Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a \u201crepresentative life\u201d of our time.

Deconstruction -- a mode of close reading associated with the contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida and other members of the "Yale School" -- is the current critical rage, and is likely to remain so for some time. Reading Deconstruction / Deconstructive Reading offers a unique, informed, and badly needed introduction to this important movement, written by one of its most sensitive and lucid practitioners. More than an introduction, this book makes a significant addition to the current debate in critical theory. G. Douglas Atkins first analyzes and explains deconstruction theory and practice. Focusing on such major critics and theorists as Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman, he brings to the fore issues previously scanted in accounts of deconstruction, especially its religious implications. Then, through close readings of such texts as Religio Laici, A Tale of a Tub, and An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he proceeds to demonstrate and exemplify a mode of deconstruction indebted to both Derrida and Paul de Man. This skillfully organized book, designed to reflect the "both/ and" nature of deconstruction, thus makes its own contribution to deconstructive practice. The important readings provided of Dryden, Swift, and Pope are among the first to treat major Augustan texts from a deconstructive point of view and make the book a valuable addition to the study of that period.Well versed in deconstruction, the variety of texts he treats, and major issues of current concern in literary study, Atkins offers in this book a balanced and judicious defense of deconstruction that avoids being polemical, dogmatic, or narrowly ideological. Whereas much previous work on and in deconstruction has been notable for its thick prose, jargon, and general obfuscation, this book will be appreciated for its clarity and grace, as well as for its command of an impressively wide range of texts and issues. Without taming it as an instrument of analysis and potential change, Atkins makes deconstruction comprehensible to the general reader. His efforts will interest all those concerned with literary theory and criticism, Augustan literature, and the relation of literature and religion.

It's been a pilgrimage for Annie Dillard: from Tinker Creek to the Galapagos Islands, the high Arctic, the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon Jungle-and now, China. This informative narrative is full of fascinating people: Chinese people, mostly writers, who encounter American writers in various bizarre circumstances in both China and the U.S. There is a toasting scene at a Chinese banquet; a portrait of a bitter, flirtatious diplomat at a dance hall; a formal meeting with Chinese writers; a conversation with an American businessman in a hotel lobby; an evening with long-suffering Chinese intellectuals in their house; a scene in the Beijing foreigners' compound with an excited European journalist; and a scene of unwarranted hilarity at the Beijing Library. In the U.

“Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional depth. Readers who complain about the obscurity of contemporary American poetry will delight in this book.

John Fox Jr. published this great romantic novel of the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Virginia in 1908, and the book quickly became one of America's favorites. It has all the elements of a good romance -- a superior but natural heroine, a hero who is an agent of progress and enlightenment, a group of supposedly benighted mountaineers to be drawn into the flow of mainstream American culture, a generous dose of social and class struggle, and a setting among the misty coves and cliffs of the blue Cumberlands. Reprinted with a foreword by John Ed Pearce, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine has all the excitement and poignance that caught and held readers' interest when the book first appeared.

Here are twenty-one tales from Kentucky's inimitable and beloved storyteller, Jesse Stuart. Full of high, rambunctious humor, quick-paced as a mountain square dance, bright as a maple tree against an October hill -- these stories are Stuart in his best form -- the form that has made him one of the most widely read authors in America. Read here about the man who coveted a steam shovel and stole it piece by piece, or about the celebrated eating contest between Sam Whiteapple and the game rooster, or about the hill farmer who wanted to clear and farm one last spot of new ground before he died. Although he has a sharp eye for human foibles and infirmities, Stuart never fails to write of his people with affection or to see that justice is done them. Originally published in 1950, Clearing in the Sky was inadvertently declared out of print after three years and never reprinted. Now for Jesse Stuart's many readers it is once more available with an appreciative foreword by Ruel Foster.

This is the book of an urban mystic, someone who believes that the streets he walks, the incidents he sees and in which he sometimes plays a part have significance; he understands that the hidden beauty and music of New York City. Madison Avenue, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park appear and reappear as though they, the poet, and the work were inseparable. The people he recalls - a bag lady, E. E. Cummings - are as familiar to us as the city itself, but here they are lyrical and light, these poems also hold love, loss, melancholy, and tenderness -they reflect the incessant rhythms between a man and his surroundings.

