Shakespeare's plays were not always the inviolable texts they are almost universally considered to be today. The Restoration and eighteenth century committed what many critics view as one of the most subversive acts in literary history -- the rewriting and restructuring of Shakespeare's plays.Many of us are familiar with Nahum Tate's "audacious" adaptation of King Lear with its resoundingly happy ending, but Tate was only one of a score of playwrights who adapted Shakespeare's plays. Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage, works in which playwrights augmented, substantially cut, or completely rewrote the original plays. The plays were staged with new characters, new scenes, new endings, and, underlying all this novelty, new words.Why did this happen? And why, in the later eighteenth century, did it stop? These questions have serious implications regarding both the aesthetics of the literary text and its treatment, for the adaptations manifest the period's perceptions of Shakespeare. As such, they demonstrate an important evolution in the definition of poetic language, and in the idea of what constitutes a literary work.In The Re-Imagined Text, Jean I. Marsden examines both the adaptations and the network of literary theory that surrounds them, thereby exploring the problems of textual sanctity and of the author's relationship to the text. As she demonstrates, Shakespeare's works, and English literature in general, came to be defined by their words rather than by the plots and morality on which the older aesthetic theory focused -- a clear step toward our modern concern for the word and its varying levels of signification.

This perceptive, carefully documented study challenges the traditional assumption that the supernatural virtually disappeared from eighteenth-century poetry as a result of the growing rationalistic temper of the late seventeenth century. Mr. Morris shows that the religious poetry of eighteenth-century England, while not equaling the brilliant work of seventeenth-century and Romantic writers, does reveal a vital and serious effort to create a new kind of sacred poetry which would rival the sublimity of Milton and of the Bible itself. Tracing the major varieties of religious poetry written throughout the century -- by major figures and by their now vanished contemporaries -- the author explains how later poets and critics made significant departures from the established norms. These changes in religious poetry thus become a valuable means of understanding the shift from a neoclassical to a Romantic theory of literature.

In classical mythology Astraea, the goddess of justice, chastity, and truth, was the last of the immortals to leave Earth with the decline of the ages. Her return was to signal the dawn of a new Golden Age. This myth not only survived the Christian Middle Ages but also became a commonplace in the Renaissance when courtly poets praised their patrons and princes by claiming that Astraea guided them. The literary cult of Astraea persisted in the sixteenth century as writers saw in Elizabeth I of England the imperial Astraea who would lead mankind to peace through universal rule.This and other late flowerings of the Astraea myth should not be taken as the final phases of her history. Frederick A. de Armas documents in this book what may well be the last great rebirth of Astraea, one that is probably of greater political, religious, and literary significance than others previously described by historians and literary critics. The Return of Astraea focuses on the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and analyzes the deity's presence in thirteen of his plays, including his masterpiece, La Vida es Sueho.Her popularity in this period is partially attributed to political motives, reflecting the aspirations and fears of the Spanish monarch Philip IV. In this broad study, grounded on such diverse fields as astrology, iconography, history, mythology, and philosophy, de Armas explains that Astraea adopts many guises in Calderón's dramas. Ranging from the Kabbalah to Platonic thought and from satires on Olivares to cosmogonic myths, he analyzes and reinterprets Calderón's theater from a wide range of perspectives centered on the playwright's utilization of the myth of Astraea. The book thus represents a new view of Calderón's dramaturgy and also documents the popularity and significance of this astral-imperial myth during the Spanish Golden Age.

The year was 778. Charlemagne, starting homeward after an expedition onto the Iberian Peninsula, left his nephew, Count Roland, in command of a rear guard. As Roland and his troops moved through the Pyrenees, a fierce enemy swooped down and annihilated them. Whether the attackers were Moors, Basques, Gascons, or Aquitainians is still disputed. The massacre soon passed into legend, preserved but at the same time expanded and interpreted in oral tradition and written accounts.Dormant after the late Middle Ages, the legend began to inspire literary works even before the discovery and publication of the Oxford manuscript Chanson de Roland in 1837. The French Revolution and Empire, temporarily relieving Roland of his religious aura, hailed him as a patriot belaboring his country's foes. The Romantics made him either a dauntless, irrepressible extrovert or a noble victim struck down while making the world a better place. As the twentieth century dawned, a few authors scoffed at hero worship but others held up Roland as a heroic example that might help his countrymen live with the humiliation of their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and then, as World War I approached, retake their lost territories.Fascinating as the Roland legend is in itself, no one has looked into the nonacademic French literature to which it has given rise in modern times. Harry Redman now shows how writers, with varying outlooks and approaches and divergent purposes, drew upon the legend from 1777 to the end of World War I. A monumental enterprise based on primary research, the book is of extraordinary value to scholars interested in the Old French epic and to all those concerned with more recent literary periods.

Among the literary innovations of the seventeenth century -- a period of rich development in English prose -- was the resolve. Generally of religious inspiration, the resolve was intended as the instrument of reform of private and public morals to assist in attaining individual perfection and in establishing the ideal Christian state.John L. Lievsay has brought together an anthology of resolves from the pens of eighteen writers, some -- like Bishop Joseph Hall and Owen Feltham -- familiar names to students of English literature, and others virtually unknown. Despite its popularity as a literary form during the seventeenth century the resolve quickly declined in influence and died an untimely death. Lievsay sketches the history of this once well-known form and provides critical and comparative evaluations of the writers and their works.Until now, the only resolve writer anthologized since the seventeenth century has been Owen Feltham -- admittedly the best of the "resolvers" but, according to Lievsay, not greatly superior to Hall, Daniel Tuvill, or Francis Rous. Together, the selections in this volume offer a comprehensive view of a significant yet little-known development in English letters.

"In the Holocaust novel, silence is always a character, and the word is always its subject matter." So writes David Patterson in this profound and original study of more than thirty important writers. Contrary to existing views, he argues, the Holocaust novel is not an attempt to depict an unimaginable reality or an ineffable horror. It is, rather, an endeavor to fetch the word from silence and restore it to meaning, to resurrect the human soul, to regenerate the relation between the self and God, the self and other, the self and itself.This book is less a critical study in the usual sense than an impassioned meditation on the deeper sources of the Holocaust novel. Among the authors examined are Elie Wiesel, Arnost Lustig, Aharon Appelfeld, Katzetnik 135633, Primo Levi, Yehuda Amichai, Piotr Rawicz, A. Anatoli, Saul Bellow, I.B. Singer, Anna Langfus, Rachmil Bryks, and Ilse Aichinger.The Shriek of Silence is a first in several respects: the first to examine the Holocaust novels in their original languages, the first to articulate a theoretical basis for its approach, and the first phenomenological investigation -- one that attempts to penetrate the process of creation for these novelists. Organized along conceptual lines, the book examines "the word in exile," the themes of death of the father and the child, transformations of the self, and the implications of the reader. Its philosophical foundations are Rosenzweig, Buber, Neher, and Levinas. Its critical approach is shaped by Bakhtin.The novelists of the Holocaust, in witnessing through their words, regain their voices and in so doing are reborn. By probing the depths of their struggle, Patterson's study draws us too toward a higher understanding, perhaps even our own rebirth.

This study offers an introduction to an important branch of Spanish literature -- the romance, or ballad. Although a great many of these poems have been translated into English by various authors, they are not generally known nor easily accessible. Collected here for the first time in a single volume is a broad and representative sampling of romances in translation that encompasses historical ballads (including those about Spain's greatest folk hero, el Cid), Moorish ballads, and ballads of chivalry, love, and adventure. For the collection, Shasta M. Bryant has written a perceptive commentary and critique in which he discusses the individual poems and compares the translation with the original; both texts are presented to facilitate comparison. For those who wish to pursue their reading further there is an index of romances that have been translated into English, along with the names of the translators. Although the text has been written with the non-specialist in mind, this book will be equally valuable for students of comparative literature and of medieval Spain.

