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Readers of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare’s greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago’s malice? But while many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, Millicent Bell demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare’s philosophy of doubt. Examining the major tragedies, Millicent Bell reveals the persistent strain of philosophical skepticism. Like his contemporary, Montaigne, Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowability of our world. In a period of social, political, and religious upheaval, uncertainty hovered over matters great and small—the succession of the crown, the death of loved ones from plague, the failure of a harvest. Tumultuous social conditions raised ultimate questions for Shakespeare, Bell argues, and ultimately provoked in him a skepticism which casts shadows of existential doubt over his greatest masterpieces.
Henry James rebelled intuitively against the tyranny and banality of plots. Believing a life to have many potential paths and a self to hold many destinies, he hung the evocative shadow of "what might have been" over much of what he wrote. Yet James also realized that no life can be lived--and no story written--except by submission to some outcome. The limiting conventions of society and literature are, he found, almost inescapable. In a major, comprehensive new study of James's work, Millicent Bell explores this oscillation between hope and fatalism, indeterminacy and form, and uncertainty and meaning. In the process Bell provides fresh insight into how we read and interpret fiction. Bell d...
'Bloom's Guides' are the successors to 'Bloom's Notes' & 'Bloom's Reviews', offering a comprehensive reading & study guide to an important work of literature. Each book includes a biographical sketch of the author, a descriptive list of characters, summary & analysis.
The two men met on only six occasions, and never for more than a few days, so their friendship was almost entirely epistolary. The letters assembled here, nearly half of which are previously unpublished, exhibit a voice decidedly more vulnerable than that which we usually associate with James. They also shed new light on the writer's homoerotic leanings, as he approaches Andersen with a passion, as well as a tenderness, typically reserved for a lover.
Caresse Crosby rejected the culturally prescribed roles for women of her era and background in search of an independent, creative, and socially responsible life. Poet, memoirist, advocate of women’s rights and the peace movement, Crosby published and promoted modern writers and artists such as Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker, Salvador Dalí, and Romare Bearden. She also earned a place in the world of fashion by patenting one of the earliest versions of the brassiere. Behind her public success was a chaotic life: three marriages, two divorces, the suicide of her husband Harry Crosby, strained relationships with her children, and legal confrontations over efforts to establish a center for world p...
The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton offers a series of fresh examinations of Edith Wharton's fiction written both to meet the interest of the student or general reader who encounters this major American writer for the first time and to be valuable to advanced scholars looking for new insights into her creative achievement. The essays cover Wharton's most important novels as well as some of her shorter fiction, and utilise both traditional and innovative critical techniques, applying the perspectives of literary history, feminist theory, psychology or biography, sociology or anthropology, or social history. The Introduction supplies a valuable review of the history of Wharton criticism which shows how her writing has provoked varying responses from its first publication, and how current interests have emerged from earlier ones. A detailed chronology of Wharton's life and publications and a useful bibliography are also provided.
"Barlowe examines the causes and consequences of the continuing disregard for women's scholarship. To that end, she chronicles The Scarlet Letter's critical reception, analyzes the history of Hester Prynne as a cultural icon in literature and film, rereads the canonized criticism of the novel, and offers a new reading of Hawthorne's work by rescuing marginalized interpretations from the alternative canon of women critics."--BOOK JACKET.
Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit ...
Since Ovid, the concept of metamorphosis has been an irresistible temptation for writers, not only as a metaphor for shifting personal identity but as a way of exploring ideas of cultural and political transition. The essays in this volume show how authors from Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to Thomas Mann, Karen Blixen, and 20th-century science fiction writers, have used this pervasive concept to raise fundamental questions about the nature and agency of radical change. Among the broad topics addressed are how shifts in scientific understanding intersect with and even effect transformations in literary expression; the differing values attached to the language of metamorphosis over time; and...
One of the greatest ghost stories ever told, The Turn of the Screw is now a feature film from Universal Pictures premiering January 24th, produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Finn Wolfhard and Mackenzie Davis This unsettling collection brings together eight of Henry James's tales exploring ghosts and the uncanny, including his infamous ghost story, "The Turn of the Screw," a work saturated with evil. James's haunting masterpiece tells of a nameless young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. But is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence or something else entirely? This collection also includes "The Jolly Corner," "Owen Wingrave," and further tales of visitations, premonitions, madness, grief, and family secrets, where the living are just as mysterious and unknowable as the dead. In these chilling stories, Henry James shows himself to be a master of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension.