondness for long, winding verse sentences; some poems consist of but a single one. Again and again, Holder alludes, sometimes implicitly, to works by great figures of the literary past-Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Melville, Twain, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Dylan Thomas-using them as springboards to go his own way. Repeatedly, his poems raise questions that do not admit of answers. Sky Gazer is very highly recommended for personal reading lists, as well as community, college, and university Contemporary American Poetry collections.” —Midwest Book Review, Wisconsin Bookwatch: March 2016, James A. Cox