We as adults are reflected in our children, those in our literature as well as those in our familes, and so it is natural to want to examine their presence among us. Children and child speech are important literary elements which merit careful critical analysis. Surprisingly, comprehensive studies of the child in American fiction have not been previously attempted and fictional child speech, even that of individual characters has been almost totally ignored. Nevertheless, the language of fictional children warrants attention for several reasons. First, language and language acquisition are primary issues for children much as sexual development is primary issues for adolescents. Second, because vast linguistic efforts have been directed toward language acquisition research, a broad base of concrete information exists with which to explore the topic. And, third, language is a key which opens many doors. An understanding of fictional children's language leads to discoveries about various critical questions, sociological and psychological as well as textual and stylistic.This study examines the presentation of children and child language in American fiction by applying general linguistic principles as well as specific findings from child language acquisition research to children's speech in literary texts. It clarifies, sorts, and assesses the representations of child speech in American fiction. It tests on fictional discourse linguistic concepts heretofore applied exclusively to naturally occurring child language. The aim is not to evaluate the degree of realism in writers' presentations of child language, for that would be a simplistic and reductive enterprise. Rather, the overall object is to analyze fictional child language using linguistic methods.

Since the early 1970s southern fiction has been increasingly attentive to social issues, including the continuing struggles for racial justice and gender equality, the loss of a sense of social community, and the decline of a coherent regional identity. The essays in The World Is Our Home focus on writers who have explicitly addressed social and cultural issues in their fiction and drama, including Dorothy Allison, Horton Foote, Ernest J. Gaines, Jill McCorkle, Walker Percy, Lee Smith, William Styron, Alice Walker, and many others. The contributors provide valuable insights into the transformation of southern culture over the past thirty years and probe the social and cultural divisions that persist. The collection makes an important case for the centrality of social critique in contemporary southern fiction.

Latin American theatre is among the most innovative in the world today. The period 1965–1970 was one of intense theatrical production in the region. Dozens of major playwrights and collective theaters produced hundreds of highly original plays. This was also a period of profound ideological and sociopolitical transformation. Hopes for Latin American self-definition and self-determination after centuries of colonization and foreign exploitation began to crumble, while the right-wing backlash produced a politics of terror.In this dynamic study, Diana Taylor proposes that, for all the diversity of peoples, languages, and cultural images in Latin America, the effects of crisis on the region's theatre are surprisingly uniform. As a cultural subsystem, theatre is both a product of and a commentary on the making and dismantling of society at large.Theatre of Crisis is an important source of information for Latin Americanists as well as theatre specialists and literary critics interested in this virtually unexplored field.

Taking a new approach to the study of Robert Penn Warren's imposing and still growing poetic canon, Floyd C. Watkins has found in the poems what he describes as a "poetic autobiography" unparalleled in American letters. Drawing on interviews with Warren, members of his family, and contemporaries from his hometown, but keeping the poetry itself constantly at the center of his vision, Watkins shows how the poetry has grown from the experience of the boy and man and from his contemplation of his family's and his country's history. He traces through the poems a family chronicle, moving from the frontier to the late twentieth century, and set in a landscape that is clearly derived from the Kentucky of Warren's boyhood. The little town of Guthrie, divided by railroad tracks, with its two burial grounds for whites and blacks, becomes in the poems a town of both memory and imagination, peopled by characters many of whom are recognizable to Warren's contemporaries. The images of a black man fleeing through swampy woods outside the town, of a grayfaced man who led a lynch mob, of a mad druggist making a list of people to poison, all have counterparts in Guthrie's history. Then and Now is a revealing and provocative study of the poetic process in a poet who is thought of as the originator of the biographical fallacy.