This is the first comprehensive critical examination in any language of the German national tradition of historiography. It analyzes the basic theoretical assumptions of the German historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and relates these assumptions to political thought and action. The German national tradition of historiography had its beginnings in the reaction against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789. This historiography rejected the rationalistic theory of natural law as universally valid and held that all human values must be understood within the context of the historical flux. But it maintained at the same time the Lutheran doctrine that existing political institutions had a rational basis in the will of God, though only a few of these historians were unqualified conservatives. Most argued for liberal institutions within the authoritarian state, but considered that constitutional liberties had to be subordinated to foreign policy - a subordination that was to have tragic results. Mr. Iggers first defines Historismus or historicism and analyzes its origins. Then he traces the transformation of German historical thought from Herder's cosmopolitan culture-oriented nationalism to exclusive state-centered nationalism of the War of Liberation and of national unification. He considers the development of historicism in the writings of such thinkers as von Humboldt, Ranke, Dilthey, Max Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke; and he discusses the radicalization and ultimate disintegration of the historicist position, showing how its inadequacies contributed to the political débâcle of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism. No one who wants to fully understand the political development of national Germany can neglect this study.

The White Rose tells the story of Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, who in 1942 led a small underground organization of German students and professors to oppose the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazi Party. They named their group the White Rose, and they distributed leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime. Sophie, Hans, and a third student were caught and executed. Written by Inge Scholl (Han's and Sophie's sister), The White Rose features letters, diary excerpts, photographs of Hans and Sophie, transcriptions of the leaflets, and accounts of the trial and execution. This is a gripping account of courage and morality.CONTRIBUTORS: Dorthe Solle.

Although Pedro Calderón de la Barca was one of the greatest and most prolific playwrights of Spain's Golden Age, most of his nonallegorical comedias -- 118 in all -- have remained unknown. Robert ter Horst presents here the first full-length study of these works, a sustained, meditative analysis dealing with more than 80 plays, conveying a sense of the whole of Calderón's secular theater.To approach so vast a body of literature, Mr. ter Horst examines the meaning and function in Calderón of three broad subjects -- myth, honor, and history -- the warp threads across which the playwright weaves a subtle tapestry of contrasts, dualities, and conflicts: the private person versus the public person, the inner realm versus the outer, masculine against feminine, poet against prince.The Calderón who emerges is a consciously consummate artist whose lifelong study was the passions of the human mind and body. In addition, he is seen as a synthesizer of his Spanish literary heritage and especially as a brilliant adapter of Cervantes' insights to the stage. Robert ter Horst's profound and far-ranging analysis sheds light on many fine works previously neglected and finds new depths in such supreme achievements as No hay cosa como callar, El segundo Escipión, and La vida es suefio.

A leading critic of contemporary Spanish poetry examines here the work of ten important poets who came to maturity in the immediate post-Civil War period and whose major works appeared between 1956 and 1971: Francisco Brines; Eladio Cabañero; Angel Crespo; Gloria Fuertes; Jaime Gil de Biedma; Angel González; Manuel Mantero; Claudio Rodríguez; Carlos Sahagún; and José Angel Valente.Although each of these poets has developed an individual style, their work has certain common characteristics: use of the everyday language and images of contemporary Spain, development of language codes and intertextual references, and, most strikingly, metaphoric transformations and surprising reversals of the reader's expectations. Through such means these poets clearly invite their readers to join them in journeys of poetic discovery. Andrew P. Debicki's is the first detailed stylistic analysis of this generation of poets, and the first to approach their work through the particularly appropriate methods developed in "reader-response" criticism.

Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.

McCaffery interprets the works of three major writers of radically experimental fiction: Robert Coover; Donald Barthelme; and Willam H. Gass. The term \u201cmetafiction\u201d here refers to a strain in American writing where the self-concious approach to the art of fiction-making is a commentary on the nature of meaning itself.

A beautiful and moving collection of poetry by a new author.

A compelling second collection of poetry.

Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.