The almost universal adulation given Edmund Waller in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries -- an adulation which, often as not, attached to his reform of poetry -- has been commonly accepted with little question of the grounds on which it is based. In this essay Alexander Ward Allison presents for the first time a specific analysis of the changes from Jacobean modes which Waller made, suggesting in the course of his analysis that the seventeenth century saw not a dissociation of sensibility, but rather a new fusion, of which Waller is a type.By a careful and detailed reading of the poems, Mr. Allison shows how Waller, writing in the genre of occasional verse, replaced the rational, ethical, direct Jacobean mode with a tone of geniality and personal detachment supported by an easy association of ideas and images. The same examination reveals how Waller elevated his diction and how, under the influence of Fairfax, he continued the "sweet" tradition of Spenser in his smoothly modulated metric.That to neoclassical poets Waller constituted a paragon is evident from their sometimes excessive praise; that he is one indeed is demonstrated by Allison with a style which enjoys an Augustan nicety.

The undisputed intellectual leadership of Octavio Paz, not only in Mexico but throughout Spanish America, rests on achievements in the essay and in poetry. In the field of the essay, he is the author of more than twenty-five books on subjects whose diversity -- esthetics, politics, surrealist art, the Mexican character, cultural anthropology, and Eastern philosophy, to cite only a few -- is dazzling. In poetry, his creativity has increased in vigor over more than fifty years as he has explored the numerous possibilities open to Hispanic poets from many different sources. The bridge that joins the halves of his writing is a concern for language in general and for the poetic process in particular.Toward Octavio Paz defines this process of creation through a close examination of the books that represent the summit of the poet's development, three long poems and three collections. It is intended for readers of varied poetic experience who are approaching Paz's work for the first time.By studying the relationship of the parts of the poem, particularly structure and theme, Fein traces the poet's growth through approaches to the reader, each embodied in a separate work. From the divided circularity of Piedra de sol through the intensification of the subject of Salamandra, the multiple meanings of Blanco, the polarities of Ladera este, and the literary solipsism of Pasado en claro, to the silences of Vuelta, Paz has shaped his audience's responses to his work through suggestion rather than control. The result is not only a new poetry but a new receptivity.

Although much has been written about how the novel relates to the epic, the drama, or autobiography, no one has clearly analyzed the complex connections between prose fiction as it evolved before 1800 and the literature of travel, which by that date had a long and colorful history.Percy Adams skilfully portrays the emergence of the novel in the fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and traces in rich detail the history of travel literature from its beginnings to the time of James Cook, contemporary of Richardson and Fielding. And since the recit de voyage and the novel were then so international, he deals throughout with all the literatures of Western Europe, one of the book's chief themes being the close literary ties among European nations. Equally important in the present study is its demonstration that, just as early travel accounts were often a combination of reporting and fabrication, so prose fiction is not a dichotomy to be divided into the "adult" novel on the one hand and the "childish" romance on the other, but an ambivalence -- the marriage of realism and romanticism. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel not only shows the novel to be amorphous and changing, it also proves impossible the task of defining the recit de voyage with its thousand forms and faces. Often the two types of literature are almost indistinguishable; even before Don Quixote, Adams writes, many travel accounts could have been advertised as having "the endless fascination of a wonderfully observed novel."This study by Percy Adams will both modify opinions about the novel and its history and provide an excellent introduction to the travel account, a form of literature too little known to students of belles lettres.

George Herbert has always been regarded as a man of singular piety and a poet of uncommon technical ability. Until recent times, however, he was usually thought to have written prosodically ingenious but conceptually thin verse. Mary Ellen Rickey, through a close examination of Herbert's poetry, reveals the high concentration of ideas in his verse and the richness of his imagery.

More often than not, critics have looked upon Milton's great epic not as a literary work but rather as a theological tract or a display of Renaissance learning. In this book John Shawcross seeks to redress that critical imbalance by examining the poem for its literary values. In doing so he reveals the scope and depth of Milton's poetic craftsmanship in his control of such elements as structure, myth, style, and language; and he offers new approaches to reading Paradise Lost as a literary masterpiece rather than a relic of religious history.